But as I was trying to point out, it’s difficult to figure out how important the issue is unless we know what percentage of the site’s *total* traffic is represented by that pie chart. And stating percentages on the pie chart is likely to mislead.

I could do something similar showing Lynx 2.3 vs 2.4 usage on any one of my sites, and conveniently fail to mention that the two, combined, account for a fraction of one percent of my traffic.

Web designers who don’t (for whatever reason) just code to the standards tend to care about what browsers they’re actually getting traffic from. Choosing 2 versions of 1 browser that’s only available for 1 platform doesn’t really lead to informed decisions. With the growth of other browsers (notably Firefox) and platforms (Mac, Linux) that don’t run IE 6/7/8, each of the slices of the pie chart above probably accounts for less than 1/3 of the traffic to the site (just a wild guess, there).

The people who do conditional-everything for each browser will, alas, have more work. Condolences.

Sounds like you used the right word.

Three points:

1) I’ve been building websites for about the same amount of time, but that doesn’t make either of us better web designers. Our talent, technical skills, and ability to keep up with the times is what makes a web designer better or worse. In my experience, people who use time as their measure of skill in any IT field have been unable to keep up in the industry. I know 60-year-olds that will kick the socks off most programmers even with the latest and greatest tech, and I know 13-year-olds that give them a run for their money. Age and time have nothing to do with skill.

2) That graph is perfectly appropriate for the point being made. Those are the two most popular versions of IE by far, and he was simply showing, as stated in the text, that IE7 is gaining popularity at the expense of the popularity of IE6. In that context, the graph says all it needs to say, and any other information in the graph would be superfluous.

3) Your second point has nothing to do with his argument. If everyone were to “code to the standards…”, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. The point of the article is that a portion, perhaps a large one, of the web “population” are lazy coders, and this new split of rendering engines will simply coddle those users into continued, and perhaps worse, laziness. Yes, the good coders and designers “code to the standards…” but would you say they are the majority? If coders and designers were forced, however gently, to “code to the standards..” at the expense of their business, don’t you think more coders and designers would “code to the standards..”, therefore making the web a more standard, better functioning virtual place?

I’m probably a curmudgeon too, but I haven’t gotten crotchety yet…

First, I’m appalled that Nick (who also goes on about PHP and other such sensible things) would show a pie chart consisting *only* of traffic from IE6 and IE7. As he and I both know (and anyone else in the field *should* know), that’s ignoring all other versions of IE, plus all other browsers for Windows, plus *all* browsers for anything but Windows. How about a pie chart that shows IE6 and IE7 traffic as percentages of Wayne State’s total, Nick?

Second, “code to the standards and make sure it degrades gracefully on browsers that aren’t standards-compliant” doesn’t seem any worse an idea now than it was back in the mid-1990s. Seriously.