When you’re doing web design, it’s always tempting to design for the most up-to-date browsers, but you have to remember that not everybody runs them. You can’t leave those folks behind. On the flip side, however, some folks are running browsers that are so out-of-date that to support them fully would mean crippling your website and leaving out a lot of modern functionality. So, there’s always a tradeoff!

We always try to make things as inclusive as possible. For example, our ad code is one of the few in the world that can gracefully degrade and display ads even to people who have JavaScript turned off. Recently, we added Ajax functionality to our bidding pages, which allows you to bid up and down in real time. Of course, if you’re not running JavaScript, these won’t work, but they fail gracefully: they direct you to a page explaining what JavaScript is and how to turn it on. And, as before, you can always use the simple “edit bid” page.

For something more modern like Ajax, you’ve pretty much always got to ensure that there’s a non-Ajax way of doing things. In other words, shiny new interface elements for those who can handle them, while everyone has the option of staying with the tried and true.

We also updated our bid status icons. Older versions of Internet Explorer had long-standing bugs in which alpha blending (the transparent parts of images!) would not be rendered properly: instead of “seeing through” the image, you’d see an ugly shade of gray. It wasn’t very pretty. As such, our status icons were in GIF format, which rendered properly everywhere but which were limited to 256 colours. With IE support of PNG images now working properly for a while, we’ve upgraded our images to PNG format, and tidied them up a bit while we’re at it.

Before (GIF format):

After (PNG format):

You’ll notice the new images have a much smoother border, with none of the “jaggies” associated with the GIF format. This is an example of the trade-offs mentioned earlier: members using old versions of Internet Explorer will still see grey backgrounds on these images, but these members are in a much smaller minority now, and the majority of members can now enjoy a prettier Project Wonderful.

(Any resemblance between the old “NSF” image on the right and Pickle Inspector from the critically-acclaimed comic MS Paint Adventures are entirely coincidental.)