position: Compatibility

[NeckBone]

Hi Folks,
I'm back again looking for some advice :^)

I'm tired of hanging on to the old. I'm tired of beating my brains out catering to old browsers.

I've got my page design complete using relative and absolute positioning. For old browsers, I'm not serving any style info and the generic pages look half decent. For the newer browsers, I'm serving CSS presentation and they look really good and work great in testing.

I had a little trouble with the "box model". I discoverd the box-sizing:border-box and box-sizing:content-box declarations which makes life a little easier. Opera seems to support box-sizing. Using box-sizing, you can get closer to IE's box model with other browsers.

Anyhoo, the advice I need is this:

At which version of each major browser do I draw the line on serving either the generic page or the CSS positioned page.

I figure 5.5 is a good place to start with IE, 5 with Opera, 5 with Netscape, 1 with Firefox, 1 with Safari, 5 with IE Mac.

Can you give me your opinion on where to draw the line with these browsers?

Many Thanks and Happy Holidays


Youth and beauty are no match for age and experience.

 

[Vragabond]

I would clearly rank among the lazier ones. With IE/Win, I mostly aim for 6. I make sure it looks respectable in 5 and 5.5 but if it is not pixel perfect, I don't really care. IE is forced upon us by M$ and they're making sure less and less people are using old versions.

As for Geckos (Netscape 6+, Mozilla, Firefox), it is my main development environment. I make sure it works and looks good in the 1+ versions of the latter and 7+ of the former (N6 was awfully buggy and is probably not used anymore except from people who don't even deserve to see websites). I find support for these to be very simple.

Opera I do it since 7. Opera has a very small user base and most of those users follow Opera development and are using the latest version (being 8 at the time of writing this). This means that 7.5 and 7 were two of the major previous releases and that's enough for me. Opera 6 I remember had a very shaky support for much css so I don't bother with it.

Netscape prior to N6 (N5 never actually existed so I don't know what you meant with 5 with Netscape) I don't support at all. Anyone stupid enough to still use NN4.xx can struggle.

I unfortunately don't own any Macs so testing and supporting in their browsers is somewhat difficult. I found out that my code usually has no problems whatsoever with Safari and little to none with IE5/Mac. But if it has, it is hard for me to do the actual test/adapting.

That said, I suppose I could try and make my code work in the desired browser, if client ever has one. More importantly, I realized that semantically correct, properly validated and doctyped css driven sites (that do not employ extremely difficult layout techniques tend to work perfectly in most if not all aforementioned browsers.

 

[NeckBone]

vragabond,

Nice post and good advice.

On my PHP site, I draw the line at 6 with everything except IE Mac, FF, and Safari. That's a lot easier to control the display because I'm using includes there.

This site here I'm using js and css.

I'll go with 6 on IE.

That Netscape 5 was supposed to have been Netscape 6. I screwed that up.

I agree with you about Opera. I'll start at 7 with that. They have 8.5 out now which is the one I use for testing.

I get a quite a few hits identified as NN4. I think most of those are in other countries. I'm still supporting it on the PHP site, I'm supporting just about anything and everything with the PHP. On this one, NN4'll get the generic page.

I love absolute positioning. I put it off forever because of compatibility. No more. Them days are over. I'll just serve unformatted pages to the oldies. The unformatted pages don't look so bad anyway and I'm sure those people are used to getting the short end of the stick.

Many thanks for your input.


Youth and beauty are no match for age and experience.