[Gllug] browsers

[Jonathan Harker]

On Friday 18 October 2002 7:24 am, Clare Hillyard Melia wrote:
> --snip --
> Since then (almost 2 years ago), Opera's popularity has grown but it is 
> still insignificant - a recent survey estimates that less than 1% of web 
> users have Opera as their browser

> Best wishes, Chris Evers

Hi Chris (Clare?),

An important point such surveys do not take into consideration is the large 
numbers of users who have to change the user-agent of their browsers in order 
to pretend to be an IE 5 browser, so they can view poorly designed sites.

I know nothing, and therefore can say nothing, about the Barbican site, but a 
good case in point is the Royal Bank of Scotland. They deny access to their 
online banking site unless you have IE or Netscape 4. Yet, if you fake the 
user-agent to IE 5, Opera 6 and Konqueror 3 both work fine (Mozilla probably 
would too, but I haven't tried it yet). Which goes to show that even badly 
designed sites such as theirs do not need to check the browsers these days. 
This practice was common a few years ago, but modern web design should 
preclude this practice, even if you are using ASP/IIS (bleargh), Dreamweaver 
(shudder), etc.

As Tethys says, sites that use bog standard HTML 4 or XHTML, and snazzy style 
sheets, can be viewed in all browsers, even really old ones. Use of 
JavaScript should be ideally restricted to non-essential stuff such as 
dancing bears and flashing pop-up lights, rather than critical functionality 
such as user input validation, which should be handled on the server.

Let us know how you get on!

Cheers,
Jonathan.

-- 
Jonathan Harker
www.jonathanharker.co.uk

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