How many use old browsers (e.g. =< Netscape 4 or IE 6) as their ONLY source of web content?

[Terry Stewart]

Thanks for all those replies, and feedback on what the test page looked
like on various devices.  Much appreciated.

I see there are various views as expected. I guess it depends on what I
want the website to do in the end.  One of the reasons I'm doing this is
more to make sure the pages are ok for mobile. A lot of people now use a
mobile platform for their leisure browsing. On average 25% of the people
looking at the site are now on a mobile platform.

However, I also want it to be nicely formatted, although somewhat
minimalist and clean. I also want it to be easy to maintain. I'm not
interested in people seeing ads (if fact those google ads on the site at
the moment are going to disappear) or whiz-bang things.  I'd like to think
the site might inspire people into the hobby, or get them interested in the
history of personal computing, somehow. Especially younger people, or
people in their 30s-40s who weren't necessarily there in the day,,,or were
very young.  This is why I'd like google search to index them well.  So
people can find them.

The site doesn't offer a lot of resources in the sense of downloads to the
community..the exception being the System 80 sub-section and NZ Bits and
Bytes downloads (which is mirrored on achive.org anyway).  At the moment
the System 80 site might stay as is.  It's a complex site and will probably
be the last piece I tackle.

>It is quite easy with html 5 and css3, the modern tools of the web
>designer, to detect when a  lynx browser is being used to access the page
>and in response present a text version of the site.

>best of both worlds

Bill, can you point me to a site which covers this?  What I don't want to
do though is to duplicate the site, but if something can strip out
everything except text, images and links on the fly if it detects a
non-compliant (old) browser, it might be worth looking at.

>Oh, I know it can be done. It's not a /technical/ problem :-)

Yes.  It's an "is the effort worth it" for those hardy few kind of question.

Terry (Tez)