first, congratulations on making the site xhtml compliant!

i also work for a university. our network people have standardized on netscape 4.02 or something absurdly old like that and refuse to upgrade (apparently that was the last version of netscape that could be downloaded as just the browser; everything since is 'communicator' and comes with an email client, etc. and they have some objection to that). so we tend to actually see a pretty high percentage of NN4 users. boy does it suck.

i've had more success by being very strict about keeping sites simple, marking them up semantically, using css for all the layout and formatting and using a couple basic tricks. i think you've made the right decision in acknowledging from the beginning that NN4 will not display the same page the same way as newer browsers and it isn't worth it to even try.

we've generally avoided having alternate versions of the site for different browsers though. that turns into a maintenance problem and we just don't have the resources to do that.

here's the recipe i use:

the result is a page that works in every browser, looks good in the ones that support css fully, and degrades in NN4 about as well as could be expected, with the right colours and fonts (often important for "branding") but maybe a more linear layout. and you don't have to maintain two seperate versions.

the main downside is that most designers have spent years learning table-based design and tricks for making it work and their intuitions about how to design web-pages have been very subtly influenced in this direction. many otherwise excellent designers really can't think about web-design without implicitly thinking in terms of table layouts. divs + css are really at least as powerful a layout tool but they require a different mindset to work with. different kinds of layouts are difficult or easy in each style. so this is usually a problem unless your design team is unusually open-minded.

if you can't entirely eliminate tables, you can at least go to a second-best approach where you use tables for layout and css for all other formatting. this sacrifices some of the advantages of semantic markup but is usually the most practical approach.

if you absolutely must have alternate versions of the site, it's good to at least use some kind of system, either a CMS or XML with multiple XSL views to allow you to maintain the content in only one place and have all the alternate versions automatically updated. cocoon and axkit are my preferred tools for this kind of thing.

anders pearson

In reply to Re: OT: Web Design - Catering to Everyone by thraxil
in thread OT: Web Design - Catering to Everyone by arashi

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.