Wow. Is this thing still here? Hm. Okay. I’ll tell you a story.

I’ve just finished my first product launch for hamptonroads and pilotonline. I’ve learned a lot of new things, had some realizations and am in a new office. But I was also reintroduced to several old nemeses, not the least of which is IE6 for Windows. Both members of our little rogue design group tried very had to write semantic and meaningful markup; we tried to keep a wide range of users in mind and leave out the least amount of folks; we pushed hard for user testing and made the best use we could (in the few scant weeks we had) with what we learned. But as the UI person I struggled hard to justify IE6 support. At almost every turn IE would chew up my day in twenty and thirty minute chunks. Almost every UI feature, no matter how simplistic, was met with a dirty diaper on IE’s part.

There are so many blogs dedicated to IE6 and its rendering issues that I could scarecly list them all here. The more I think I understand about quirks mode and about graceful degradation of my code, the more I am shown up by the fantastic ways in which IE fails. The true kicker is that IE7 is only better (than Firefox, natch) in about 70% of cases. It deals with many outstanding irritations but leaves enough untouched or unchanged to make me really angry.

See, there’s a specification for all this browser writing. It’s not as if Microsoft was asked to make it up as it went along, or reverse engineer something secret or copyrighted: this is a fucking agreed upon standard. Large groups of people took time out of their busy lives to write all this shit down and get various heavyweights to sign their names to it. Most ironic is the fact that Microsoft itself had a hand in the original web consortium. The question is what could they gain from ignoring an open standard as important as this one?

Microsoft’s defiance of standards bears obvious fruit in many cases. Creating a “secondary standard” they alone can support means primary and tertiary streams of income that, while evil, makes business sense. But attracting the derision of anyone with even a novice’s knowlegde of web development has no business purpose that I’ve been able to see. It’s only purpose seems to be making me turn purple at work while thinking of ways in which I could gleefully end the lives of various Microsoft employees.

So, in my own work I’m dropping it. Here’s why.

If I were working in television, and you told me I had to shoot everything in black and white because getting a color TV — even though it was free, and people were even offering to put it in the car for you — was not an option, I’d laugh at you. In the days of broadband you always have a choice, especially when IE6 only runs on systems whose specifications practically assume they’ll be owned by people who can afford (and would prefer) broadband. The Firefox installer is around 18 megabytes and takes three minutes to run, even less on a Mac. Safari is a great option too. Hell, anything that attempts to fully support a set of seven year old specifications is an option.

Soon IE7 will be install in enough places so that I can stop doing the “!important” hack, and I can specify separate print stylesheets without having to have clean nappies on hand for IE. Until then, if you can’t find me, just listen for the guy yelling about IE rendering bugs. It’s probably me. ~