How do you handle very old browsers on your site?

Question

We have a non-profit web site that got about 5 million hits in May. Of those, about 5,700 were from IE 5.x or lower; about 4,000 were from folks with Netscape 4.x or lower. We know that the current site's layout works for newer browsers and we're testing it on IE6 as well (along with Chrome, Opera, Safari, and Firefox). How do you handle the folks with the older browsers? Because of jQuery libraries and such, the pages might not function correctly on those old browsers.

Is there an easy way to show a text-only version on browsers that can't handle the CSS and jQuery goodies? How do large sites handle this sort of thing? I've used the @embed to hide the stylesheet from Netscape 4.x, but not sure beyond that.

Answer 1

You should not keep the old browsers as your main priority - just keep the content readable on them, and maybe add a helpful banner that explains they are using an outdated browser.

However, you don't have to focus on getting the layout look 100% same on browsers that old, that's just waste of time. As long as the content is available and they can navigate the site, it should be fine.

Answer 2

Make sure that all content is accessible and readable from a browser like Lynx, and no content requires Javascript to read & access.

I would suggest designing for disability accessibility and seeing if that would produce those results as well - kill two birds with one arrow.