I am already blocking IE6 access to my website so I am wondering if it’s a good idea to block IE7 access as well and just allow IE8?
It would make my life alot much easier as a website designer - and possibly give users the education on why updating their browser is a good idea.
It would not block them entirely, but it would show them a page like this (must view in IE6 to see it):
What do you think?
Thanks!
BLOCKING any browser from even ACCESSING the site is one of the WORST practices to ever come along. You have ZERO business even doing that. It’s called browser sniffing; browser sniffing BAD! (grabs the rolled up piece of newsprint) Bad browser sniffing. Bad… Borked de bork de bork bork bork
Especially with IE6 still being the latest version for mobile. What, did you miss the 6 on 6 party two years ago? That’s ok, so did everyone else 
[i](literally, IE6 just arrived on win mobile two years ago, prior to that it was still running 5.5)
I’d double that on such a piss simple layout; What exactly are you doing that you would even be having trouble with?!? Lemme guess, the lightbox nonsense… GAH I hate lightbox effects - it’s like for pete’s sake just let me open the malfing image. (Not a fan)
Though I’m seeing a good deal of what might be the heart of your issues. Word of warning, I don’t sugar coat this stuff, I’m going to give you this straight up matter of fact, rather than the soft spoken mealy mouthed “everythings ok” garbage. What I’m about to say may not be suitable for the knitting circle at grandma’s tea party, but we’re talking about making things better, not applying balm and pretending nothing is wrong.
MAYBE if you had valid markup, weren’t still making pages in transitional using outdated tags and attributes, weren’t using javascript to do CSS’ job, learned enough about semantics to have proper heading orders, learned about class inheritance so you could pitch a third of your markup in the trash as redundant/unnecessary (see the portfolio-left class for example), didn’t place your comments in a manner known to trip IE layout bugs, got rid of outdated malarkey like clearing DIV, pitched that fat bloated pile of crap known as jquery in the garbage and bothered making pages that actually followed the WCAG you might have less headaches making pages work cross-browser.
That last one is particularly surprising for “Front-End Website Design / Development” given the colors that don’t meet accessibility minimums, fixed metric fonts on the content (what is that, 9px? 10px? Way to make users dive for the zoom), lack of images off graceful degradation, lack of CSS off graceful degradation, lack of scripting off graceful degradation, and other things that make the page a failure at front end design.
Recommended reading:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/
NOT trying to pick on you - NOT trying to start a fight or be mean. I’m trying to tell you how it is, and if you want, we can go through and discuss all those points so you can learn to do things better.
no, it will merely piss them off
it’s like standing at the door to the supermarket and turning away perfectly good shoppers with perfectly good money just because they happen to be wearing brown pants
I don’t see any legitimate reason for dropping support for IE7 just yet.
Here are a few of the things that it supports that IE6 doesn’t, which makes IE6 troublesome besides it’s bugs.
Granted IE7 still has haslayout issues and the broken float model to deal with but they are overcome easily.
Thanks everyone, that’s a good way of putting it with the pants analogy.
OK I won’t block access entirely, but I think I will still at least make it known that IE6 is a terrible browser and give them insight into why a newer browser would be a better choice. In my opinion, I look at IE6 as IE5… old and ancient and just not with the times. Eventually IE7 will be like this too… I just can’t wait for it to happen sooner rather than later.
deathshadow60, thank you very much for the critique. I really appreciate the time you put into taking a look at the site and responding to it! 
Would you suggest dropping lightbox entirely? I can’t seem to find an in page pop-up solution that complies to the web standards. But maybe that’s my problem in the first place: using in page pop-ups. I like them because they are fast and do not require a page reload, and they also give a bit more depth to the website. What would you suggest as an alternative?
I’m not sure what you mean about jQuery being a “fat” bloated pile of crap"? Looking at the alternatives out there it sure seems to make my life easier (without extensive JavaScript knowledge) and it fixes the issue with cross-browser compatibility in the DOM <– which I happen to think is the root cause of alot of the issues, not jQuery. It also means I can use some pretty nifty jQuery plugins which save time. But maybe they aren’t worth it? If they are making the site worse as far as compliance goes?
That’s a lot of recommended reading but I will do my best to get through it all. I am more than happy to discuss the issues with my website in further detail with you! After I get through these W3C documents, what would you recommend as further reading?
Thanks!
Just to clarify what I said. I wouldn’t “block” IE6, I’d pop up a DIV urging people to upgrade and if the site used functions that specifically didn’t work on IE 6 I’d let them know.
Of course they’d still be welcome to continue and use the site, but I wouldn’t be expecting them to come crying to me when the particular function they were told wouldn’t work, didn’t work.
Would you suggest dropping lightbox entirely? I can’t seem to find an in page pop-up solution that complies to the web standards. But maybe that’s my problem in the first place: using in page pop-ups. I like them because they are fast and do not require a page reload, and they also give a bit more depth to the website. What would you suggest as an alternative?
In case he’s out for the weekend, his issue is pretty much the same as mine: we’re used to clicking on an image and then seeing the full-sized image. Waiting extra time so a script can darken the screen, build some element to hold the image, adding a close button… Not all lightboxes are the ones who slowly load the box and do funky fade-ins but when I was searching for a house to buy, this was annoyance number one: every real estate company in the area did these slow bloated lightbox effects that made stuff look pretty but made it harder for me to just check out a house.
I dunno that you’ll find some “more standards-compliant” version of a lightbox, they’re all mostly the same and the issue isn’t the standards anyway.
(I don’t mind a lightbox-like effect if there’s a page full of tiny thumbnails and the lightbox script has next and prev buttons/arrows/links/whatever, because I’m willing to take the time to get the script going if I can just be one click away from the next full-sized image.)
I’m not sure what you mean about jQuery being a “fat” bloated pile of crap"?
jQuery, and all other Javascript libraries, exist to make the web site developer need less code to write. It’s slower on the browser. Watch:
When you do
$(“#container”).doSomething
that’s not much code. But your browser is still doing
$(“#container”).doSomething… oh that means var $ = document.getElementById(“container”); then $.doSomething…
You skip writing the long version of Javascript, but the browser is now not only going through the jQuery version, it’s still then going through the regular real Javascript version. There’s better explanation in the comments of Dustin Diaz’ site, where he suggest newbs make a function for their getElementByIds and many point out that it’s making the browser do more work.
On top of that, when using a library, the users are downloading even more (unless they have it cached). A simple lightbox can be a single script, but when part of jQuery it’s, load the library, load the plugin, load the lightbox, load the separate lightbox CSS… so it becomes more “worth it” if you are using the one library to run many many scripts. But then you start wondering when you have too many and they’re bogging the site down. Everyone’s got different internet connection speeds.
The reason to use a Javascript library are
-you’re using a lot of plugins other people wrote and that’s easier for you
-you don’t know Javascript, or don’t know it well enough to make it do what all the pre-written stuff in the library does
-you lost your own library (as yeah many people do end up recycling their own shortcut functions everywhere, and yes this is almost always more load on the browser in exchange for less paid developer hours)
It also means I can use some pretty nifty jQuery plugins which save time. But maybe they aren’t worth it?
That’s pretty much the reason to use them, and whether they are worth it is up to you, the developer. Jason can write his own, and doesn’t care to write scripts that do fancy animation, fades, and other junk, so he’ll never find them worth it. Everyone’s different.
If they are making the site worse as far as compliance goes?
No, your markup is just terrible. Actually, jQuery’s resilience is probably why it works on your site. Whether you use a JS library is not really going to be much of a factor in your site’s compliance: any DOM changes Javascript does are not seen or tested by the validator (though if you’re writing your own Javascript, you can make sure the generated HTML code is also still following the rules… I haven’t seen yet any really terrible HTML mistakes in jQuery but I also haven’t looked more than a bit into it).
As far as general reading, a google for “web standards” would probably bring you to various articles about any single particular situation and how to deal with it while adhering to web standards. They take time to learn. WCAG might also be suggested reading, as accessibility is important to web standards but are not related to things like the w3c validator.
IE6 is a special case due to it’s overall crappyness and security issues and the media hype behind it will validate you blocking the version.
I don’t see any need for such drastic actions to block IE7+
You’d really nark people off.
it’s like standing at the door to the supermarket and turning away perfectly good shoppers with perfectly good money just because they happen to be wearing brown pants
To add to that:
You may think, as a web designer, that people might go home and put on blue pants. Of course, some people would have to first go get some blue pants, which are free but a hassle and maybe they’re not allowed to go get blue pants or they’re too fat and old to fit in any available blue pants or whatever.
But the secret truth of human beings is, they’re just too damn lazy to give a crap. They’re already walking around in brown pants, and they like it that way (that or they can’t do anything about it), and they think your reasons for “upgrading” to blue pants are esoteric, or just too complicated to bother caring about, or are too technophobic to even be able to understand your reasons. Esp those people who aren’t really sure what pants even are. Do you mean jeans? Pantalones? Knickers? For our secretary here at work, it would mean “clothing” because she doesn’t know a browser from anything else on her screen.
If your site doesn’t really need to cater to many people, and it’s yours (not a client’s), I personally don’t see a problem with blocking IE users, but do it at your risk while being very aware of the above.
PS whoa, there’s a Safari 5 out already??? Where the f*** have I been? Arg.
Anyway, points for making it really easy to just go get another pair of pants, if the user has that option and is willing to do it. Maybe the text should be more like
"Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 are buggy and full of security risks. You are using one of these browsers (or an even older version!). I don’t trust you to enter my site with such buggy old things, and if I did, my awesome standards-compliant website would look horribly broken in your browser. Please consider downloading any other browser for the love of GAWD PLEASE JUST GET RID OF THAT STEAMING PILE OF BROWSER PLEASE LORD PLEASE (list of browsers).
Thenkoo, camaagen!"
Me, I show the page, but (for a site with lots of stuff where I needed completely different styles for IE6) I put a big ugly warning box on the main page with links to some browsers. Annoying? Yes (the more the better). However, the site is still built to function in IE6 and lets those with no choice to continue on if they wish.