web non-sense : blog on web design, photography, music and jeeps

From M. Dave Auayan at IE Death March:

Internet Explorer 6 will be SEVEN years old on August 27th. It came out a few weeks before the Twin Towers fell. It came out before the Nintendo GameCube. It came out before the first iPod.

It’s time to put a deadline on dropping IE6, and I say that time is now, and the deadline should be soon… say like, March 2009. That’s roughly a little more than 6 months. Feel free to join me.

And don’t think for a second that this is the only “Give IE the axe” campaign … Oh no! There are quite a few out there already.  Elliot Jay Stocks says Death to IE as well.

As of now, I’m no longer including it in the standard project scope. If a client wants IE6 support, it’ll be an optional, charged-for extra.

While I agree that “fixing” (being nice here) a site to work in IE6 is a total pain the rear end (again… being nice here), according to TheCounter, IE6 is still used by 37% of internet users (for July). That’s still quite alot. So what do you do?

I think Elliots’ way of charging for IE6 support is the best way to handle this mess.

One comment that struck me on Elliot’s site is a great eye opener:

I bet you still put accessibility features into a site and I think the numbers of people who use those features are very much less than a third of the internet population.

How true it is. We slave away making sure out site is accessible to all but the number of users using Lynx or some other test browser is MUCH less than IE6 users. So why do we support them? Because they have NO CHOICE in the matter. And IE6 user CAN use another, better, browser. Not a person with certain disabilities. THAT is the difference!

I was always of the belief that you should support the latest two versions of IE. So for me, IE6 will be dropped when IE8 comes out.

So… what will you do? Will you totally drop support for IE6? Will you charge extra to support it?

When you’re designing a web site, you want it to be the best right? I mean … not just average looking but something you will be proud to put against those featured on showcased sites right?

You’ll often find me posting and answering questions in forums when my mind needs to be somewhere else for a few minutes. Sometimes I find myself reviewing sites. When reviewing someone’s site, I often point them to CSS Showcase sites (notably CSSMania because of it’s topics) just to give them a view on their competition. I think it’s very important to see what your competition has for a site and making sure you’re up to par with them esthetically. I mean, you’re product might be better than Company B but if your site looks like it was done when Netscape 3 was out … most people won’t look past the first impressions.</p>

Yes … it’s true unfortunately. The classic line of “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover” doesn’t work in the Web Design industry. If your site looks great and it’s trendy, clients will come.

So … when you’re designing a site, don’t settle for less! Go look at what the others are doing and aim higher.

From No CSS Reset by Jonathan Snook:

“The problem I’ve had with these resets is that I then find myself declaring much more than I ever needed to just to get browsers back to rendering things the way I want. As it turns out, I’m perfectly happy with how a number of elements render by default. I like lists to have bullets and strong elements to have bolded text.”

I echo that declaration. I too used to start my stylesheet with the famous

* { margin: 0; padding: 0; }

The I found that I was putting back the same formatting that was already set by default on most of the elements.

As for building a base CSS stylesheet, I do have one but it mostly only contains the main separations for a site like #header, #content, etc…

Going back in the archives of Smashing Magazine, I found an interesting inspiration article on Award Winning Newspaper Designs and all I’ve got to say is that if one of the regional newspaper would look half as interesting as any of those, I would read it!

I know… it’s sad. I’m 30 years old and I don’t rarely read the local (or any) newspaper. Their boring, unattractive design makes for a boring read.

Rarely is any color used … maybe it costs too much?! Don’t they get that color attracts the eye? Or colorful ads, imagery makes it more interesting? Just like website design has evolved, so should newspaper design in my opinion. It’s not surprising why people tend to read smaller newspapers that are available in the free stands (like 24 heures (PDF)). They tend to be more colorful, bigger images and varying layouts.

Fonts, layout, color. 3 simple things that can make a newspaper more interesting to read.