Treating Internet Explorer 6 with Style
How do you treat Internet Explorer 6? Maybe you ignore the beast, or perhaps you spend two thirds of your development resources fixing miniscule browser anomolies and maintaining cross-browser pixel perfection. Whatever your business model, you need an IE6 strategy.
My strategy, for example, is to feed out an ie6.css file which provides a different design (a whiter site) for those of the ilk to avoid progress. OK the visitor doesn’t know that’s not the real design, and they’re probably never going to see the real design. It’s nice, it’s functional. It’s a cheaper way to go than trying to fit square pegs into round holes – pixel perfection across browsers is a myth.
Andy Clarke has listed a half a dozen strategies you might choose, and then his own take on the solution. Basically Andy suggests we create a Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS file. That’s it for every site you work on, include the standard typography and very basic but presentable shell. It’s kind of what I’m doing but a little step past it.
Creating yourself a quality standard IE6 template solution is going to save you a huge amount of time and money in your overheads on every single project. Simply doing what I’ve done on this site saved me significant time and money, too – it’s cheaper to create a new but lesser design. Whatever you do, try not to let IE6 suck you down that black hole of perfection crap. Get some perspective, and implement your own strategy. Asta La Vista IE6, you’re so 2001…
