Web Coder Plus

Molly.com has a great little post on Web Standards and The New Professionalism, a look at how anyone who still designs web sites with nested tables shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves a web professional.

At the end of the post, she says:

Today, I want to express that I believe that this new professionalism means taking responsibility for the education of ourselves and each other, and ensuring that reversions like Disney Store UK never happen again.

I guess it’s a nice sentiment, and in the first world you can expect almost everyone to be using browsers capable of rendering standards compliant pages properly. Down here in South Africa, things aren’t quite as nice. A year ago, I was chatting to a web developer friend of mine, and the subject of web standards came up. I asked him why all his web pages still used horrific sets of tables and other nastiness, and he replied that using CSS just wouldn’t work on most peoples browsers. I laughed and pointed out that IE 5.5 was currently holding less than 5% of the market and anything lower was so unused that it wasn’t worth thinking about.

Well he pulled out the stats of one of his clients, and while he was exaggerating when he said “most” peoples browsers, the numbers were nevertheless worrying. 5% were still using Netscape Navigator 4! Even more still using IE 5.0, IE 6 only just having passed the IE 5.x’s in overall share. FireFox, Opera and other new browsers didn’t even make a full percent combined.

I’m glad I don’t make web pages for local reading here, and if I did, I think I’d just have to live with alienating 20% of the public.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2005 at 10:37 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.