Set Anger Aside

I know how you feel, I spent the better part of a decade watching IE5 & 6 destroy designs. Now that IE6 is on it’s death bed the temptation to stand on its neck and put a cigarette out in its eye is near overwhelming but we have to think about the real victims here, the users.

At this point, chances are your IE6 users have no choice. Out-dated machines barely running Win98 and employees at the mercy of demonic IT teams are just some of the demographic that represent IE-old’s victims. The people forced to use IE6 already have terrible enough lives, don’t punish them further and waste your own time with solutions that at this stage aren’t practical.

Rather then talk about how to help eliminate IE6 here’s my list of Dos and Don’ts for IE6, commence flame-war in comments below.

Do, Make Sure Your Grids Are Usable.

Fix your grids so your page doesn’t end up inside-out. Don’t flip out about a weird margin or collapsed grid if isn’t in the design structure of your CSS or interfering with usability. Try to be reasonable about the time you dedicate to IE6, don’t waste time and money fixing something that will never be appreciated, focus on show stopping problems and learn to let go of your design vision in IE6 and compromise.

Don’t Bother With External Style Sheets.

Conditional style sheet includes invalidate your source just as much as *-hacks but they have the added bonus of complicating your document structure, add to development time and make maintenance a pain.

Don’t Use A “PNG Fix”

If your website depends on an IE6 heavy demographic then don’t use 24-bit PNGs, if it doesn’t depend IE6 then stop worrying about it. And please, If you don’t need a stunning high color transparency go with the 8-bit PNG or gif if possible, they are smaller and IE6 can actually display them.

Learn To Let Go Or Move On

Your design is probably never going to look identical even in the major browsers so stop pining over what IE6 will do to it while your back is turned. If design support for IE6 is that necessary to your site then keep things simple and don’t bother spending hours over complex CSS and JS solutions that just punish the very people your trying to support. Chances are the IE6 use on your site will be so low that considerations aside from show stopping errors simply aren’t worth it.

Conclusion: Helping Is Hurting

Trying to drag IE6 kicking and screaming into “Web 2″ accomplishes only two things: IE6 users are forced to use interfaces typically beyond their performance capabilities and THE LIFESPAN OF IE6 IS EXTENDED. The more IE6 is treated like it has capabilities it doesn’t the longer it can exist, so come; let us help each other let IE6 die in a humane dignified manner.