Opinions on when to use CSS

I'm designing a commerce site for an herbal retailer. Given the audience, what are peoples opinions on the likelyhood of their users having browsers capable of displaying stylesheets [just for visual hierarchy, none of that fancy js stuff]?

I've checked http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/index.htm and they say that the majority of browsers are 5.0 but their stats are taken from suspect sources [mostly personal sites with counters and internet related technology sites].

I've always been taught to design for the lowest common denominator - but in this case the LCD is a little fuzzy. So I'm asking the community.

you can get stylesheets to work quite well in 4.0+ browsers so I would design for that. I think there is still an overwhelming number of people that are still using 4.x browsers.

This is a fairly tricky subject.

I just recently designed a small website for myself and a few friends that I knew had 6.0 browsers. I went all out with the CSS box models and whatnot. Mostly to learn it, since I had never really used CSS in any serious way before.

At this point, though, I'd never design an entirely CSS-based website(one using the box-model instead of tables) for the masses. There are just too many people still using <5.0 browsers.

It's possible to do simple things that will work with most 4.0 browsers though, which is acceptable to me. I'm talking about basic text/link/background colors and formats. This seems to be the best all around option at the moment, as far as I'm concerned anyway.

I'd say one thing for sure is use CSS instead of those nasty font tags. For font stuff, indenting etc...the basic original CSS stuff everything seems to work fine for NS 4.7 and IE4.01 .

NS has problems with fonts sometimes so CSS has helped me a lot. NS doesn't always like inline styles though.

I haven't used CSS to replace tables etc.

My opinion is that it's about time we bury Netscape Navigator 4.x for good. Only the use of style sheets and DHTML extensively will prove to people it's about time to upgrade to something better.

Yes, people will still use these browsers, and Mosaic or Lynx. Despite this, you can't really make things worse for the majority so as to cater for the minority, especially when the minority can easily become part of the majority. Unless it is forced upon you there is no excuse for having a pre version 5 browser.

Let's look at this another way. According to some stats about 8% of the world population use Netscape 4, other say that about 14%. So take a median, about 11% therefore use Netscape 4. Funnily enough, about 12% of the world population have some level of colorblindness. So if you don't cater for that 12% with the design of your web site, then why cater for the lower percentage who use Netscape 4?

Which browsers hit your site often depends on what sort of site you have.

For example: if you are selling anything interesting for companies...especially large companies...then you have to watch it. They often run a unix system like Sun - and hence use NS. And if they run something like that then they probably have some money. I wouldn't want to lose a customer with money.