Talking to a brick wall...

Rants & Raves

The Future of the Web

... somewhere close. Somewhere near and dear to our hearts. This big catch is that older browsers, which we have known and loved for years, do not support these new standards.
Big deal, eh? Well, not only do they not support these new standards, but the new standards can't really be used effectively in conjunction with the ones that older browsers support.
Still, new standards come around all the time, and the old ones, well, they die. We're used to it. The problem, though, is not that the old standard is dying.

For me, it is particularly painful to see Netscape 3.2 look at a newly redesigned page, one that now incorporates CSS and such, and notice that all of a sudden the page has gone from a nice structured layout with pretty colors and neat (if rather basic) effects has turned into a large stream of default font on a grey background, with a picture entirely interrupting the flow of text every now and then.
We, the people that have been on the web for years, know well that the 3.0 browsers can do better than that. People who are still using them, for whatever reason, also know this. And if I were to move entirely to newer standards all of a sudden, I would leave them all in the dark and leave a sad little part of my web memories behind.

What do you do then? As you can see, my site compromises a bit. Some things, such as the background color and the layout, remain, as they are crucial to the best viewing of this page. Others, like the floating images, font settings, and backgrounds, have now been moved on to the new standards so that I can take advantage of several new features.
Can developers do this? Do people with older computers really deserve not to get the best they can from the web? This is a hard decision to make, and one that we will have to deal with for several years to come, as current browsers still, over 4 years after the CSS-1 standard was complete, do not support the standard in its entirety. >>