Why I will not be dropping support for IE6

Peter Wilson — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:30:58 +0000

Increasingly I’m reading of web developers deciding to drop IE6 from their list of supported browsers, usually, because of its creative interpretation of CSS standards, besides IE7 is over a year old, and, IE8 about to be released.

I’ve decided to continue support for IE6 as it’s still in wide use – especially in corporate environments – and, I don’t think it needs to take a lot of work to develop for. I’ll say that again, I don’t think IE6 is as bad it’s sometimes made out to be.

IE6 is the difficult child of the browser family – but like most difficult children, with the right tools it can be made to behave. IE7 is better behaved than IE6, but let’s not fool ourselves, it’s not the glowing example of a perfect browser, and requires hacks of its own.

Standards Mode

The best tool to reduce IE6‘s development time is to move the browser out of quirks mode and into standards mode using an appropriate DOCTYPE, and, leaving off the XML declaration; I code in XHTML Strict, so my files begin:

In standards mode the browser will inherit font styles within tables, use the W3C box model and vertical alignment defaults.

Comments

Create a standard comment format for your main CSS file which you can use when you know you’re going to have to write a hack for the IE6 style sheet, such as /*HACK ie6 ... */; rather than flicking between your main and IE6 style sheets during standards development, you can just search for hack comments during non-standards development.

#someDiv {
min-height: 300px; /* HACK ie6 - height: 300px */
float: left; /* HACK ie6 - 3px jog (adjacent), zoom: 1 */
}

Surprises

Once you’ve specified the DOCTYPE, and, repaired known hacks, IE6 is likely to surprise you with a few more creative problems, positioning, an extra few pixels here and there and other little tricks; but by ruling out the obvious in advanced, overall debugging will become less time consuming.

As I said above, IE7 requires its own set of hacks. If browser specific debugging is required anyway, I don’t think it’s overly time consuming to continue support for IE6.

Big Red Tin » doctype

Why I will not be dropping support for IE6

Standards Mode

Comments

Surprises