[cheat-master30]

Firstly, I agree 100% with what has been said about not supporting obsolete browsers. Stop coding for obsolete junk, code for the future. The reason people are still probably using such browsers is either because they don't know about them or they have no reason to change. Make them change. Stop supporting the out of date browsers until they have no alternatives but to upgrade.

Besides, CSS layout and standards support IS cross compatible. Just those who don't upgrade get a cut down version which still separates design from content. Don't aim for pixel perfection cross compatability, aim as best you can for it to work in the modern browsers with better standards support.

But I hate the attitudes of many corporations to backwards compatability. Building everything with tables and inline styles just to support browsers as old as Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 5. Trying to get pixel exact layouts across everything from the dawn of the internet. Just drop the support for old browsers in such software. vBulletin for one should reduce tables to where they're needed (and also add the tag to the BB code list, but that's another thing). You don't need to support such old browsers. I'm quite sure most website owners somewhat know about the browser situation by now.

Besides, think they'll go elsewhere? Forget it, not with all the pure standards and CSS layout support of many free and not so free software now. There's nowhere to go, nothing to choose then other than upgrading.

Also on that topic, stop using things like font tags and BR line breaks for what should be CSS and paragraphs in posts. Heck, browsers UP to Internet Explorer 4 or so could support even the formatting CSS, there's no need to use such inline styling.

Sorry if I went off topic, and sorry if it's slighty incoherent; I haven't been able to think so much about how to write better recently.