Website development and not supporting Internet Explorer 6

lorg — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:38:51 +0000

My partner and I started to work on a website a few months ago. We have a working prototype, and we are always improving it. My work is mostly concentrated on a smart Python backend, and on a Javascript front-end, while a thin controller acts as a messenger between the two.
Lately, I’ve worked on improving the UI. As expected, I rely heavily on CSS. I generate a lot of html elements using Mochikit and format them with CSS classes. While obviously better than the old alternatives, I still don’t like CSS. Maybe it’s because I don’t understand it deeply enough, but for me, there is still a lot of voodoo involved. An example I found, which luckily I didn’t run into yet, is collapsing margins.

Still, even with all its voodoo, CSS is bearable. At least until you get to IE. My latest run in with it was a scrolling bug, and I ran into many other issues. However, as much as I complain, I’m probably getting it easy, as when we started work, we decided not to support IE 6, at least until required.
Our reasoning was:

Developing for IE6 both independently and consistently with other browsers has a high cost attached to it.
IE6′s use rates are declining, and will decline even more by the time we launch (See these statistics for example).
Our first versions were mostly required as a prototype to prove our technology to potential investors.
As a two-men team, and a one man programming team, we are very low on development resources.

Given my latest bout of UI programming, this choice made me just a little bit happier.

Algorithm.co.il » CSS

Website development and not supporting Internet Explorer 6