Brian Kelly wrote:
>
> > Brian Kelly wrote:
> >
> > [long snip]
> >
> > > However I would agree that this is a legitimate approach, although
> > > purists could argue that (a) Web resources should degrade
> > gracefully
> > > so we shouldn't be doing this or (b) we shouldn't be supporting
> > > fbrowsers with bugs in them.
> >
> > Are there any real-world browsers /without/ bugs in them?
>
> Perhaps I should have said significant bugs in them. For example IE and
> Opera will do a good job for a lot (but not al) of the CSS 1 spec, but
> Netscape 4 has major problems.
>
> What's your view?
That we are constrained by opposing needs :
1) To conform to international standards
2) To provide accessible documents
The problem is that (2) is usually interpreted to mean "Accessible by sighted,
partially sighted and blind users", whilst in the real world it must also be
interpreted to mean "Accessible from any browser which has significant market
penetration". Thus we /cannot/ generate pages which are unreadable in NS 4.7+
simply because we don't like NS's historical inability to build browsers that
conform to international standards. All the while NS 4.7+ remains the browser
of choice of a significant number of potential visitors to a site, the webmaster
for that site has a duty to ensure that the site is accessible to such visitors,
in just the same way as he/she has a duty to ensure that his/her site is accessible
to blind and partially sighted visitors. As a result of this, he/she must /either/
program to a lowest common denominator, /or/ serve page variants (possibly via
variant CSS files, which in turn can be generated on the fly using either
client-side JavaScript or server-side scripting) which ensure that the page is
legible on all common browsers. Thus, for the time being at least (that is,
all the while NS 4.7+ remains a commonly found/used browser), CSS can
be used only to /add value/ to a page, not to convert it from gibberish to
a work of art.
** Phil.
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