Helping a client choose between web standards and backwards compatibility

I was presented with a challenge last weekend while working on project specs for a freelance client. She is a extraordinarily talented and multi-faceted person (award winning novelist, once ranked 10th in the nation at racquetball), but technical requirements are just not her thing. I had a long list of technical questions that I needed her feedback on, and one of them was browser support. Instead of taking the technologies approach and talk about web standards by tossing around acronyms, I chose to talk about benefits and audiences.

Web Standards

Browser Support:

• Internet Explorer 5.5+
• Netscape 6+
• Mozilla/Firebird
• Opera

These are the "modern browsers." The vast majority of users will have them. The focus of this method is providing code that is fast to download, easy to maintain (you could learn to edit the code yourself), and easy to make site-wide design/layout changes.

The audiences that benefit most from Web Standards are disabled people (blind, visually impaired, mobility impaired) and Search Engines. Search Engines such as Google are for all practical purposes a blind visitor. They look at the code of the site in the same way that a screen reading program does for a blind person. Good search engine optimization pretty much requires Web Standards.

Backwards Compatible

Browsers supported include the four listed about plus these:

• Internet Explorer 5.0
• Netscape 4

By coding in such a way that our layout is maintained in these old browsers we basically have to compromise each of the benefits listed above to some degree.

The audiences that benefit most from Backwards Compatibility are people using really old computers, most often found in schools and libraries.

Notes:

Let me make it clear that this decision has mostly to do with which audiences will see the intended layout of the site. If you choose Web Standards the Backwards Compatible audience will still be presented with the content of the site (I make it a rule to not excluding anyone), the site would simply look a lot more like a Word document, with it's headers and lists, than a website.

I chose to cover operating system support in another section.