It is with determination and excitement but also some sadness that I am completely redoing my main Web site in XHTML and CSS. To you non-geeks out there, that may elicit a hearty “huh?!” and “who gives a flying cow chip?”
But you should care. For approximately 90% of you, my site will load faster, look cleaner and more professional, be easily updatable (leading to more frequent updates!), and also be accessible to voice browsers, the colorblind, wireless browsers, and more.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that approximately 10% of the folks currently visiting my site are still using old old old old browsers from 1997. When they access my site in the future, they’ll get a boring straight-text layout.
I’m sorry, but I’m not that sorry.
Almost anyone can download new browsers for free, or — in those places where connection time costs money — for a few dollars at most. I can no longer justify spending countless hours mangling HTML and dealing with futzy layouts and holding back the progress on my site for the (overwhelmingly) ignorant or lazy… or, in some sad cases, the few truly unfortunate souls who simply can’t run the most modern browsers on their older systems.
If you’re managing to see this entry but everything else on this page looks garbled… well, I hate to tell you this, but then I’m talking about you. And no, I’m not the only stubborn mule on this point nowadays. You’re being shut out of lots of sites, trust me.
So if you’re one of those 10%, go to http://www.microsoft.com/ie or http://www.netscape.com or http://www.opera.com/ and download a new browser. Please. For your own sake.
What do you think?