Browsers - older versions?

I'm not sure where is the best place to post this. My question is: what is the oldest version of various browsers that I have to be concerned with when designing a website? (For example, no one could possibly still be using Netscape 4, could they?)

I'd appreciate people's opinion on this.

it depends on your site

if your designing a site that is for older people then you should go for netscape 4 if your designing 1 for streaming media then i think you would be ok designing your site just for newer browsers

haha - there are quite a few of the minorities in the world who do not like change - you will be surprised to find ppl using ns 4 - but will they be your audience?

Last time I saw some stats Netscape 4.x was less than 1%. Having said that, apparently some organisations like the odd government dept and educational institution are sticking with Netscrap for some reason. IMO you are safe building for version 5 browsers nowadays and working forwards in testing.

Thanks everybody.

If you build your site using CSS you can have a lovely version for people with recent browsers, and have it 'gracefully degrade' for older browsers - i.e. it won't look as good, but it will still be functional and everything will work.

If we don't all start going this route, we'll be using things like tables for layout forever, just because a few old browsers don't support them.

On the topic of the forum section: using CSS and proper markup (i.e. heading tags for headings) rather than tables for layout and font tags can help with the search engines as it reduces unnecessary code on the page and lets the search engines know what is important - i.e. it knows something in h1 is an important heading, it doesn't know that something in a 'font size=24px color=red' tag is important.