Nkosi868

So I've just started to learn CSS. I bought a few books and bookmarked many tutorials I found on the internet. One point that 99% of these sources seem to hammering into my head is "browser compatibility". Internet Explorer seems to be the bud of most, if not all the problems in this area. What I fail to understand is, why there are so many people using outdated browsers. And something that annoys me even more is that web developers continue to bend over backwards to make their sites compatible with these dinosaur browsers.

My simple answer to it all is to build your websites to W3C standards and whomever visits it with a browser not built to these standards, redirect them to a browser that is W3C standards compliant. There are countless ways to do this. I am fairly certain I am not the first to propose such an idea and I won't be the last, so why do so many web developers still continue to make their lives unnecessarily harder?

If we continue to bend over backwards for people who don't want to update their software, CSS development will turn into a bunch of hacks to make sure websites display properly on all browsers. Not only that, but the computer illiterate amongst us who visit our websites would never learn and this will never end. I remember hearing the same grumblings when I was learning HTML.



This fiasco reminds me of the DTV transition argument about why the U.S. government should keep postponing the switch to a much better and much more reliable system.

"PEOPLE WOULDN'T KNOW WHAT TO DO"

I assure you, if people turn on their TVs tomorrow and realise that they can't view any channels, they will ask questions about why this is happening and get it rectified. This is assuming they missed the bombardment of DTV infomercials that have been airing for nearly a year now. And if any of these people missed the news about DTV, then they don't watch TV and it really won't affect them much if the government decided to ban TVs on June 12th. I watch no more than 4 hours of TV every week yet I hear about DTV almost daily.

Okay I'm getting a bit off topic but the same solution applies to both scenarios.

Do not increase your workload and reduce the quality of your work/product because there is a very small minority of people who refuse to upgrade to the latest technology.

The browsers I use and highly recommend,

Google Chrome

Firefox 3