I think another part to this that has not been mentioned is educating clients and bosses, as well as the general user, that ‘Progressive Enhancement’ so to speak is the way forward. In large corporations and across the clients I have worked with there is still the mentality that all sites have to look perfectly the same across all browsers.
We as Web Designers have a responsibility to push this education out to people otherwise we are just making our job harder. As Malarkey said above even adding this into the contract can help to bring these issues out in the open.
I have been working on a Beta site recently, that had a very strict time frame that would have totally been blown out of the water if we had worried about IE6 whilst designing and developing the site. Due to this I convinced the bosses to send all IE6 traffic to the old site (bear in mind we still have over a 30% user base in IE6), should this be an issue? No, the users can still access exactly the same content but just not with the funky AJAX content and advanced layouts. Once we go out of Beta we will push users to upgrade their browser to view the new site or be stuck with a downgraded version. The choice is up to them.
Ollie Kavanagh
I think another part to this that has not been mentioned is educating clients and bosses, as well as the general user, that ‘Progressive Enhancement’ so to speak is the way forward. In large corporations and across the clients I have worked with there is still the mentality that all sites have to look perfectly the same across all browsers.
We as Web Designers have a responsibility to push this education out to people otherwise we are just making our job harder. As Malarkey said above even adding this into the contract can help to bring these issues out in the open.
I have been working on a Beta site recently, that had a very strict time frame that would have totally been blown out of the water if we had worried about IE6 whilst designing and developing the site. Due to this I convinced the bosses to send all IE6 traffic to the old site (bear in mind we still have over a 30% user base in IE6), should this be an issue? No, the users can still access exactly the same content but just not with the funky AJAX content and advanced layouts. Once we go out of Beta we will push users to upgrade their browser to view the new site or be stuck with a downgraded version. The choice is up to them.