Like Tzafrir, I’m living in Israel, where many websites are horrifying as well. I had to switch banks because my original bank blocked Mozilla-based browsers. But the situation is getting a bit better, at least with the really important sites.

I talked with an American teen on the IRC, and he told me that most of the sites there are also of the sort that only works properly with MSIE. A Norwegian IRC correspondant said the same thing about Norway. However, some American sites are large enough so they care enough about the minority, and also tend to employ more clueful programmers.

Thanks for the nice article! I’ll mention it in my blog.

Mustafa, I’m glad that you actually teach your students the right stuff. Each year we get more graduated students with lots of misconceptions about web design.

This is definitely a world-wide issue, but I’ve noticed that a few companies in different parts of the world already switched to CSS-based and standard compliant layouts, such as Windows Vista’s website. Sure, it doesn’t validate, but it did a pretty good job in my opinion.

jinesh is right, these are definetly applicable all over the planet. Im writing an article for a Norwegian website myself right now, and was looking for some inspiration, and this was it!

great article and tips, I enjoyed reading it. I am also in KSA (teach at e-commerce & web development KFUPM.edu.sa), went through some of your thoughts and MOST definately feel your pain.

Actually I gave an assignment to my students to go through the TOP 100 companies in Saudi Arabia and see just how many of their sites are following web standards. It is a sad scenario. E-Mail me sometime, mfahmed at kfupm dot edu dot sa - there are companies I know that are looking for “good” developers.

Mustafa Ahmed

developing corporate sites or applications sometimes requires us to support really old browsers like ie5.0 or even netscape 4.5(!) where using css for positioning is not an option.

for such cases, you might like to refer to jeffery zeldman’s hybrid approach (http://www.zeldman.com/dwws/read/) where tables are used to provide structure and css for styling.

with broadband becoming widely available, i’m sure we’ll see more people upgrading their browsers or switching to opera/firefox.

nomo, I’m going to show some samples this week. What do you mean by “web design links” though? like web design companies?

Tzafrir, I’m preparing an Arabic version of this article to post it in a technical Arabic blog, even though i’m certian that there will be little to no interest.