Hello Alfie

Thank you for your data input.

Some HTML-construction in the forum software is only necessary to give old browsers access to some form of CSS-formatting. For newer browsers wich supports CSS-3-features the HTML and the CSS could be some bits simpler at many places.

As long as the functionality is not affected – which IMHO shouldn’t be the case – I don’t see a good reason to keep the old stuff.

FACK

Actually it is beyond my intellectual reach why some IT-gurus (you know: beard, sneakers, lumberjack shirt) resist in leaving a vulnerable OS behind.

We (in my company) need (virtual) XP-installations too. There is the database wich is not fully migrated to the SQL-Server and a special software to read collected data from measurement instruments that is not running on a newer Windows-version than XP.

We cound have iOS apps and other "crap" but not a new version that runs on a newer Windows. Unfortunately we are dependant to this program.

Or should we leave the old crap behind us?

Yes. The question arises about how far can / should one go? I think that full-fledged HTML5/CSS3 would be too much.
Maybe we should start a survey amongst admins – having an eye especially on IE.

We could abandon the classes for stripe coloured table rows. We could abandon the colour gradient graphics. We should consider the use of HTML5 instead XHTML1. With CSS and JS (HTML5-shiv) older browsers can use the unknown elements. We could use wide supported HTML5 form field types (Fallback is type "text"). ...

We should debate about the necesssarity of changes of the UI. There are a great many number of devices with smaller viewport than desktops browsers outside. Users have to touch the links to reach the next site. These are very small what causes a nightmare of zooming or a "Friemelei" [1].

As you know my forum is not representative since many users come form developing countries. My current IE-stats:
6 (1.4%), 7 (5.5%), 8 (8.4%), 9 (4.6%), 10 (2.2%), 11 (0.011%). Seems that Win8.1 is not too popular yet. I had just 1.1% requests from mobile devices.

Let's summarise:
- IE 6, 7 and 8: 15.3% (Windows XP)
- IE 9, 10 and 11: 6.811% (Windows Vista or newer)
- 22.111% with IE, the rest comes with Chrome, Firefox etc.

The latter mentioned browsers have auto-update-functions [2] and most of the installations should be somewhat up to date. Many of the CSS3-features are available with IE 9 or 10 and newer. If an user with an older IE can't see a gradient or table rows with different backgroud colours should not affect us. There are non-gradient background colours present for the site at all and possible for tables and other elements.

[1] Is there an adequate english word? Neither dict.leo.org (my favourite translation tool) nor Google Translate know this term.
[2] Windows itself has auto-update (also for IE) too. But there are, as said, many intentional outdated installations in companies.

Tschö, Auge