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let’s all hate on IE6 for a moment

So, this blog thing is a good deal. And I’d like to start promoting it a little bit - like at least let our family, some friends know that it exists. But there’s one problem - lots of people, unknowingly and against our better judgment, are still using Win IE. Some of them are even people we know. And like. And while we have four or five really nice CSS layouts for this site, we still don’t have one that actually works in Win IE. Black and white is mostly OK, except the header is funky. The two bird designs (my favorites) push the sidebar down below the main content. (Ok, so the Emacs design works in IE).

So - are you (eric) up for fixing this? Do I need to dig into the CSS? Right now it’s all that’s holding me back from spreading the word more widely.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 7:57 pm by carl and is filed under metablog, web design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “let’s all hate on IE6 for a moment”

  1. carl Says:

    May 18th, 2006 at 9:09 pm

    Well, I went ahead and did it. Sent out an email to the family - didn’t see why they should be left out of the fun. Then I thought: well, I could have waited until we have the navigation all cleared up. But if you start down that road, you’re never really finished.

  2. eric Says:

    May 19th, 2006 at 1:56 am

    IE6 can GO HOME. GET OUT. WE DON’T WANT YOUR KIND.

    ok. i’ll fix up the bird ones by making it all static and pixel based. then i’ll (hate myself and) use the box model hack to make IE happy. but don’t think i’ll like it. maybe, while i’m at it, i’ll use nested tables.

    I pray about that IE7 beta every night before bed.

  3. eric Says:

    May 22nd, 2006 at 2:24 pm

    actually, i’m a bit worried about IE7.

    if i hack all my styles here to work for IE(OLD), and IE7 fixes all the little bugs that allow the standard box-model hacks, but they don’t fix the larger CSS issues (i.e. the box model bugs), we’ve got nothing. hacks may be backwards compatible, but they’re never forward compatible (and everything else here sould be). i just don’t like it. i don’t like it one bit.

  4. carl Says:

    May 23rd, 2006 at 6:03 pm

    Though the bird style does seem to work nicely now in IE6 (well done), it is sad indeed to hack up a nice clean style for IE6 compatibility.

    So here’s my thought. I know browser-detection is bad, but for the interim between now and IE6 going away, why don’t we just do a little browser-sniff in the JS style-setter and make the default IE6 style be something IE6-friendly (it could be a new style, or the hacked bird). Keep all the alternate styles nice and clean and unhacked and not pixel based (even bring back the unhacked bird).

    You’ve already got a warning up on the styles page, so if an IE6 user decides to switch from the IE6 default to a standards-based style, they’ve been warned.

    What do you think?