On 1 February 2010 15:43, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 10:14 AM, Thomas Dalton
<thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> It's not just the clutter, though,
it's the effort of maintaining it.
I don't suggest we maintain it. Just leave
it alone. If other
changes happen to cause IE5 to break, then remove it, but don't remove
*existing* IE5 support as long as IE5 still happens to work with no
extra effort on our part.
Yes. If someone actually notices something bitrotting and they tell
us, that's excellent. If they don't, there you go.
That said, there must be *someone* on this list bloody-minded enough
to test Wikipedia in every possible browser and file bugs and patches
accordingly ...
It shouldn't be a question of bloddy-mindedness. The rotting of
support for a single browser version would potential shut out many
tens of thousands of users. It's something worth dedicating some
resources to.
Simply verifying functionality with all the *popular* browsers and
platforms is already burdensome. Doing it well (and consistently)
requires some infrastructure, such as a collection of virtualized
client machines. Once that kind of infrastructure is in place and well
oiled the marginal cost of adding a few more test cases should not be
especially great.
The core of Wikipedia functionality is plain text with a smattering of
images in common formats. I can think of no reason that this basic
reading functionality for IE 5.x and the like should go away for the
foreseeable future but if nothing else, knowing that it doesn't work
would be a good thing.