Thread: IE6

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?

Originally Posted by CornedBee

CSS is actually quite rigid. But the most basic properties of the web, namely the diversity of devices (and thus sizes) make it impossible to go beyond a certain level of specification.

And CSS is IE's biggest weakness.

Originally Posted by Pendragon

Elysia. You're arguing for arguments sake and have not contributed anything new to this discussion. You seem so determined to have this point of view that you're not listening to a word anyone is saying.

When you've worked in this arena, like many people here have, then you can argue all you like because you might actually have something valid to contribute. Until then...



...grow up. Closed-mindedness is not an asset and some people would like to discuss this issue minus the juvenile (see above) influence.

It's not like there's someone here I need to convince, nor is there any need for anyone to convince me--I'm not designing web pages for someone.
And I'm not stupid enough to start an argument over it. I do believe the matter is discussed thoroughly and there's not much more to add.