No more CSS Hacks!!!

December 3rd. 2007, 12:11pm

OK, so I’m looking at my shelf and I notice that almost 1/5 of the books I have deal in CSS hacks. I’ve spent many a night reading through these books trying to find the right hack to make a 1-pixel difference in a design for a browser that is being used by only 5% of my clients’ visitors. Now, many of you will say that I shouldn’t go through so much trouble to accommodate just a few visitors and I would agree with you. However, if I tell my clients that their site will look great in specific browsers, then I’m going to make sure that it does.

Yet, I’m beginning to feel that bending over backwards for these users is not the correct approach. I’ve come across a few sites that share that same sentiment and definitely make a good argument to stop the nonsense. If you’re a designer or developer, you know that 90% of my frustration is hacking for the IE6 browser. Of course, for professional sites, I still find it necessary to accommodate the IE6 users. Looking at my analytics, I can justify the extra work because I have enough visitors still using the dreaded browser. But, for personal sites or sites that aren’t e-commerce sites (and if the client is on-board), then I agree with the Stop IE6 movement.

Now I understand that many users that still use IE6 do not have control over the browser that is available (whether their IT department doesn’t want to spend the necessary 3 minutes it takes to upgrade, or whatever), but we’re not talking about making a site inaccessible with IE6, just not quite as beautiful as with a more standards based browser.

One of the more intriguing posts I’ve read on the topic is from Web Designer Wall, you can read the post here.

Thank goodness IE7 has a bit better CSS rendering engine than its predecessor. Soon IE6 will be but a past nightmare, and we can start devoting our time and our shelf space to more important topics, like usability and accessibility.

Let me know what you think about this by posting your own comments.

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