RE: [Dynapi-Dev] Netscape 6 discussion

[Nuno F. <nun...@wi...>]

	>Leading to my real question: should DynAPI keep supporting "old" 4.x
	>browsers? is there any need for it?

At least in my world there is.
If, for instance, the DynAPI stopped supporting NS 4.x, and/or IE 4.x I
would
certain would stop using it.

People forget that usually, a client, particulary, a BIG Client, when
specifiying
the Browser target for his/her web page, usually wants to target IE4.x and
NS 4.x
Trust me, they don't care if the latest statistics show 90% of the Market
using
IE, they care about the other 10% too, because they want all the users to be
able
to access their site. Some months ago I did some HTML optimization for the
team
that built the site of the biggest telecom company in Portugal, and they
demanded
that we should maintain IE 3x and NS 3x compatibility!

I do think that the main problem is not supporting NS and IE, it's
supporting
	a) IE 4.x, IE 5.0, IE 5.5 on Win32
	b) IE 4.x, IE 5.5 on Mac
	c) NS 4.x
	d) NS 6

If you look closely there's more IE versions out there that NS versions (at
least
from a pratical point of view). Most users are very lazy, and if you look at
most
statistics, and if their version of Win has IE 4, or IE 5.0 they stick to it
until
they cannot view a page decently, and only then they upgrade, because 15Mb
downloads
are still out of the question for the great majority.

I don't know if NS 4 is the same on Linux, Win32 and Mac, so this view maybe
a bit biased or incomplete.

You can't ignore 4.x versions as long as there's millions using them, just
as you
can't start developing for a 1024x768 while there's millions using smaller
screen
sizes (actually 800x600 is still the most widely used screen size...)

I work in a Web Design and Development so I deal with this problem all the
time,
and I can safely say that professionaly, we're gonna have to deal with 4.x
browsers
a long time still.

If the move was to end supporting 4.x browsers, I think most people will
stop using
it professionaly, and treat it just like a cool thing where you can develop
some
experimental stuff...


NunoF