Coding for IE6?

[Keleth]

I was kind of curious on people's thoughts on this. Most of the sites I currently run are more tech-savy, so less then 10% of hits are from IE6, which for me (an active proponent for using web-standard browsers) gives me the peace of mind to not worry if a site is IE6 complaint or not.

I'm working on a site I hope to market to Universities, and I'm running into a slight dilemma. This means, odds are, I'll be facing more IE6, although at the same time, I know my alma mater (I just graduated a year ago) was on top of upgrading to current IE builds, as well as offering Firefox and Opera. Working on IE6 does pose a few problems. For example, IE6 really doesn't like the 'button' tag, acting strangely with it, as well as a myriad of other issues we all know about.

So now the debate... should I be IE6 compliant? Should I just be W3C compliant? If someone tries to access the site with IE6 or prior, should I just inform people they should come back in a more modern browser? I can't really decide...

[codeexploiter]

Under normal circumstances the people tend to upgrade their hardward/software frequently. For eg: a person who have used Windows 98 has upgraded to Vista which means (s)he will get IE7 in vista. But it would be a mistake from a developer side if they expect these updations correctly from user's point of view. So either you can build a site and you can demand your users to upgrade their browsers to IE7 at least to view the site correctly. Now the question how many of your user would upgrade their browsers just to view your site especially if other sites are opening fine.

My personal idea is based on the current market share of IE6. I have a cutoff point set as 10% if the market share of the browser goes less than my cutoff point, I'll try to convey the message that to view the web page correctly they have to upgrade their browsers. I am not saying that this is the best solution but it is mine, which I feel will work correctly in my client base.

There is JavaScript framework developed by Dean Edwards - Ie7 which makes the IE behave like a standard compliant browser and it fixes many HTML & CSS issues. Using this will solve some of the many issues that exists in IE browser family.

Hope this helps.

[Medyman]

It varies on a site-by-site basis. I'd love to drop support for IE6. But, as a matter of principle, we support the last 2 versions of all major browsers. So, until IE 8 comes out of beta, we'll support IE6 (BTW IE8 was released as a RC recently, it's getting close).

For some sites (ones where IE6 doesn't make up a large enough market share to make the headaches worth it), we usually serve up the content in a usable way but don't spend the time to iron out all the little bugs.

If you're coding using standards compliant code (yes, you should do this by the way), there really won't be THAT many differences between IE6 and Fx 3 or Safari. So, if you intend on catering to an IE6 audience, start of with IE7 (using standards compliant code) and then progressively enhance the site for more advanced browsers.

For example, I recently launched a site that uses Webkit's CSS Transformations. Most people won't see them as only Webkit (Google Chrome, Safari, others...) supports them. But for those who can, it's a plus. For those who cant, there really isn't a loss.

So the moral of the story is make your content accessible and usable. If you want to add bells and whistles that only work in some browsers, go for it! Who said that your site had to be the exact same in all browsers for everyone?

[Keleth]

Well then, from all it seems, I should post some code here, as I have two items I've created that I just can't seem to get to work properly in IE6