Walter, I follow you, but since we’re talking about “web design” and “Apple” here, consider well how much code Apple injects into Apple.com to make it look consistent across most browsers.
Todd, my approach is indeed sustainable as I’ve been doing it for several years now. And I alone design our company websites, including shooting product photos, authoring all the text content on our English sites, translating that into Japanese for our Japanese site, creating all the graphics, design layout, and even setting up many of the PDFs and other downloads, which is all secondary to the other jobs I do in Customer Support (telephone & email), product repair, product advertising, product catalog design (print), product R&D (electronics design), on-site training, and dialog with our overseas factories. I simply feel it’s time to move to a CSS3 approach by default, but with a compatibility fall-back for some browsers that are still in major use. No manner of arguing with me on that point will ever magically change the fact that 90% of my web visitors (here in Japan) use Explorer, the biggest two versions of which are IE 8 & 9.
I am not trying to maintain support for “all browsers.” My sites are designed to look decent even in IE6 right now, but for the past 8 months I’ve set up a browser-triggered banner atop my pages that tells my web visitors that their IE6 & 7 browsers are out of date and in need of an upgrade. WinXP users still dominate Japan, so most of those users merely upgrade to IE 8. As such, I need to design my sites, not with ancient IE 6 or 7 compatibility in mind, but IE 8 & 9. I don’t think too much about IE 10 now because it is not officially released and almost no one here in Japan is using it.
I fully understand the resistance I’m getting from Action authors and programmers on this topic though, since you folks despise old browsers, particularly IE, and you think any effort spent on them is wasted time. I concur with your hate for those browsers, but your and my hatred for those wicked browsers cannot magically alter the minds of people who foolishly continue to use them, nor is it within my power to control who flocks to my sites in Japan. All I can do is consider how best to implement my design philosophy within the browsers constraints given to me, as dictated by the majority of my web visitors.
For the past two years, I have been watching the slow progression away from IE 6 & 7. About 20% of my web visitors still use those browsers (combined), but in my eye that 20% is now low enough so I can focus on the rest who use IE 8 & 9. And since I can just tell IE 6 & 7 users to “upgrade to IE 8 if you have XP” or “IE 9 or 10, if you have Win7,” I really don’t need to worry about IE 6 or 7 anymore. And that is why all my posts in this thread have focused on problems inherent to those to “modern” browsers, not ancient browsers. And even if one argues that they too are broken, again, there’s nothing I can do about the fact that 70% of my Japanese web visitors use them, and will likely do so for the next two or three years.
So all I’ve been saying is that I think it is worth the effort to code some fall-back compatibility for those browsers, since they have a little trouble with CSS3. And over the next few years, the number of people who use those browsers will decrease, which will diminish the importance of the fall-back. So yes, you would be coding something that will be irrelevant in a few years, but (1) it is relevant and important now, and (2) what software code doesn’t age and become irrelevant over time!? As such, I think it is worth the effort to add some fall-back. And the main reason I mentioned this being built into Freeway is because Softpress has always understood the need for fall-back, and as a result they more than anyone should appreciate my the logic and reason I presented in this thread.
I look forward to the day when fall-back us no longer needed. But we are not there yet.
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