We launched our new web site earlier this month. Amber and JR worked like animals to do it, setting an impossibly tight deadline. In the end, they pretty much hit their target, but some things had to be dropped. The most notable amongst the casualties? Support for Internet Explorer 6.

How could a company that touts its support for any web browser in its software drop support for a web browser that accounts for about 20 percent of its traffic on its corporate web site? The answer lies in a book that JR, Amber and I have read called Transcending CSS, by Andy Clarke.

For those who don’t know, CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. In a nut shell, CSS is the technology behind the look of a web page. In good looking and readable HTML code, there is nothing but the content of the message, readable on any HTML viewer, such as a web browser. Good HTML code not only clearly conveys only the message (usually text), but it also gives context to the meaning of each element of the message. Titles are identifiable as titles and anything in a list is shown as a list. Never is a graphic used in place of text or a table used as a way to make the page appear a certain way.

CSS code goes along side of HTML code and applies style to the message. For a clear example of this, load trms.com in FireFox and click the “View > Page Style > No Style” menu option. Or just load our page with Internet Explorer 6. With CSS, plain text can be formatted in any way imaginable, conveying just the right look for the device that is displaying the page.

In Andy Carke’s book, he talks about writing your web site for current browsers only. Today, that list includes FireFox 2, Internet Explorer 7, Opera 8 or above and Safari 2 or above. Writing a web site for these browsers is pure joy, as most everything in most CSS and HTML documents renders and acts the same on each browser. After the site is complete, only then does the book suggest going back and fixing it for whatever older browsers you care to accommodate.

In part, we ran out of time to make a style sheet for IE 6. But another part of us was so frustrated with our attempts to make IE 6 work that we decided to make a small statement: update your web browser to something that is newer than 6 years old.

There are many sites devoted to this debate, and they’re written by people more informed  than I. I’ll just say here that many of the decisions that Microsoft made in designing IE 6 have been a terrible plague on web designers all over the world. My best example is that it takes me about 2 to 3 hours to make a really good looking web site for modern web browsers. Then it takes me another 5 to 6 to make it look passable in IE 6. If I want it to be a pixel perfect replica of the original site, that’ll be another day or so, if it is possible at all (thanks to no support for PNG transparency in backgrounds no matter how you try to hack it…).

We will make an IE 6 version of our layout shortly. Thanks to the good design that Amber and JR employed, today’s version functions perfectly well in IE 6 today, but it lacks beauty… unless you think semantic HTML is beautiful, which we do. We realize that it could send the wrong message, however. A message that we’re draconian, inflexible nerds that make demands instead of accepting reality. We are nerds, but we’re none of that other stuff, so we’ll fix our site.

In the mean time, if you’re using Internet Explorer 6, you could do other web designers a favor and follow this link…