However we are stuck in a position as website designers that people to this day use OS\'s as far back as windows 95 (possibly even further back if you look hard enough), and therefore we are forced to support browsers who just simply wont work, unfortunately users refuse to change browsers in the most cases and at best will upgrade to the highest version their OS will support. And guess what? IE5.5 for Win9x... what a way to go, I know my site has managed to dig its way into working using an extremely painfully long amount of coding (time based).
Granted its our job to make things work equally for everyone but with browsers like Internet Explorer who can barely work with even the most simple of CSS without deciding to alter things to meet its own end we just cannot, all we can hope for is to make our sites standard compliant and either...
A ) Hack our code to pieces using filters and hack scripts to take a shiny axe to the browsers head to force it to do its job.
B ) Tell the browser to get lost and force users to use a different browser if they want to visit the site.
C ) Leave the bugs as they are and just hope they don’t impede on the user experience.
What are we meant to do? There’s no good solution, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. Users will never stop using old versions of a browser unless they are forced to find alternative means of browsing (due to sites no longer allowing them) but we can’t kick them off otherwise we loose out on potential customers.
Basically since the browser wars we are still fighting, the terrain may have altered (CSS, AJAX, etc) and the players may have retired and sent their siblings in to fight the war however as designers and developers we are forced to suffer the never ending result of the web browsers mistakes and continue to try to make the most out of an awful situation. What makes it worse is that colleges and universities teach these bad practices and methods depreciated years ago to new designers and developers who keep the requirement for browsers to keep supporting the browser war while those who choose to write their code by a standard (granted not a perfect one but its something at least) have to try and keep their head down in the trenches and hope that some duct tape and band aids will keep their site alive.
Essentially the state of the internet is this... a war is going on between the browsers for supremacy, emerging technologies are being used as collateral and weapons (just like in the old days between Netscape and IE) and websites literally begin the slow process of dying as soon as they are born as new standards which cant be agreed on and impossible harmony between browsers forces us to keep patching our sites for the latest browser or the latest technology or the next fad of the internet.
I know I sound pretty bitter but I want the web to be unified with a single set of standards... we do not need competing formats like ASP, PHP, JSP, CFN! it would be nice if we could agree on a format as web developers and make that a standard so that we could gradually improve it for its users rather then turn the web into a fighting ground... if you use internet explorer you have to be given preference in how your site functions as the majority of users use it otherwise you loose business. Simple as that.
I’m going to end this rant with an analysis to show you exactly why its so hard for developers to make anything work first time... we have to work with multiple server side languages (none of which are perfect), we have to make our websites work in an ever increasing amount of browsers (wait till the mobile phone browser wars... I’m not kidding), we don’t have any clear accessibility guidelines yet were told to meet them, we only have generalised usability and design convention standards in designing sites (which due to their subjective nature aren’t perfect), so we end up with no true standards, no preferential coding style, a slacked attitude to implementing standards of any kind by the browsers and the ignorance of the importance in keeping an up to date browser by the user (there would be so much less hacking if users knew more about what was involved in doing what they do on computers).
End rant! grr!
