Thoughts on Legacy Website Development
When you find yourself coding a website for multiple browsers and get all caught up with going to the extremes of using browser hacks just to try and meet your personal visual standards verses the W3C compliant standards, you find yourself at a crossroad where both standards are at jeopardy.
What do you do? Which standard should you favour?
You’ve got to make a decision on what is most important, and while you may not like the result, you can justify it with this simple reasoning I read in a blog comment from Brad Czerniak that perfectly sums up how you should approach the solution:
I personally don’t find it necessary for everything to look exactly the same in all browsers, and this is a good example of a place where a minor difference makes a modern browser look good and a legacy browser still function properly.
Take the extremes of web design/development: you want to make the content still accessible on the worst of browsers (ie LYNX), yet display the content as beautifully as possible if they have the best and latest browser versions (ie Firefox 3).
What are the tools/browsers of your ideal audience?
When and how do you show your antiquated audience that they’re missing out?
When and how do you reward your savvy audience?
Lastly, where will you draw the line?
