Don't anchor me down

by Andre Engelbrecht

browsers innovation technology

The World Wide Web has long been a new and exciting application platform, and it just keeps getting better. No longer do we have to be confined to a single platform for an application, nor do we need an extra budget to develop for other platforms because these days, all we need is a browser and an Internet connection.

New technologies like HTML5, CSS3 and SVG is gearing up to make the web even better and more interactive. One of the biggest reasons I love web, is that it simplifies interface design. In the past, when you developed a user interface for a Dos, Windows, Mac or Linux system, you had to have a programming background to do so. These days, we leave that in the hands of qualified Designers, exactly where it belongs. Graphic Designers have a far better background for designing user friendly and appealing UI's for our applications, and HTML + CSS is the perfect tool for this job.

This means that the programmer can focus on his task of building the application logic, while the Graphic/Web Designer can focus on building a strong, user centric, interface and experience.

Unfortunately there are a couple of obstacles that still prevent us from moving forward. Old, depreciated and in-secure web browsers, are holding us back like the anchor on a ship. Not only does it stifle innovation and prevent us from adding great features on our web applications, but if we get to far ahead of ourselves, the anchor-line pulls tight and we get pulled under an ocean of incompatible features and security holes.

Why stifle innovation?

Most modern browsers already support HTML5 and CSS3. So we can start doing great things like rounded corners without wasting bandwidth on downloading a rounded corner image. PNG can be used instead of GIF for beautiful transparent effects (GIF only support 1 bit alpha transparency), and recently, we even have support in browsers for animated PNG's, combining the wonder of PNG's transparency, to animation. Just imagine what we can do!. SVG is also a wonderful technology allowing the use of vector graphics directly on the website.

This is all great news, but as soon as we want to employ any of these techniques, we have to think of other browsers. So we consistently use all sorts of tricks to try and accommodate browsers such as IE6 and 7. I believe that this attitude prevents fast adoption of new technology, since there are no demand from the users. People still use old browsers, and therefore we still support them.

How do we change this mindset?

My website, is a good example of what I'm trying to achieve. I decided I will not go crazy trying to support IE6 and 7. What I did was to use all the nice rounded corners etc. that CSS3 provides, so that it looks pretty (subjective ^_^ ) to users using modern browsers. Users of depreciated browsers and technology, will see a site without the nice looking features etc. Note however that I do make sure the site is at least usable for older browsers, but that's as far as my support goes.

I propose that we blatantly stop supporting older browsers. It is high time that we start rewarding users of modern browsers, rather than penalize them, just because we need to support depreciated technology.

You can use Markdown to format your comment.