There is little point me countering any of your points, since my position on all these issues are covered both in this article, my other IE6 articles and the comments on same. None of your arguments have convinced me that dropping support for IE6 is a good thing, quite the opposite in fact.

So let’s agree to disagree shall we, or do you want to spend more of your youthful energy on trying to again prove your intellectual superiority over an old idealistic fart?

1) I find it very important that I cater for all web browsers that are in common use by my target audience.

2) I am more than happy to accommodate for the bugs evident in older browsers such as IE6, if they are in common use by my target audience.

3) I am not, however, eager to tweak my websites to the extent that they are pixel perfect in every out-dated browser, as otherwise, the shift from old to new browsers in 90%+ of the population will never happen in the foreseeable future.

4) Therefore I think it reasonable to adopt a middle ground as I have previously stated. I dislike IE6, but I am willing to put up with it until its users fall to a significantly small percentage of my target audience.

5) Having said this, unlike you, who although claim to despise IE6, are unwilling to take any definitive action and would prefer pansy around like the Good Samaritan you delude yourself as being. “I am really caring, tender and thoughtful of others and their feelings… and outdated browsers.” Does this remind you of someone? No…hang on…not yourself, surely?

6) I’m not sure if you’re a fan of Jeremy Clarkson and his brilliant Sunday columns, but I suggest you read/reminisce his article on gagging on the fabric of British life, and how we, as Brits, are so incredibly slow and unresponsive to actions that is of high priority, as indeed, you are the perfect example.

I thought I might add a few finishing points to my final comment on this drastically depressing article.

1) “Smug condescension is not an attractive quality.” Contradictory? You’re not my father.

2) Less of the patronisation, perhaps? Coincidently, I too am aware of the bugs evident in IE6 and “how to get around them.”, by your standards making me an “experienced… decent designer”.

3) position:fixed is not nonsense, it is a real flaw and a real annoyance, that costs me real time when designing websites. You clearly don’t understand my point, and the points of many others which you – oddly – have never directly answered. These hacks and fixes are a waste of time! Could we not be charging clients less for better quality websites when granted an extra couple of hours in place of implementing IE6 fixes?

4) There are “users who, for whatever reason, won’t upgrade from IE6. Ludicrous! “For whatever reason?” I have already outlined there is none?!

5) You are reading into my comments too much! Your site is one with “bells and whistles”. It is… Why assume I was implying a contradiction in your sites design and the ideology of this particular article?

5) I am not an elitist. I am a realist, whilst you, unfortunately, are an idealist.

6) Why would I want you to take me seriously? It would seem many people commenting on your uncannily similar IE6 articles don’t take you seriously.

You make some good points about flaws in IE6. As an experienced web designer I’m more than aware of all the problems, and more to the point how to get around them. The position:fixed example you used is nonsense – any decent developer can sort this problem out for IE6 if they choose to, by compromising on the design. It seems you feel that compromise should be unnecessary and are unwilling to cater for users who, for whatever reason, won’t upgrade from IE6. I think that’s a shame and rather elitist.

You state that you consider my site to be one with “bells and whistles”. It’s completely accessible and usable in IE6. I think that proves my point: one can make websites available to older browser if one cares enough to do so.

If you choose not to care for a portion of your audience, that’s up to you, but it’s not a view I share.

Since this article was about “a web for all” and wasn’t about IE6 specifically, I’d be happy to hear your comments on the original subject. Otherwise, if you want to talk about IE6 further, please do so on my other “Why I support IE6″ blog post.

Secondly, my argument has much more merit than the pathetically flawed old and new car analogy you cited. Ha, make sure of it, this analogy wouldn’t last a minute under the scrutiny of the the ‘expressed class’ I am in, made up of around twenty sixteen year-olds!

Nevertheless, IE6 does in fact fail to render some websites properly. Take position:fixed for example. Many websites use this basic feature of CSS2 which IE6 fails to cater for. Moreover, it’s not always about the rendering of these page elements, but the degrading of them: some websites viewed in IE6 will have dozens of DIVs carelessly strewn across the bottom of the page… What good is this when trying to sell products or advertise a charity event? Having said this, I understand your point to a small extent, IE6 doesn’t completely fail” to render websites, but surely, neither does Lynx? (The text web browser.) It’s like saying an old shoe has no value. It does have a value, 0 value.

And finally, please don’t jump to conclusions about me spoofing your “credentials”. My name, as it happens, is Matthew Hill and I found your site (which by the way I would describe as one with “bells and whistles”) when checking my search engine ranking on my newly built website, http://www.matthewhill.name. Why so ignorant to the fact that not everyone on the WWW is a childish, or perhaps fraudulent imbecile?

“thank you.”

Your argument might have some merit if IE6 was a wholly incapable browser and by that I mean that it completely fails to render websites. That’s not the case: IE6 is more than capable of rendering correctly built websites, even if it doesn’t support some of the fancier bells and whistles.

If you’d like to make further comments, please do so with a real email address that doesn’t spoof my credentials, thank you.

This is an excruciatingly ridiculous statement.

Internet Explorer 6 has an immense “bearing” on surfing the internet. The box model bug, no hover states, no alpha transparent PNG support – to name a few – are flaws in the browser that may hinder a surfer’s “stops along the way” to an often surprising amount.

I would suggest that the old car is not unable to stop at the cinema, but is unable to watch the film in its entirety and complete beauty.

Furthermore, what good is a website “built for people”, when the “people” are unable to interact with and utilise it to its maximum potential because their browser is behind the times. (In fact, IE6 wasn’t even in the times, so to speak, when it was released.)

Granted, designers merely blocking IE6 users from their sites is petty and preposterous, but re-iterating my previous point, it really doesn’t take much effort to update to a more standards-compliant browser.

My intent was to show that the browser you use to navigate the web should have no bearing on what you can do at the stops along the way. The important issue in my story is the cinema, not the car. It’s wrong for the cinema owner to disallow a customer from entering purely because their car is outdated. Sure, it’s a bit of a mixed metaphor, but do you see what I was getting at?

Web sites should be built for people, not browsers.

The driver of the old car is reluctant to get a new car, thus unable to watch a film at the first cinema.

Is this reluctancy because of a) the old cars sentimental value, or b) the new car’s potential cost, or c) laziness?

Either way, both a), b) and c) are absurd reasons for not updating to IE7.

This is because a) the old car (IE6) holds no sentimental value – it’s a piece of software! – b) a new car (IE7) is free and c) it takes mere minutes to download and install IE7.

Anticipating a criticism that would probably be posed before being properly thought through, only a very small percentage of the world’s population who use the internet don’t own a computer or don’t have access to a computer with sufficient computer specifications or an operating system capable of running IE7. In such a case, they simply download and install a Gecko based browser their computer is capable of running.

Simple, no?

No-one WANTS to support IE6 any longer than necessary, but right now it’s still necessary.

Maybe when IE6 is < 2% we can consider dropping support, but certainly not yet. And even then, I’d still be hesitant; I don’t want to lock anyone out of using what I build.

Sure, I’m an idealist about “A web for all”, but what would this world be without ideals?

You have to look at the ROI factor at all times, and at the current moment ignoring IE6 does not give you a better ROI. So we still have to build sites that IE6 users can use.

But if everybody using IE6 would upgrade we could spend those extra resources on other projects or on building better web sites. At the moment we can not do that.

There probably are still users using Netscape Navigator 4.0, but the group is so marginal that one can not defend the cost of supporting them.

The number of IE6 users can not drop soon enough to the level of NN4.