Friday, May 19, 2006

Graded Browser Support

Interesting article on Graded Browser Support by Nate Koechley, Senior Web Developer Yahoo! Inc (Feb 13th 2006):

"In the first 10 years of professional web development, back in the early ‘90s, browser support was binary: Do you — or don’t you — support a given browser? When the answer was “No”, user access to the site was often actively prevented. In the years following IE5’s release in 1998, professional web designers and developers have become accustomed to asking at the outset of any new undertaking, “Do I have to support Netscape 4.x browsers for this project?”

By contrast, in modern web development we must support all browsers. Choosing to exclude a segment of users is inappropriate, and, with a “Graded Browser Support” strategy, unnecessary.

Graded Browser Support offers two fundamental ideas:

  • A broader and more reasonable definition of “support.”
  • The notion of “grades” of support

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