More often than not I find myself building websites with the outlook of developing for ‘the here and now’, taking into account the browsers that we are using today and also those which we were using yesterday (Please stand up IE6)!

So my question is this; Should we be actively developing for tomorrow, not today, using new technology wherever possible and providing only those with bleeding edge browsers (Safari 3 & Firefox 3) with the perfect experience? Is it now acceptable to present users of yesterdays, and even today’s web browsers with a degraded experience?

Consider that most websites might have a shelf life of 2 – 3 years, and you soon realise that the website you are developing might only be viewed using today’s web browsers for 6 months of it’s life, with the majority then migrating to Internet Explorer 7 and 8 (or whatever it may be) and dilapidated browsers like Internet Explorer 6 fading into the dark and distant background.