GermWorks - Web Design & Life

Recently read a good thought provoking article from CSS Juice about “Who Cares What IE6 Can Do?” and it raises a few issues about the old discussion of excluding and including browser support in web design.

The IE 6.0 problem with CSS

I personally do not support Internet Explorer 5.0/ 5.5 anymore but with still around 40-44% users still using IE 6.0 I still support it in my website designs (one example hear). The problem however is that IE 6.0 only supports CSS 2.0 while other modern browsers support parts of the new CSS 3.0.

Modern Broswers (September 07) are:

• Firefox 2.2
• Intrnet Explorer 7.0
• Safari 3
• Opera 9

Is this a solution for IE 6.0?

When designing a website, design for the most modern browser first, using all of the most advanced techniques it supports. This allows you to give a good deal of your audience the best experience possible.

When that design is complete, then work backwards. How does the website look in the next best browser? Odds are that something has gone wrong in IE6. This does not affect your other users though. It only affects IE6, so your task is to do the best you can for IE6. If you can hack the feature, fantastic! If you can’t, don’t worry. Just remove it from IE6, and make sure that the page is still usable.

While this all makes sense, the thing that most people forget is that only a certain amount of CSS 3.0 properties actually currently work for the ‘present modern browsers’.

If all of CSS 3.0 worked with every other modern browsers then I would also recommend what the author has suggested but until this happens I would personally not use CSS 3.0 in my websites.

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