Welcome!

[Tarvalon]

Why wouldn't you?

It can be a big time sink and a rather painful process - if your site stats don't dictate you support the browser, I wouldn't. Not many of us can say that though

[Andy]

No it's not css but it's an important part of the layout. Of course png-8 works, but they do not look good if you want some nice transparent stuff.

There's often ways of bypassing the need of alpha transparent image such as the method I mentioned with PNG-8, baking in the background in the image and so forth.

If I understand things correctly, IE6 can handle alpha transparencies on PNG-8's as well, but photoshop just doesn't generate the alpha transparency except on PNG-24's. If you create your transparent image and save it out as a PNG-8 in Fireworks, you're good to go. Or maybe I'm misremembering - let me know.

Yeah, you are. IE6 handles boolean transparency. The alpha transparency becomes available in more capable browsers (IE7+, Firefox, Opera, Safari, ...).

[Tarvalon]

Ahh, thanks Andy - appreciate the explanation.

[wandernauta]

I want my sites to be usable (readable, navigatable) in IE6, just like I want my sites to be usable with eLinks. I don't think they have to look the same as in Firefox or IE7, though. You want transparent PNG effects? Go grab a browser that supports them. They're free, you know.

[Parallax]

*snip* You want transparent PNG effects? Go grab a browser that supports them. They're free, you know.

That's the important thing to keep in mind. We are web enthusiasts. We care about stuff like this. Most people don't care at all, they just want the sites they visit to work and let them do something.

[wandernauta]

I guess you're right.

Luckily, because most people have Automatic Updates enabled, they get IE7 automatically too.

[LennonMcCartney]

i, too, most definitely design with compatibility (for ie6 and others) in mind.

i'm not a fan of ie6 (or ie in general) but am mindful of the fact that many people use it by default.

heck, most people don't know about ctrl++ to increase font size so~~

yah

gotta look out for the common folk, ja gno?


HOWEVER

i must suppose that it all depends on the audience that one is trying to attract. for my own personal sites, i don't give a damn about people who are ie6 and below, but that's just because most of the people i cater to tend to be more web savvy and digitally inclined.

at work, however, its a different story. our sites attract a lot of people who only use computers to browse and shop and so they necessarily won't care about upgrading browsers or keeping up with trends. with our own data, we've shown that a good quarter of our visitors still use ie6. that's a pretty good chunk of people, yes?
yes

so, i keep them in mind and try to make my work sites compatible with ie6+, firefox2+, safari and SOMETIMESSSSSSS chrome (just for my own amusement)

[crinkle]

Definitely. My full-time job is front-end development in local government, where every single person uses IE6, and will do so until Firefox or IE7 is rolled out (if you've ever worked in government, you know how long this could take). So I spend a great deal of time and effort ensuring that things work in IE6, often at the expense of my sanity.

IE6 has a market share of somewhere around 16%, and that's large enough to want to cater to. The customers of my clients are more likely than some to fall into that 16%, so it is obviously very important that I make sure I'm doing the right thing by my clients.

I only "hack" when it comes to alpha transparencies (which I love, and can't help but use) and occsaionally margins, if there is absolutely no other way. I have independent css files for IE6 and IE7 and that is perfectly fine for now.

[Kaypearl]

I try to avoid them.

[Andy]

Please, stop referring to the statistics at W3 Schools.
Net Applications is the most vast one and tracks over 160 million users.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser ... px?qprid=2

[CrossMotion]

I try to avoid hacks, but I still optimize for IE6 yeah. My customers use it so I don't really have a chose huh

[Madambond]

yes

[Horttcore|DE]

never ever use hacks imo...
the better way is to use conditional comments and include a special stylesheet to overwrite the global stuff!

[Andy]

never ever use hacks imo...
the better way is to use conditional comments and include a special stylesheet to overwrite the global stuff!

You do know Conditional Comments qualifies as a hack, right?

[vuurvos]

Normally I test my sites for IE6,7,8 and firefox/safari.

However a client of mine wanted a design for which I needed PNG24 (png24 = transparant, supports shadows and gradients), so I could not support this site for IE6, a pity!

In effect there are IE6 upgrade scripts, like here: http://code.google.com/p/ie6-upgrade-warning/
or here http://ie6update.com/