John Kavanagh : Indie Web Developer

The double-margin bug in IE6 is one of those inexplicable behaviours of the aged browser that nobody quite understands: the developers claimed to be following the W3C’s CSS standards with IE6’s rendering, but sometimes this can almost be forgiven: the rules and guidelines are written down in such a verbose and brain-shattering verse that it’s very easy to see where people would perceive different outcomes when reading the same thing.

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Eight years ago when IE6 was released, the majority of websites were still single-colour, square-edged and table-based with the occasional hard-edged animated gif. Microsoft could be forgiven for not implementing transparency support for PNGs because at that time there was no need for it, and since the majority of people accessing the internet were sucking it through an asthmatic 56k dial-up modem, web developers couldn’t use the larger-file sizes in their sites anyway.

Times have changed since then but sadly IE6 still takes up enough of a market-share of browsers on-line that this incapability to render the transparent sections of PNGs is almost crippling. Below is a screen shot from a PNG-dependant website I developed last year part-way through it’s development: I’m only pleased it didn’t look worse in IE6 than just a simple transparency problem..!

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Developing for Microsoft Internet Explorer is a chore for every client-side developer: IE6 was released almost eight years ago and although admittedly IE7 was a huge improvement and the release of IE8 promises to reduce the gap yet further between “proper CSS rendering” and the way Microsoft like to do things. However, for the foreseeable future it is still a very definite requirement that website should be cross-browser compatible. That doesn’t mean perfectly identical in every single way, but close enough, and ensuring that users of one browser don’t receive a significantly reduced experience compared to visitors using others.

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