You never know who is visiting your site
Which is why it is very important to build for Web standards.
If you or your company just builds for Internet Explorer, not only are you building for a browser that is behind the times (and just terrible, just terrible), but you also might be alienating some of your users. Or a lot of your users.
Firefox is the No. 1 browser that comes to The Journalism Iconoclast and my personal site, The Pat Thornton Files. Yes, you read that right. 50.52% of JI readers use Firefox, compared to 36.79% using Internet Explorer. Most of those IE readers are probably coming from work where they have no choice and their soul is being sucked from them.
Apple’s insurgent, and blazingly fast, Safari commands 9.43% of my browser share (it is much better on OS X than on XP or Vista, which is Apple’s fault). The rest of JI users are primarily made up of Mozilla variants. Can you imagine if this site was built for Internet Explorer, a non-standards-complaint browser?
Man, would Web traffic be down — way down. But it’s not. You want to know why?
When I build a Web site, I build it for standards-complaint browsers first, like Firefox (Mozilla), Safari and Opera (Oh, Opera are you still there?). I then fix it for Internet Explorer. I don’t cater to a non-standards-complaint browser that will make it tough for me to get my site up and running on the rest of the world’s browsers.
But, of course, I always make sure my sites work under Internet Explorer, because it is still the dominant browser for the majority of Internet traffic. If someone, however, tells you that you only need to get a site working under Internet Explorer because “that’s what everyone uses,” smack them.
Smack them hard. You never know what your individual users will use. 20.30% of JI visitors use a Mac, despite the Mac having a 5 percent world market share.
That’s why I always build sites to work across all platforms. You just never know. And with more and more people coming to sites from mobile platforms, like the iPhone, standards compliance is even more important.
The iPhone runs off of the open source WebKit framework, which is the basis for Safari. Google’s new mobile platform Android also runs off of WebKit. Go ahead and build sites just for IE, they won’t work on the future, which is mobile.
All this points to, of course, is that JI readers are smarter, better educated and, well, more iconoclastic than your average computer user. And for that, I thank you.