Yahoo!’s Graded Browser Support shows a rather similar (though decidely more organized) design philosophy to our previous Browser Support @ Middleware Infrastructure article. One choice that may raise some eyebrows is their treatment of IE 5.0 – delegating it to unstyled “core” semantic HTML status ala Netscape 4.x and Lynx.

Their 3 browser grades basically break down into full support “A”, unstyled content “C”, and we assume you know what you’re doing and aren’t going to worry about it “X”. The short article accompanying the support table is a quick but useful read into degrading design philosophy and testing.

While application/site performance and testing is of course unique to every environment, (having 5 flavours of OSX is a luxury most of us probably don’t have, and other OS’s/browsers may not matter on an intranet) it is undeniably a great starting guide for uncontrolled environments or at the very least a conversation starter.