Chris's Wiki :: blog/web/OldBrowsersAndYourSite

submited by
Style Pass
2024-10-31 07:30:05

One of the questions you could ask about whether or not to block HTTP/1.0 requests is what this does to old browsers and your site's accessibility to (or from) them (see eg the lobste.rs comments on my entry). The reason one might care about this is that old systems can usually only use old browsers, so to keep it possible to still use old systems you want to accommodate old browsers. Unfortunately the news there is not really great, and taking old browsers and old systems seriously has a lot of additional effects.

The first issue is that old systems generally can't handle modern TLS and don't recognize modern certificate authorities, like Let's Encrypt. This situation is only going to get worse over time, as websites increasingly require TLS 1.2 or better (and then in the future, TLS 1.3 or better). If you seriously care about keeping your site accessible to old browsers, you need to have a fully functional HTTP version. Increasingly, it seems that modern browsers won't like this, but so far they're willing to put up with it. I don't know if there's any good way to steer modern visitors to your HTTPS version instead of your HTTP version.

Next, old browsers obviously only support old versions of CSS, if they have very much CSS support at all (very old browsers probably won't). This can present a real conflict; you can have an increasingly basic site design that sticks within the bounds of what will render well on old browsers, or you can have one that looks good to what's probably the vast majority of your visitors and may or may not degrade gracefully on old browsers. Your CSS, if any, will probably also be harder to write, and it may be hard to test how well it actually works on old browsers. Some modern accessibility features, such as adjusting to screen sizes, may be (much) harder to get. If you want a multi-column layout or a sidebar, you're going to be back in the era of table based layouts (which this blog has never left, mostly because I'm lazy). And old browsers also mean old fonts, although with fonts it may be easier to degrade gracefully down to whatever default fonts the browser has.

Leave a Comment
Related Posts