[WEB4LIB] Re: HTML Question - target="new"

[Mark Pecaut]

On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 02:48:15PM -0800, Daniel Messer wrote:
> To be honest, I agree. However, designing a page to work with every possible 
> browser that comes down the pipe is a tricky and time consuming process. 
> IMHO, the way to do this is to have three versions of the HTML code and gear 
> each one for those specific browsers. One for IE, one for Netscape, and one 
> for say Mozilla. However, how many webmasters do you know that are going to 

I think many, many big sites do this.  Very sad.

> take the time and trouble to construct and tweak three versions of source 
> code to do the same thing? However I think some people missed the point of my 
> recommendation. I said to state that IE is the BEST browser to view the page 
> with. Nowhere in that did I say to state that IE was the ONLY browser that 

It is still not a good idea to suggest which browser to use.  
You may be doing it for your users' benefit, but they won't interpret
it that way.  We should be grateful people are visiting our pages, they 
are doing us a favor.  Telling them it would be better if they used
a different browser is not welcoming.  

Maybe we shouldn't be so anal about every formatting detail and instead
try and provide good content.  Content is what makes websites popular,
not precise formatting.  

Many other people on this list have said far more intelligent things
about this than I can say, so I will stop now.  I just don't want people
to get the idea it is ok to make your site use specific features of 
certain browsers, or to give preference to a specific browser.

-Mark