The Art of Pragmatism

The web (or let’s say, the technology underneath the hood) is once again facing an evolutionary step towards becoming more userfriendly for both developers and consumers. I put big hopes into CSS3/HTML5 and a more streamlined production process for creating websites due to less workarounds. With more and more websites haveing heavy usage of ajaxified user interfaces, there will be even more streamlining happening in the future. Of course I’m haveing browser compatibility on my mind as I’m writing this. It seems like even Microsoft is understanding now how important it is to support standards and I think they’re trying really hard to get back their share of the cake by starting to get less ignorant. I can only hope they actually walk the way and don’t fall back to old habits.

The numbers of people using old browser versions is still too high to forget about the annoying compatibility round at the end of every design process, but the trend is to force “nice degradation”, rather than “full conversion”. From my point of view, this is the best approach by far and I’ve been practically going there since about a year. This means, designing for state of the art browsers, but with nicely degrading fallbacks for old versions. This is reducing production overhead and costs. I rather spend the time on the initial design than on achieving the same looks with a fossil browser like IE6.

How does this affect the viewer? Well, basically not at all. The functionality has to be the same of course – it just looks a little bit different in the end, downgraded. The content is still being displayed perfectly well and the brave people using current browsers will enjoy the feature richness, while the fallback makes sure that old browsers at least display the information which is meant to be displayed in the first place. And well, if you think about how someone must perceive the web who is *still* using IE6, he might be used to a lot worse and what he doesn’t know, he doesn’t miss, right?

Well, I know, this isn’t exactly new but I know the fight some webdesigners might have over this, inside and with their bosses and clients. It is, however, a matter of displaying key points to why this approach is more efficient. There are tons of objective reasons which support this approach, be it efficiency or to create future proof designs. Be brave. :-)