June 14, 2003
Earlier this week I was talking with a bunch of webmasters and mentioned that the main Minnesota State Colleges and Universities web site was still getting 10-15% Netscape 4 traffic.
Yesterday I took another look at the stats. To my surprise and delight, Netscape 4 is now hovering around 2% of the traffic. It seems that I was correct in my longstanding suspicion that most of that traffic was internal: our office switched to Netscape 7 and IE 6 a few months back, right around when the stats dropped. Yes, I could have easily verified my suspicion, but it was never important enough to bother.
Because, you see, I'm not sure how much I care, or what effect this drop in Netscape 4 traffic will have. My approach to dealing with Netscape 4 and other older, less-capable user agents has never been to ignore them completely. I just don't bend over backward for them, spending ungodly amounts of time ensuring that everything looks perfect. As long as everyone can still access the content and the pages don't look or act awful, then I'm happy. Nevertheless, 10-15% is nothing to sneeze at, so on the sites where I have influence, and certainly in my web applications, I spend a little time making sure that pages look more or less similar even for older browsers. Just not an undue amount of time,
My approach is similar to how I think about JavaScript. When I do accessibility training, I always emphasize that yes, you can use JavaScript and still have an accessible page. In fact, much as images can help some people understand or navigate a page, sometimes JavaScript can enhance a page's accessibility. But that's the key: treat it as an enhancement to core coontent and functionality rather than a basic requirement. Similarly, when putting together pages, I design with web standards so any user agent can access the content, then enhance and do cool things for modern browsers that can handle it. That is, I lean less toward graceful degradation as progressive enhancement.
Still, I must admit, 2% makes me feel a helluva lot more comfortable than 15%.
