With mariteaux.somnolescent.net, I wanted to do the unthinkable--and support any browser. If the computer can reach the World Wide Web, I want it to be able to browse my site. While this is doable with a simple site with no layout and little CSS, that's also boring. I had bigger ambitions for my layouts and multimedia features. To a lesser extent, you can have features for newer browsers and fallbacks for older ones on the same page, but this results in a mess of markup to accommodate thirty years of browser technology and I'm not maintaining that.
Thus, I've built three versions of mari.somnol--nofi, lofi, and hifi, which reside at three different subdomains. Here's the breakdown of what each site targets:
You'll still probably be able to load the page, but stuff will absolutely not work right. You'll experience glitched out images, broken layouts, missing assets, and you possibly won't even be able to read the text. This is intended.
Nothing! Browsers are good at legacy support, so nofi and lofi will work on browsers newer than what they were aimed at just fine. That said, you might not like the way they look on bigger screens, since they're aimed at smaller screen sizes for the most part. Using lofi and hifi will get you a much richer experience, but if you're fond of simplicity (me too), use whichever you like. The content is the same across all three.
Very minimal. All the page content will be exactly the same--so my stories, reviews, essays, music, those will be the exact same. Multimedia formats will be different (for example, nofi has music for download in RealAudio and 64kbps MP3, while hifi has V2 MP3s and FLACs for download), and each site has its own critter as the mascot. nofi has my snow leopard boy Alexi, lofi features my lovably-airheaded puppy sona Setter, and hifi features mari the Flareon and Cammy the badger, who are my main two sonas. So basically, where it matters, they're identical, and then they each get some different flavoring and media more aimed at computers of their era.