Anyone that has ever met me knows that I despise the fact that developers are still catering to, and developing workarounds for Internet Explorer 6. It is a costly, aggravating task that enables users to remain on the decrepit system. So what is the solution?
I recently stumbled upon a site For A Beautiful Web. When I find a site like this, it is in my nature to dig. View the source, and whip out Firebug for a peek under the hood. Get in the minds of people and sites I aspire to, and learn the things that will put you in the head of the pack.
As I was digging through some source in the HEAD, I noticed some conditional statements. These always catch my eye, as I am always interested in how other people handle IE bugs. A firm I used to work with decided to set up a page referring them to download newer and better browsers. A freelancer I currently work with supplements with stylesheets to fix the bugs. But what do other people do? This question has always been on my mind. So while looking at these conditional statements, I realized that they were linking to some code hosted on Google Code. It was an IE6 specific stylesheet.
Take a look at the code, as it is some clean work. In the developers notes, they state that THE most important part of (most) sites is the content. This stylesheet leaves intact the content, does not give it layout, but structure (very similar to the default styles of the browser). The difference between giving the IE6 user this stylesheet, and not letting IE6 have control over the styles is simple: these styles are much classier, and easier to work with if you ever wanted to give a mild bit of branding.
I’ve decided that I will recommend this to all future and current clients. It is an elegant solution to what I think is a hideous problem.