David Emery Online

Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS

21 May 2009

When I asked myself why people visit my sites, and the ones that I make for other people, the answer was always “for the content”. Content that is almost always written words and that means type.

That is why 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.

A great idea, I think – come up with one stylesheet just for IE6 that completely ignores layout, backgrounds etc and focuses on making the page content look nice (albeit simple). We’ve stopped supporting IE6 on the sites we make now as the user % has dropped below 5% (finally!) but it would be nice to easily give those 5% something that works and is easy to read, so this fits the bill quite nicely.