Andrea Gandino

OK, so this topic has been debated quite a few times in the last several months, and I’m certainly not reinventing the wheel here, but just leaving my two cents, as usual.

The question is: can we drop support, or at least strongly reconsider the way we look at that “old cousin that nobody likes but you can’t avoid inviting for the Christmas dinner”?. IE6, that is, and that quote should be from Zeldman, I think.

As you might guess there are a lot of different opinions on the matter, and none of them can be considered as the ultimate truth. My opinion is, as the title to this article suggests, that we can’t cut off like 20-25-30% of visitors that each day come visiting our website. Many many times, the fact that they’re using this dinosaur of our days’ technology isn’t their choice at all.

Some (not sure what percentage, though) of them are forced to do so, or aren’t geek enough to know alternatives. So, they’re good guys, after all, many times they’re not guilty of anything, and so they deserve to get our juicy contents just like other people do. For those who stick to crappy browsers, ignoring the fact that they’re basically stealing precious hours of web developers’ even more precious lives, because they’re too lazy, I can’t help. Also, browsers are free: why the hell one shouln’t be willing to switch to a better thing that won’t cost a penny?

So, should we surrender to a jurassic way of styling? Again the title of the article helps us: nope!

I’ve always thought that designing for the Web is all about making compromises. There’s some stuff out there that would be ready for prime time, if not for IE6 (and 7, don’t forget v7!), sure; but we are supposed to be smart and skilled enough to overcome this obstacles.

For instance, IE is both providing the problem and the means to the solution: conditional comments. They’re ugly, they’re proprietary, but in a situation like this I feel like they’re our best weapon. With that technique we can target specific browser versions, and ensure that the content is OK every time.

So, my advice is to always design and build stuff using a modern browser as reference. If you’re extreme enough, you can even use WebKit, which usually implements advanced stuff first. Then, when you’re done with your hyper-cool layout with all the fancy stuff in it, you can turn the IE spotlight on, and make the needed corrections.

What does that mean? It means that you’re wasting time, in the short period, because you have to write two, or three different stylesheets. But writing one good main stylesheet is priceless, because in the long term, when newer, and supposedly better, browsers will come along, your work will be already done and you won’t need any more fine tuning.

So, it’s a matter of time and since you’re wasting it, when designing your master stylesheet, you should take as many shortcuts as you can, whether they are advanced CSS selectors, or rounded corners, or even revolutionary ways to lay things out.

Then you go on and fix stuff for IE, bearing in mind that things must not necessarily appear exactly the same, that little imperfections may be acceptable, as long as the content and its message are preserved. It’s not the visual look of the website that should be pixel perfect, it’s the branding aspect of it, the overall feeling, the stuff that connotates a service or a product you’re selling, that needs, this is mandatory, to be delivered as it is, no matter what the device.

At this point, one might note that this very site doesn’t feature an IE specific stylesheet. Yet. So, for now I’m not practicing what I’m preaching, and while I’m not sure when I will actually find the time to do that for this site too, I’ve been pondering about the problem for quite a while.

I came to the conclusion that not to exclude IE6 users, we could do like we do for mobile phones: it might not be great, but why not a single-column layout? Dead simple, and worries-free. OK, that might be too simple, but you get the point, right: simplify things! The content would be there, the overall theme of the site would be mostly preserved, and the site would end up to be just a simplified version of the real one. That’s just an idea, anyway, a banal one perhaps, but I’m probably go that way to kinda offer a basic support for legacy browsers.

So, what?

While we’re no superheroes, we have a mission. In early 2000’s it was spreading Web Standards. Right now, what we gotta do is harder and more subtle. By targeting specific browsers, intentionally producing worse-looking versions of our sites, and by displaying messages only to users of those browsers, we need to get them, especially the lazy ones, aware of the fact that browsers doesn’t differ much from the rest of the technology we use.

So if generally we’re conscious of it and we accept the fact that, say, a cell phone (or a television, a radio, a computer, you name it) bought five years ago has less features than one that will come out tomorrow that is generally better, we must make it so that people apply the same thinking to browsers too.