Does anyone bother worrying about IE5 compatability?

I'm on a Mac and 5 is where they stopped developing IE.  I made some changes on some of my pages and they look fine in Safari and firefox but the text is screwy in IE5.

I looked at my logs and I have less than 1% of visitors using IE5.

Any easy workarounds or thoughts on this?

The pages in question are any of the shopping pages on my website in the signature.  In IE5 the text div's under the items are all jammed to the right.

P

Someone else here will probably say otherwise, but imo I'd just let it go.

1) I don't think you'll ever be able to make your site perfect in every situation, when you consider browser type, version, and screen resolution. We got into that discussion a while ago when I noticed all the different variations at my site.... I never knew there were so many combinations.

2) These people will eventually upgrade, whether they want to or not. The computer is going to crash at some point.

Another way to look at it, is your conversions -

If you get 100 people a day, and 1% are IE5, then thats only 1 person a day.

That's 30 people a month x 1% again (conversion rate), which then boils down to 0.3.

So you COULD expect less than 1 person extra, per month, that converts.

I don't know what you're selling, but is it worth the headache?

I've found the thing that's making it wacky in IE and now I'm wondering which is the best way to code these blocks of text.  Here is the old way using nested Div's:

<div id="ssbodysuitTXT" style="position:absolute; left:172px; top:362px; width:112px; height:56px; z-index:107">

    <div align="right"><span class="SmGrnDescription2"><strong>

<a href="SeparatesShortBody.htm" class="TopBotMenus">s/sleeve bodysuit</strong></span></a>

<a href="SeparatesShortBody.htm"><br><span class="OrangeBodyCopyBold"><strong>$20.00</strong></span></a>

</div></div>

I tried to simplify the code by putting the align and class calls within the outside div and cleaning up some of the code:

<div id="ssbodysuitTXT" class="TopBotMenus" align="center" style="position:absolute; left:188px; top:372px; width:auto; height:auto; z-index:107">

<a href="SeparatesShortBody.htm"><strong>s/sleeve bodysuit</strong><br>

  <span class="OrangeBodyCopyBold"><strong>$22.00</strong></span></a></div>

Isn't less code and less complexity better?  Seems like it to me, I would imagine the page will load quicker.

I want to put the positioning info within the stylesheet next but I'm working on one thing at a time.

I'd be surpised if many mac users still use IE5 as there's safari and firefox to use instead

I'd only worry about IE 5 if my logs showed that IE 5 users bought from my site [i.e. deomographics]

Rest of the time - screw 'em; they should be bought upto date and forced to use firefox or something!

LOL- i like Northie's answer

realistically- if you're running an online business and a visitor comes to your site using IE5 - what are the chances that person's going to buy anything from you? If they're that far behind the times i doubt they're going to be pulling out their CC for an online shopping spree - just my opinion

ROFL!!!  Well, from my personal experience - I ONLY use IE 5 when I have to.  By that I mean, 2 days/week I'm at an office with an outdated computer that's just too old for Safari or Firefox (and yes that is sad) lol.

Hopefully, those using IE 5 are few in number.  My own website has similar issues w/alignment etc. on IE 5.  It's quite frustrating, but as others have mentioned, I'm not sure it's worth the hassle to make the changes (not that I'd know what those changes are).

Sorry no help - but good luck!
BasketLady

I figured it wasn't worth the bother.  Just freaked me out when I checked it on IE on my mac. 
As I said, they stopped developing it for the mac in 2005.

Ok, this may raise a couple eyebrows coming from me, but here goes.

Though we should do our best to make things compatible with IE5, you have to keep things real. Sometimes it is best to skip all the bloated code that it sometimes takes and just say forget it, "Why should I penalize everybody by having extra code for just a small handful of people that needs to upgrade their machines"

So, I agree with Northie and Nic.

backward compatibility needs to stop some time - 1% of visitors using it? Stop now!

Just think how many sites there are out there that don't check on FF - yes its true!

matte wrote:

backward compatibility needs to stop some time - 1% of visitors using it? Stop now!

Just think how many sites there are out there that don't check on FF - yes its true!

Agree completely with you Matte, my reasoning for not working too hard to have a site work with IE5. The web is always improving and like most, improvements are always hindered if we never let go of the past.