Websites looking different across browsers? Why don't people care? [closed]

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Our company is looking at building a brand new website in the next couple of months and the IT director is all gung-ho to start using HTML5 and CSS3. He really thinks it's the coolest thing and definitely doesn't care that a website styled with HTML5 and CSS3 is going to look and function great in Firefox, safari, opera and just ok in all versions of IE. Granted IE9 is definitely a nice improvement from IE8, but won't be a standard amongst our visitors for a while.

But my question is. Why don't people care that their website looks different across browsers?

I feel like I am missing something completely. Our analytics shows that 72-74% of our visitors use IE. In addition, research done for our visitors show the vast majority of them are, in marketing terms, considered "laggards" (always the last to adapt new technology. A lot of older 45-65+ business men and women.)

I am开发者_高级运维 a tech geek like my boss is, I love new technology, and I wish everyone in the world had browsers that supported the latest and greatest.

But from a business standpoint, I just don't see the sense in constructing a web site that implements technology that a vast amount of our visitors won't be able to see or use (or care about, if we're being honest). Those people will only be able to see a degraded version of our site.

To me it makes sense to continue to use technology that is consistent. Right now, it is so easy to make your website look the same across all browsers.

But that's just my opinion, anyone else out there agree, disagree?

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I disagree very strongly, complete consistency is a stance of myriad CSS and Javascript hacks.

I wish there was a way to make people and businesses see what kind of trash Internet Explorer is.

Just because it is easy to throw in a hack that generates rounded corners in IE doesn't make it a good idea. Without a degraded experience, what sort of incentive is there for people to upgrade their browser, like they should?

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I usually cater to the masses. If a browser is getting less than 3-4% of total views on the site, I do not care about them. To be honest html5/css3 is cool and all but what does it really do? It makes things easier to develop for the most part. You putting that drop shadow in there with css3 or a series of divs with background images will end up looking very similar to each. The end user will not notice an improvements in speed, besides a 4K image not being downloaded, or an enhanced experience. I've always believed don't let technology model your website, let the users.

My suggestion to you, since your boss is gun hoe on using html5/css3 there are a couple things you can do to make sure the user using your site in IE has a degraded (but still functional) experience.

For new html tags you can use moderizer. It basically just converts everything to normal html tags for deprecated browsers. Only problem is that is javascript is disabled the site will look like total trash. As for CSS3, I'd just say make the layout look similar. Obviously it won't look the same, but it can still look good.

Also, you can use jQuery instead of a lot of css3 properties. This way it will be consistent and not be a real pain.