The problem, I think, is that we were trying to explain what hackerspaces do, when we should have been talking about the people who join hackerspaces.  That is, hackerspaces are defined not by what they do, but by the people they are comprised of and the ideals they embody.  I’d like to borrow some language from the free culture movement:

A free culture is one where all members are free to participate in its transmission and evolution, without artificial limits on who can participate or in what way. The free culture movement seeks to develop this culture by promoting four things:

• creativity and innovation;
• communication and free expression;
• public access to knowledge;
• and citizens’ civil liberties.

I think that’s pretty spot on.  Hackerspaces are communities of people who seek ownership of their culture through creation.  The key is, when someone asks you what sort of things a hackerspace builds, the answer is basically: anything.  We build anything.  The idea is to build, and in doing so, to take back a little piece of culture from McDonalds or Walmart every time.  How refreshing, especially in a world of credit cards, the “toss it and buy a new one when it’s broken” attitude, and mass production.

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

Two months ago, I started a project that inevitably became “The 2009 Collection.” The project began out of frustration, but quickly became a labor of love that consumed countless hours of my free time every week. None of the 2009 music lists offered in popular magazines and blogs satisfied me, and I had no knowledge of music from 2009 to compare against the – to be frank – crap they offered. After sifting through hundreds of new albums and collecting a sizable library of new music, I culled an original list of 20 songs down to 10, and out came this.

A quick list of the bands that made the cut: The Heavy, Voluntary Butler Scheme, Phoenix, K’naan, Balmorhea, Givers, Jay Reatard, The Flaming Lips & Stardeath and White Dwarfs (with Henry Rollins), The Protomen

But this post isn’t just about the immense amount of work that went into creating the collection, but some of the great resources I found along the way that helped me gather the music.  To list some of them, and then go into specifics for two:

• pandora.com
• thesixtyone.com
• last.fm
• The Sound Opinions podcast
• The All Songs Considered podcast

Thesixtyone.com is both a beautiful music website, and a great tool to discover new and upcoming music.  It helped me find quite a few of the songs that inevitably made the final list.  I’d recommend checking it out if you’re interested in new music, and don’t mind sifting through crappier music to find stuff you love.

The All Songs Considered podcast was incredibly useful to me, and also a pleasure to listen to.  All Songs Considered is an NPR music show with less talk and more tunes.  I’d recommend listening to this if you want to hear (mostly) great music that’s just breaking onto the scene.

I found the other sites and the podcast I listed to be useful, but not nearly as much as the two above.  I was particularly disappointed by Sound Opinions, both because I’m a Chicago native (the show is from Chicago Public Radio), and because they usually played absolutely nothing I found interesting.  Let’s hope they find their way again, because they used to be a delight to follow.

So what’s next?  Well, this website doesn’t mark the end of The 2009 Collection. A forthcoming disc with original art and contextual information about artists and songs on the list is in the works. E-mail me at hello@jaymargalus.com if you’d like a copy.

I hope you found this useful, and don’t forget to check out The 2009 Collection right now!

Yes, I understand that it’s still the mainstay browser of lots of large enterprises. The only reason that their IT departments haven’t switched is because it’s kind of a pain in the ass. I guarantee there are lots of IT admins out there who actively want an excuse to install a modern browser across their enterprises. Just give them a reason.

As Jayson has mentioned, Youtube recently made its site inaccessible to IE6 users. Last I checked they’re surviving just fine. If this has taught us anything, it’s: a. youtube is doing just fine without IE6 users and b. IE6 users continue to exist without having access to youtube.

Ultimately, the only way to get rid of IE6 is to stop coding for it. Do your part.

I understand.  Really.  Firefox, Chrome, Safari… they’re scary, they don’t have ‘internet’ in their names, and they didn’t come pre-installed on your Dell workstation.  This has always been the hurdle  with getting people to make the big switch.

This time around, the cool kids’ browsers aren’t the only game in town.  That’s right.  IE 8 is actually a half-way decent browser.

I’m not saying we cut IE6 off cold turkey, but don’t spend as much time testing it as you do IE 8 or Firefox.  Chances are, this is already the case anyway.  If you’re feeling extra ambitious, throw a div at the top of your page for IE 6 users that says “Does this site look funny?  Your browser is a bit old, and the latest version is faster and more secure.”

The longer we support outdated browser versions, the more work we make for ourselves.  We’ve stopped designing for 800×600, and it’s time we stopped putting extra effort into supporting IE 6.

I’m actually torn, its annoying when a site doesn’t work properly and I’m forced to use IE6 because of work. That said I don’t know if that means I think that it should or shouldn’t be coded for. It’d be nice if everything worked, so from that perspective I think that it should be coded for. Another part of me though thinks that the only way for it to actually go away would be if enough stuff just stops supporting it. One of the main reasons that Windows XP stuck around for that long is that support kept remaining for it .. if that had not happened others would have migrated away from it. Same thing could be true here too

Following the recent hack on Google HQ which exploited some major holes in Internet Explorer, and particularly IE6, the IE6 debate has begun to receive more attention in the public.  According to w3schools, around 10-15% of all internet users still browse in IE6, which was released on August 27, 2001.  Along with security problems, IE6 is also known to have issues with rendering modern websites, creating a dilemma for web developers: do they create websites for a user base that still comprise a large percent of the internet browsing population, or do they begin to ignore this population?

To get the discussion started, I’ve gathered four individuals with differing views on the issue.  Hopefully, by the end, we’ll have developed some criteria for when, if at all, IE6 should stop receiving support.  So hop on over to the Discussion page and remember to keep checking in!

Insert implicit pornographic reference here

Posted via web from Jay’s Posterous

I love working for myself

Posted via web from Jay’s Posterous