[Web4lib] Gracefully degrades to..?

[jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu]

Richard Wiggins writes:
>I'm in favor of not making any statement as to what browsers you support, 
>or that the site works well with, but instead stating under what standards 
>your site validates.

I'm sympathetic with this approach, but it does have a significant problem:
it's not patron-friendly.  It's hard but possible to get a typical user to
figure out what browser and browser version s/he is using.  It's
unreasonable to expect that a typical user could make use of information
about what standards your site validates to.  So the approach doesn't answer
the practical question of "will it work for me?" and perhaps more
importantly it doesn't provide us with a way to answer the question "Your
site doesn't work.  What do I have to upgrade to make it work?"

By the way, my experience is that in the real world html validation level is
no longer all that big an issue.  Most of the problems I see these days are
security issues, browsers that don't have the right set of Unicode fonts
installed, browsers that support different DOM versions or have different
Javascript implementations, browsers (you can guess which one I mean) that
ignore Content-type in the HTTP interaction and instead use the file
extension implicit in the URL, browsers that handle RSS differently,
different versions of addons (for example, on our campus we right now have a
problem with Java versions, with one enterprise app requiring Jinitiator
1.3.1 and another preferring JRE 1.5), missing support for useful formats
(.wmp on Macs?  .aac on PCs?), ad nauseum.  So "what standards your site
validates" has lots more dimensions than those measured by validator.w3.org
and jigsaw.w3.org.

Many of these problems can be addressed with an inelegant rule such as "we
support the most recent version of Firefox on the current version of your
operating system, and believe that the most recent versions of Safari+MacOS
and MSIE+WinXP will mostly work".

JQ Johnson, Director                 Office: 115F Knight Library 
Center for Educational Technologies  mailto:jqj at uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon            phone: 1-541-346-1746; -3485 fax
Eugene, OR 97403-1299                http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/