On Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:50:41 +0100, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/2/20 Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com:
On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 5:19 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
There are different levels of support. We should certainly make sure things fail gracefully for IE6, but a new feature not working on IE6 shouldn't be a reason not to implement it for everyone else. (I believe that is pretty much the current policy already.)
It depends on the type of feature. For instance, when implementing different icons for certain filetypes on external links in Monobook, I used the [$=foo] CSS selector, knowing it would fail in IE6, because it's not going to hurt anyone if it does. On the other hand, it would still be unacceptable at this point for a significant new feature not to work in IE6. It still has 20% of the market, by some figures I've seen.
I can't see any significant new features causing a problem that wouldn't be dealt with by the "fail gracefully" condition. As long as adding the feature doesn't make things worse for IE6 users (so they can still read and edit the sites), then there isn't a big problem. Of course, if you can cater to IE6 easily, then there is no reason not to.
Actualy there is one big reason not to: As long as people continue to carter for IE6 then less computer savy users will see no reason to upgrade because "it still works". I believe that's precicely the reason it's market share remains fairly high, and why web developers still feel they must continue cartering to it, and as long as they still carter to it... Well let's just say that unless a initiative like this gain some traction everyone will be stuck "having" to support IE6 untill all the old computers out there break down and die and are replaced by new ones that doesn't have IE6 pre-installed.