I've seen some very dedicated people around here that take into account a lot of aspects of a website and more, compatibility with browsers out there.

Now, I might be talking from a begginer's point of view, but after some research on my developed sites I see visitors are concentrated into IE, Firefox, a fraction Opera, and the rest are under the 0.2% share of traffic generated. Note that this is specified only for my share of sites and I do not mean to include other people's traffic into my idea.

Speaking clearely, how much effort should a website developer use on making a website fully compatible. There have been situations where fixing for one browser has degraded for another (in my experience), fortunately i found sollutions in the meantime.

I do not intend to be mean by excluding users that use some exotic borwsers from viewing correctly my pages, but the quiestion is where does it suffice? I see a lot of criticism on methods that don't work for some ET browsers (sorry if i seem too comercial on browser choice).

I'm offering this challenge thought for small and mid-siezed impact websites out here. Of course when you have a website with massive traffic and of great public interest the goal is to make it open for as much people as possible. But what happens if my desired target is more than happy with the results.

So, how much browser compatibility do we really NEED ?

This is a great question, and one that HTML/CSS developers need to ask themselves whenever they begin a new project.

I think the easy answer is, know your audience.

If you are developing a website that targets Mac users, you had better make sure that the site will render correctly in Safari & IE 5.1, 5.2. This is not an enviable task. If you're developing a site that may have a large amount of Scandanavian visitors (a website about fjords perhaps?), Opera should be on your list of supported browsers.

In both my freelance work, and at my day job, we build sites for the latest versions of the most commonly used browsers. That means IE6, Firefox and Safari (this covers the VAST majority of web users). The code written should degrade gracefully in older browsers, but layouts may break. If a client insists that their site support older browser versions I am happy to do so at an additional cost.

I know that the Jakob Nielsens of the world (Standardistas) will cringe at what I've written, but if websites are developed to look the same in Firefox and Netscape 4, well... you have a site that looks like Jakob Nielsen's. In other words, very little progress.