Develop for your clients’ customers and treat everyone fairly

The decision to not develop for IE6 and not test our clients’ web sites on it isn’t one that we, the developers, should be making.

A recent TechCrunch article puts IE6’s browser share at 20%. Depending on your clients’ customers, that number could be more or less.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/02/internet-explorer-browser-share/

Even if you might not care enough to accomodate a significant percentage of your site’s visitors, you should be upfront in your dealings with your clients if you’re not going to accomodate all of their visitors to the best of your ability. At the end of a project, are you willing to provide a screenshot of what your work looks like in IE6 and ask them if they find it acceptable?

Back before JavaScript was widely supported, developers were proudly touting graceful degradation. Sites that were improved with JavaScript fell back to perfectly usable but less nifty implementations if the visitor’s browser wasn’t up to snuff.

Today, graceful degradation isn’t our only option, because IE6 supports enough JavaScript to allow us to overcome a number of its shortcomings while still developing for more standards-compliant browsers:
http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/
http://docs.jquery.com/Tutorials:PNG_Opacity_Fix_for_IE6

In my work, I don’t try to perfectly replicate a site in IE6, but I do try to make it pleasant to use and free of errors.

To respond to a few of my fellow debaters: My sense is that the people still using IE6 are largely not to blame. It’s hard to browse without seeing various messages about updating IE – even MSN.com displays ads recommending IE8. Internet Explorer 7 is the default browser for Vista, which was released in January, 2007, and Windows 7 ships with the far more standards-compliant IE8. People still running XP would have IE7 or IE8 if they ran Windows Updates even once since November, 2006.

So let’s forget about why people are still using IE6 and what (if anything) we can do to change that. Let’s instead focus on treating all visitors to a site fairly, because with a little effort, we can do so.

Oliver
ardamis.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.