Supporting old, horrible browsers.
I have some current stats that suggests that IE 4.x and Netscape 4.x now
represent 2% and 3% of users, respectively.
Here's what I propose to do with Cologne Blue.
1. Browser-sniffing: detect these, and only these, broken browsers, at
the webserver.
2. For these browsers alone, generate an XHTML page using tables for
layout, and minimal CSS for typography and colours.
3. For all other browsers, generate an XHTML page using CSS for layout,
and typography, and colours. (Oh, and a table for the header, but that's
OK).
Then:
1. Modern standards-compliant browsers will show the site as intended.
2. Very old browsers, text-only browsers, web spiders, and accessibility
systems will show the site in the best backwards-compatible rendition
possible, as the site will use nice old-fashioned HTML codes inside all
the fancy layout stuff, ignoring the CSS completely.
3. The brain-dead browsers listed above will show a reasonable rendition
of the site, for as long as it takes for their market share to fall near
zero.
I think that 90% of the layout code can be re-used in a single skin
file, provided that I can get an indication if the browser is one of the
broken ones.
Does this seem like a reasonable approach? And does anyone have any
GPL'd user-agent parsing PHP code?
Neil