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Comment by xab9 | Hacker News Reader

Using IE11 with the emulator switched to IE5 I can assure you, it works in IE5. At least the main layout, no popup though :D Still equal parts scary and astonishing.

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Wikipedia is a content-heavy website first, webapp only second. If it's written correctly, then of course it's going to work in IE5 - maybe with some parts of the layout looking ugly, maybe with some margins being wrong, some media not being embedded, but generally should be usable.

Nowadays it's fine for a webdev to not test their pages on IE5, but when the page is done right, there is no reason for it not to work in IE5, lynx, w3m or Netscape Navigator. Really, it's just a webdeveloper's job done right.

Nope, it's not "done right". It's a table layout from the nineties. But probably there's an api so noone would have to scrape a wiki page, I never needed to do that fortunately :)

And what exactly is not "done right" about that? If it displays the information it's supposed to in a clean and organised way, and loads as fast as any other website, then I couldn't care less if it's a '90's table layout' or using whatever the hot new JS framework is.

Try to read today's Featured Article in a text-to-speech program. The markup is so mangled it can't even read a complete sentence because it breaks anytime the text links out.

JAWS didn't have any issues for me, which reader are you using?

NVDA - aka the "2nd choice" - but I think it may have been a configuration issue on my end as the markup on the page, after looking into why NVDA was struggling with it, is just a <p> with some <a> in it which NVDA should handle fine.

NVDA can be difficult to configure, for sure. I couldn't get it to play nicely with Sublime, probably my fault. Reason I shelled out for JAWS.

Just taking a quick look at the MacOS article posted earlier in this thread, the whole page uses tables exactly as tables should be used: for tables. How do you suppose tables should be implemented?

I've seen plenty of idiotic examples of tables being implemented with a bunch of styled <div>, probably because people keep parroting the idea that tables are bad because table based layouts are bad.

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