Basically what the topic title says. When you design a website, how old browsers do you go out of your way to support? How small screens?

Right now I only have IE6 available and I'm hoping things are working in IE5.5, but frankly I don't care about anything older than that, in fact, I'm starting to not care very much about IE5.5 anymore. I really don't care about NN4 and older. I guess it comes down to IE6, and recent versions of Mozilla and Opera for me. I might add extra things for Mozilla and Opera, who understand more CSS than IE does, but my site should always look okay in IE.

When it comes to screensizes, 800x600 is my base. I want my site to look good at 800x600 and 1024x768, and at least okay at larger; but I don't really care about anything smaller than 800x600.

When it comes to client-side scripting, I try to avoid it as much as possible. I don't want anything not working because someone decided to disable that part/all of javascript on their computer.

Hmm, what else... Oh, a visitor should be able to view any flash you have with Flash5 or higher.

And finally when I make sites in XHTML 1.0 I make sure that browsers who (say that they) understand it get it served as application/xhtml+xml instead of text/html. I think I'll write something that converts XHTML to HTML 4.01 with some nice regexes sometime so I can send XHTML to advanced browsers and HTML to IE.


So. How old browsers/small screens/etc. do you design for?

I usually design web pages for these two resolutions that you use also (1024x768 and 800x600). But, you should also consider higher resolutions because huge monitors are slowly taking over the market, and the number of users with large resolutions will surely increase...

I test my web pages on IE6 (and ONLY IE6, could not find anybody using an older version than this), Firefox, and Opera. If all goes well, I FTP it on Trap17. And that's all there is to it!

When I'm designing a site, I usually have the index redirect the person to a site according to what browser they have. The only ones I really consider are Firefox and Internet Explorer 6 and 5.5. I almost always have the site layout 800 x 600, that's my screen resolution, so they can deal with it if they don't like it.

Since I have 800x600 then I'll make it look okay with 1024x768 as well. I also check it in Firefox to make sure everything looks okay.
But the worst thing about some sites is that they look awful with 800x600, because the owner has 1024x768! I can't click on the menu links because there isn't any, but with 1024x768 it works fine. I really hate it when people make such layouts which just won't work for me!

I design my site for a 1024x768 resolution. This is far by the most common resolution people use. Furthermore, a 800x600 resolution will look better as opposed to a 800x600 resolution looking at a 1024x768 resolution page.

I try to make sure that my page looks okay on IE 6.0 and Mozilla.

My 2 cents....

-Shackman

mmmm i try and make my design fit as many browsers as possible.
Although sadly browsers such as older netscapes and Firefox read some code and interpret it in awful ways. I frames is a good example of this. Firefox pisses on al;l the iframe sites ive made and makes them look crap. But thats a browser issue.

When making centered sites i make them for 800*600. But i test in 1024*768 and they always look fine.
I do sometimes however design sites which adjust to fill the whole width of the site, to fit lots of news, links advertisements etc, but i try and avoid them as i'm not overly confident with that.

Basiclly at the moment i don't design with older browsers in mind. I am still learning and refining my skills, if i was to consider the small percentage who still use out dated browsers then it would hinder my progress and my sites.
in anut shell: i design for people with new browsers. if a person has an older version then its there issue not mine

I design in a 1024x768 Resolution all the time. Seeing as That's the screen res. I use, I find it to be the most common. I design my pages for Mozilla, which is slowly taking over the market. And personally, If they don't use Mozilla, I couldn't care very much. So, 1024x768 and Mozilla, no Client Side Scripting, Nothing special besides PHP, MySQL, and good-ole HTML.

Panda

So you don't really think about your visitors at all? If they don't have what you have it's their problem? You do realise that there are more people using 800x600 screens than there are using mozilla-based browsers?

I agree. If some users don't see my page correctly I couldn't give a flying f***. I design my site to look good on my computer and it usually looks good on others. If it doesn't well hell, live with it, don't visit my site, doesn't matter to me.. If it's w3c valid it should show up right so whatever..