How far back for compatibility?
 

When we design our forums, we can make the most eyecatching wonderful designs.

But what about when someone with an old browser tells you the table that's embedded inside another table is displaying your table cell backgrounds wrong? Or some other problem that exists with browsers as old as Netscape 4.0.

Do you change your code and lose your fancy design for something less attractive. or do you let those old browser display your forums incorrectly?

There is no right answer. But what do designers here think?

-Conundrum7g
admin of Colonial Fleets (a Battlestar Galactica Forum)

i say ie 5.5 and moz 1.1 if it works good, if their browsers are that old well psh

I would really say just do research on stats from different sites. REInvigorate's front page has some great stats about browsers and browser usage. Also, your own stats are your best friend, see what browsers your users use, do some math, and go from there.

My opinion - I agree with Faranth, it's the user's responsibility to go upgrade, if they don't and they complain, that's tough on them.

When I design A layout I like to do it in XHTML now a days, using CSS aswell. For the most part I my sites do not support any 4.0 generation browser. If the clients browser dose not support the standards I use a page will display explaining why the site will not load for them and provides a link to a updated version of their browser/alternative browsers that do support the standards.

You can't accomodate every single browser without taking out what might be making your forum look decent. It's up to them to run an updated browser.

I have a band, and one of the bandmates wants to update our site via the interface I built. He has some really, really old netscape that doesn't view normal tables right have the time, so he can't even view a forum!
And he insists on complaining about it to me. The truth is...he is a novice webuser, and him and his wife are comfortable with the WAY old netscape. They upgraded once, and could not find their way around, so they swear they never will upgrade again.

I wish he was the only person with a story like that I knew!

How about they use a whole new browser? :p

Yeah, it's pretty hard to get lost in Internet Explorer 6... Besides, they must be very novice to enjoy the long load times, screwed up graphics, and intermittent failures that are a part of almost every Netscape I've used...

They hate internet explorer. They enjoy the way bookmarks are set up, and the way the email client works.

Badbunny- I think I know where your old netscape friends are coming from. The Netscape Navigator pre-AOL was pretty nifty. It was slim, but easy to use. But then when AOL bought out Netscape they replaced everything and substituted a Mozilla inside and slapped on Netscape chassis. I love Mozilla, but it is waaaay more complex than Netscape Navigator 3 was.

The only real annoying problem I've been having with older Netscapes is from when you embed a table within a table. Say you have a table with a background image. Then in one of the TD cells you stick in another table. Now even though I don't assign that inner table (or its cells) a background, every cell re-displays the upperleft corner of the outer table's background image. The "tiling" looks horrible.

or with macs, when I have a table background image, and put a <IMG> in one of the cells. Even if the the background and foreground images are produced at the same time in the same format on the same computer with the same program, and they may meld together seamlesslly on a PC, On the mac one image is much brighter and stands out. I think its a difference in gamma and how color calibration may be affecting the image and background differently.

If only we could all get along. :)