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Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the W3C, has said it best: “Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.”

Methodologies including layered development via progressive enhancement, Unobtrusive Javascript, and Hijax ensure that higher layers don’t disrupt lower layers. However, representative testing of the core experience is critical. If you choose to adopt a Graded Browser support regime for your own web applications, be sure your site’s core content and functionality is accessible without images, CSS, and JS. Ensure that the keyboard is adequate for task completion and that when your site is accessed by a C-grade browser all advanced functionality prompts are hidden.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is expected to hit the market sometime this summer with a near finalized version likely to make a public appearance at Apple's annual developers conference in about a month.

With hindsight, we can say that it might have been better to release these technologies into the public domain or to market them early, so that they might have become industry standards. Instead, alternative approaches developed at other companies have become the industry standards. Xerox’s current participation in the development of various industry standards indicates its desire to reverse this trend.