On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 9:27 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
But seriously. Outright *excluding* these old things shouldn't even be a consideration. Even a very small audience (like 0.02%) is tens of thousands of readers. Mediawiki (and the WMF deployment) already has many features which don't work / don't work well on fairly old systems, so that bridge has already been crossed, but outright dropping support for basic use?
I have to say, my knee-jerk reaction was "Yes, let's drop IE5 support already", but on consideration I have to agree with you. We shouldn't feel obliged to go out of our way to ensure these browsers still work, but as long as they do mostly work right now, there's no reason to drop support. I've confirmed that with IE50Fixes.css, Monobook is still perfectly usable in IE5 (using ies4linux), but without it, the page collapses to an unusable mess.
I don't think reducing <head> clutter is enough of a reason to drop support here. The clutter will go away anyway if/when Vector becomes the default skin -- then IE5 users can still use Monobook. Why not let them?
On the other hand, IEMacFixes.css is unused, so I've deleted it in r61787. We do have IE Mac fixes (and I think also fixes for other IE versions) in Monobook's main.css using selector hacks and such, but they're basically harmless, so let's leave them. Let's also re-add the 5.0 and 5.5 stylesheets, unless someone has a better reason than saving two lines in the <head> until we switch to Vector.