[WikiEN-l] A proposal to de-table Wikipedia infoboxes

[Håkon Wium Lie]

Andrew Gray wrote:

 > 2009/3/3 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
 > > By Hakon Wium Lie of Opera:
 > >
 > > http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/
 > >
 > > What is the likelihood of making as much as possible CSS? How to make
 > > infoboxes degrade gracefully for non-CSS browsers and IE users?
 > 
 > Youch, that's messy in IE7. Lovely though it may be, that 30-50% of
 > our audience would not be happy...

Right. I agree that graceful degradation for IE6/IE7 users is an
issue. The purpose of the case study was first and foremost to explore
how Wikipedia's markup can be simplified and improved when CSS 2.1 is
fully implemented -- like it is in Opera, Firefox, Safari and IE8. I
didn't even test in IE6/IE7.

I think it's possible -- with some careful crafting -- to make things
look ok, but not pixel-perfect in legacy browsers. In lynx, the
table-free version looks better than the original one, but IE6/IE7
users outnumber lynx by a some magnitudes. 

I'll look into tweaking the style sheet to aim for graceful degradation. 

However, I also think the web should not be hostage to IE6/IE7
forever. Some designers have declared war on IE6 for this reason:

  http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/norwegian-websi.html

Cheers,

-h&kon
              Håkon Wium Lie                          CTO °þe®ª
howcome at opera.com                  http://people.opera.com/howcome