Thread: IE6

Originally Posted by Pendragon

Because it costs money and, more often than not, the 'better' functionality will either be redundant or lost on them depending on how good your sales person is.

That's the message to the user - because it costs them nothing. And Firefox is faster, more secure, supports extensions and best of all - it costs nothing. The user can try it and use, however long they want, and pay not a single dime. So why not try it? Convert IE users to FF or Opera users.

It *is* possible to build pages with no special cases. It gets harder particularly when it comes to IE5 but it is possible. I've had a lot of practise.

IE7 supports a lot more than it's predecessors and the remaining issues were going to overflow to the next version or through fixes although I don't have details beyond the release speech for IE7.

IE7 doesn't support display: block CSS which is quite handy when you have a lot of tables. I'm not sure how well and good it's to make a site without tables and only CSS for layout when it comes to IE.
So far as I see it, you're throwing away a lot of good functionality to make it compatible with IE.

And you know how many users like visual effects? Well, IE doesn't support the standard opacity CSS, but FF and Opera does. I'm aware IE has its own effects, but they're not standard and will only work on IE while standards WON'T work on IE. Quite infuriating.

Originally Posted by Pendragon

People as a rule don't like change and if, as I said, they weren't particularly computer-literate you are not going to be able to persuade them to try something different when what they have works perfectly well for what they want.

And that's why you have commercial, yes? It's "safer" and it's also "faster."
Yes, maybe not all will use it, but some will, and eventually it will help spread the work more quickly.
Alternatively, if something on the site isn't right because someone made a mistake, blame it on Microsoft not following standards and promote Opera/FF while fixing the problem.

>The user can try it and use, however long they want, and pay not a single dime.

...and how much does it cost to use IE?

Nothing - and that's the thing. Why use something that costs? If you mentioned, try X, it's much better, but it costs Y. The user probably is not going to change, yes? But as long as it's free, it's more accessible to try and use. Pay for something you might not like? I'd rather not and I'm sure many others agree - so being free elememinates that problem.

Using tables for layout is highly unpleasant and is not permitted for a DDA-(Disability Discrimination Act)compliant page as it interferes with screen readers and other accessibility tools.

>So far as I see it, you're throwing away a lot of good functionality to make it compatible with IE.

Using tables for layout? Css-effects? This is what constitutes 'good functionality'?

Yes, users like pretty pages. This is what graphic designers, flash (if you really like that sort of thing) and javascript for dynamic content are for. Plus, these options will mostly work across the board. Why limit yourself?

Indeed, and how to make compatible pages when the CSS won't work across the board because of IE's lacking functionality?
As for effects, again CSS makes it difficult.
And hey, while we're at it - if a user is using IE6, why not promote FF/Opera, because compared to IE6, it's much more secure and renders pages much more correctly. But the key point would be security. IE6 is very unsecure.

When I say "user," it could be your family (who should be the easiest to teach since you're a professional web designer) and, of course, those who view the website.

Originally Posted by Pendragon

Using tables for layout is highly unpleasant and is not permitted for a DDA-(Disability Discrimination Act)compliant page as it interferes with screen readers and other accessibility tools.

So now we're to decide conformance with law based on whether some probably crappy screen-reader program can deal with something? I didn't know that ABC Screen Reader Corp (or whatever) had suddenly become the arbiter of what is LEGAL.

It should also be noted that the Disability Discrimination Act was legislated by the British Government. I don't know if similar laws apply elsewhere in the world.

Most of the world's leading nations passed something similar I bet. In my country we have the Americans with Disabilities Act, which took effect in 1992. It covers many of the same things.

Originally Posted by Pendragon

When software is your bread and butter I think it highly unlikely you will retain your current sentiment.

When it's your bread and butter, you are likely to be frusted with IE with its lack and disregard for the standard, often makign sure that you have to follow very strict rules or use workarounds to make it work in all three browsers.
What if you could just write standards compatible code and it would work in all three?

Originally Posted by Elysia

When it's your bread and butter, you are likely to be frusted with IE with its lack and disregard for the standard, often makign sure that you have to follow very strict rules or use workarounds to make it work in all three browsers.
What if you could just write standards compatible code and it would work in all three?

90% of the code I'm writing now is for the web of which a significant portion is HTML/CSS/Javascript.

I would love if all browsers rendered things the same way. As it stands the three main browsers that I test with all have their unique tweaks.

How things are to be laid out is actually very poorly defined and a lot is left up to the implementation.

Unlike compiled programs, browsers cannot simply throw up an error message because something is wrong with the code. It has to try and handle the error. Different browsers handle things differently.

Now as far as IE6 is concerned: While I'd love to ignore it I simply cannot. The majority share of browsers is still IE. At work I'm suppose to use IE and anything I do on the intranet has to work for IE. For the internet sites I make sure it works in as many browsers as possible.

Originally Posted by CornedBee

It would be a heuristic decision that could fail and thus swallow proper tabular data. But you have a point. It should be possible to develop a pretty good heuristic.

Unfortunately, screen readers are far too underdeveloped as it is.

I'm not sure how much screen readers read the screen and how much they read the underlying HTML. I know one thing I'm suppose to add to pages is a link near the beginning of HTML that skips all the menu contents and goes straight to the main content of the page. This leads me to believe a lot of it is just reading the HTML. If this is the case I think excessive use of nested tables to provide layout control would cause the information to be presented in a nonsensical form when read from the HTML.

Originally Posted by Thantos

Now as far as IE6 is concerned: While I'd love to ignore it I simply cannot. The majority share of browsers is still IE. At work I'm suppose to use IE and anything I do on the intranet has to work for IE. For the internet sites I make sure it works in as many browsers as possible.

Now there's something - since companies are so zelous about security - why use IE?