Handcrafted pixels & text from Salem, Massachusetts.

How I Might Deal with IE6

Posted at 11:54 AM

Eight years ago (almost to the day), Jeffrey Zeldman wrote, To Hell With Bad Browsers, signaling the dawning of “The CSS Age”. Explaining how the use of @import for referencing stylesheets is ignored by Netscape 4, was an important step in shedding away the problems related to supporting an ancient browser. Eight. Years.

Completely ignoring a browser in terms of CSS is a wonderfully freeing thing. It certainly can’t be done on every site. The important thing to remember is that it’s a site’s statistics that should determine what level of support you decide to offer.

Later, IE5/Mac became a problem. I began giving it the same “talk to the hand” treatment that NN4 was receiving by using the backslash comment hack years ago:

/* import stylesheets and hide from ie/mac \*/
@import url("screen.css");
/* end import and hide */

Now, in 2009, IE6 has become the source of our frustrations — and for certain sites, giving it an unstyled, naked view is exactly what I want to do. Alpha-channel PNGs, min-width, max-width, rendering bugs galore — there are plenty of sites I’ve designed and maintain where the IE6 stats are low enough to drop the axe and move on. Now is the time!

So what’s the easiest solution? I was chatting with Ethan about using conditional comments to hide styles from IE6 only, and after a bit of Googling, we found Simon Clayson’s article, where he cleverly does the following:

<!--[if !IE]><!-->
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" href="screen.css" />
<!--<![endif]-->

<!--[if gte IE 7]>
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" href="screen.css" />
<![endif]-->

This hides all styles (assuming they’re all contained within screen.css) from all versions of IE, but then re-applies them for IE versions 7 and greater. Lucky visitors that are using IE6 or lower will get an unstyled view of the site, just like the lucky visitors using NN4 have been getting for close to a decade.

Simon’s method also serves up a bare-bones CSS file specifically for IE6, but I think that’s being too polite :) Another real-world example of this method in practice, is The Rissington Podcast, which cleverly serves an IE6 stylesheet complete with Comic Sans.

What’s nice about this approach is that you’re not having IE6 import all your styles, having to worry about overriding them later. You could serve IE6 with a minimal stylesheet starting completely from scratch. Or none at all.

Is it a bit hacky? Sure. But in certain situations, not having the burden to worry about IE6 seems well worth it.

Have a better solution? Let us know in the comments.

Update: Commenter Daniel James might’ve simplified things down to a single conditional comment, like so:

<!--[if gte IE 7]><!-->
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" href="screen.css" />
<!--<![endif]-->

I’ve tested in Mac: Safari, FF3, Opera and PC: IE6, IE7, IE8beta, FF2. More testing required, but this looks very promising.

103 Comments

Beautiful Accidents

Posted at 4:01 PM

It must be 12 years ago now. I was living in Allston “Rock City”, playing guitar in a shoe-gazing instrumental indie rock trio. My G string broke. No, not that G string (not that kind of band). Out of extra strings, I managed to find a D string lying on the rehearsal room floor. I strung it on and kept playing. See, a D string is wound steel, and thicker than a G string, which is a single strand. But winding it tighter and tighter, I was able to tune it back up to a G.

From that day on, I exclusively played with two D strings (one tuned to G) instead of a normal set of guitar strings. It changed the way I played, changed the sound and timbre of my setup. It became a part of the DNA that made up whatever it was we were creating.

It’s been happening throughout history, of course. Beautiful accidents. Unintentional intentions. We can’t plan these mistakes, but wish we could. What seems like disaster, turns into the spark that ignites what we perceive later as “rightly so”.

And it happens all the time when I’m designing. Oops, I dumped a white paint can where color used to be. Wait. That’s nice. It’s become a part of my process. A part I can’t anticipate, or account for, but a part nonetheless.

I’ve been thinking about ways to facilitate these accidents. Make them happen more often. I haven’t come up with anything yet. Too much coffee, not enough coffee, time of day, etc. — are they really accidents, or our subconscious guiding the way?

Until I figure out, I’ll keep adapting, accepting and discovering.

31 Comments

Build Society, February 2nd

Posted at 9:40 PM

Clear your schedules, Boston-area web geeks! An extra-special joint event with fellow North Shore pals, Build Guild and the Markup & Style Society (new site coming soon) are co-hosting a meetup here in Salem on February 2nd. Special guest Eric “Rock Horns” Meyer will be in town — and when Mr. Meyer is in town, you gather up the troops and celebrate with frosty beverages and good times. You just do.

As usual, my M&SS cohort Mr. Marcotte has written up a far better summary of the night’s events. As has Mr. Meyer.

Hope to see you here in the Witch City for what is sure to be a wonderful night of markup, style and guilding. If that makes sense.

6 Comments