at the temporal coordinates: 1/28/02 10:16 PM, the entity known as Larrie
Easterly at larrie_at_larrie.com conveyed the following:
>
> Well I use to work for a major player and they had a staff of three people
> that did nothing but test the software on different version of Netscape and
> IE. They reported bugs and conflicts to the development team and we had to
> resolve them. This was a great resource.
>
> Not all players in the market can afford this kind of debugging, but if they
> want to reach the maximum number of people they will do it to some level.
>
My assertion is that's exactly the wrong approach! If you want to reach the
maximum number of folks, you code your pages so that you're virtually
guaranteed to support most any browser. That means giving up some of the
cutting edge features that are either not part of the adopted standard, or
are so new that they haven't been universally implemented yet. I contend
that using the common subset of features available in ALL the browsers of
(say) one year ago (and I'll discount LYNX for a second) should be
sufficient to implement almost any web site. I also believe that it is a
great feature, where possible, to provide a text-only option for those on
Newts (see, got it back on topic :-) ) & other PDAs, as well as those with
very old browsers that otherwise have no need to update.
There's often no/little profit in being the pioneer with the arrows in their
back. Three software experts translates to probably on the order of
$500,000/yr. in labor costs that could've been saved by not residing on the
bleeding edge. Not to mention the potential lost revenue when folks like me
get ticked-off at a site that kills my browser, or worse, creates such a
crash that I have to reboot. My assumption is that if that company is that
bad about coding their web page, they can't be trusted with their actual
product and chances are I'll never buy from them and I'll tell others to
beware.
Just my 2 cents, though.
- Eric.
--Eric Strobel (fyzycyst_at_NOSPAM^mailaps.org)
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