Mr. Clarke advocates creating one single universal style sheet to handle all styling in IE6, and to stop worrying about making content in IE6 look anything like the high-end experience.

I’m now advocating to my clients (and to you), that where feasible, not to waste hours in time and a client’s money on lengthy workarounds in an unnecessary attempt at cross-browser perfection. Instead, you and I should provide simple but effectively designed HTML elements. This means just great typography for headings, paragraphs, quotations, lists, tables and forms and no styling of layout.

This will work well for content-focused web sites. And then maybe it’s officially time to completely drop support of IE6 for web apps.

When Internet Explorer version 6 (IE6) was introduced in 2001 it was a groundbreaking product but browsers were then being developed so fast that it was soon overtaken by others which conformed better with web standards. IE6 quickly became the butt of authors’ humour but, in spite of this, 8 years later it is still widely deployed and, although numbers are reducing, its final demise may well be some way off. Consequentially authors still need to design sites that will give visitors using IE6 an acceptable experience.

IE7 script

In the recent past authors have usually worked around the problem by writing a specific style sheet and targeting it at this browser – a process that has often been very time-consuming. Here instead I describe a method using a script developed by Dean Edwards which not only simplifies this process but can often dispense with the need for a special stylesheet and indeed goes well beyond what is possible using stylesheets.

Dean Edwards’ objective is to make IE6 behave like IE7. IE7 is a much better, though still somewhat deficient, browser so this is a real step forward. The approach uses a JavaScript library which he calls IE7. He says

IE7 is a JavaScript library to make Microsoft Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6

The library has been made freely available for use. It consists of several scripts which will be described the chief of which is ie7.js. Using this script you can fix many troublesome issues which are not possible using targeted stylesheets

• Fixed positioning is supported
• Maximum and minimum width and height are supported
• Several additional CSS selectors are now supported e.g. parent>child

A complete list of the enhancements is included on the IE7 Test page which shows that some IE5 problems are also corrected.
Usage
IE7.js

Upgrade MSIE5-6 to be compatible with MSIE7.

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<script src="http://ie7-js.googlecode.com/svn/version/2.0(beta3)/IE7.js"
 type="text/javascript"></script>
<![endif]-->

IE8.js Upgrade MSIE5-7 with advanced CSS features missing from MSIE7.

<!--[if lt IE 8]>
<script src="http://ie7-js.googlecode.com/svn/version/2.0(beta3)/IE8.js"
 type="text/javascript"></script>
<![endif]-->

“IE6 is the new Netscape 4. The hacks needed to support IE6 are increasingly viewed as excess freight. Like Netscape 4 in 2000, IE6 is perceived to be holding back the web.”

Jeff Zeldman, standards guru

Bring Down IE 6

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