Media Queries
There is a lot of buzz today about Media Queries. The technology
works very well on browsers that support it and it could eventually
become the industry standard.
One of the problems with Media Queries is that Microsoft didn’t
support it until their release of IE9 in February of 2011, so a
large percentage of today’s visitors to your site will come there
with an older non-supporting browser.
But the real problem is that Media Queries was designed by those on
the Academic side of the net. Their concept of new technology is
that if you don’t have the latest browser it is your fault that you
can’t view a website and you should just upgrade. They view backward
compatibility and an upgrade path as totally unnecessary evils.
No business person in their right mind would turn away 12% to 20%
of their visitors, their potential customers, because they didn’t
have the right browser.
The academics also decided to change the format of the media tag in
the CSS links to include the queries. As a result, if the
non-supporting browser recognized the word screen in the media tag,
but not the query, it would activate every CSS file at once. If it did
not recognize it as screen it would turn off every CSS file; great
from the Academic viewpoint, horrible from the commercial
viewpoint.
What if they had split out the query in a separate attribute and
changed the rel definitions to use alternate stylesheets for the
non-default CSS files. If the browser did not support Media Queries it
would not know what to do with the media attribute and would rely on
the rel tags to determine the default CSS files. If it did understand
the media attributes, it could use them to activate or deactivate the
CSS files according to the query results
This is exactly how Variable HTML handles your default
stylesheet definitions for the 2% to 3% of visitors who do not support
JavaScript.
The commercial business side of the net can’t afford to turn away
large numbers of potential customers because they have not kept up
with the latest technology. As you will see, Variable HTML has a
well defined default for any visitor that does not support
JavaScript.
You can use Variable HTML on a business related site today and it
will support a greater number of potential customers. Best of all,
what you learn using Variable HTML will be completely transferable
to your eventual use of Media Queries when and if you decide to make
the switch.
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