Before I begin let me make a few disclaimers. Firstly I have the utmost respect for Andy Clarke and have had the pleasure of hearing him speak on two occasions. He’s a very articulate, intelligent, funny and lateral thinking kinda guy and a world class speaker. So any opinion I give comes with the addendum, no offence Andy! Secondly I reserve the right to change my mind after this post. I’m not a pig-headed person and if I can be convinced I’m taking nonsense I’ll hold my hands up. Lastly, I don’t pretend to be an authority on any topic but I do have over 8 years experience working in Northern Ireland Government, with a vast range of customers, so I do have many war wounds and t-shirts as evidence.

Ok a healthy discussion has broken out over on Andy’s blog (I prefer to call him Malarkey having known him from accessifyforum.com for some time) with many people supporting the notion of a stylesheet for IE6 users.

If you haven’t read the article I suggest you do so but in a nutshell my taking on it is that Malarkey is encouraging developers to stop supporting IE6, where possible, by spending large amounts of time on bug fixes, css hacks, javascript/jquery patches etc. I think he’s largely getting at sites which are content driven, which lets face it most are. So to clarify I would suggest the notion is sites which aren’t big on design but big on focused content.

I feel this article could prove very damaging and needs to spell out more clearly what needs to be considered before implementing any kinda of ready made css framework for IE6.

I’ve harped on in the comments about browser stats as this is the first thing you need to consider. For example, if you have a personal blog which is mainly read by developers, it’s likely the vast majority of us nerds will be using Firefox 3 or Safari 4 for Windows. We like to show off with our nice new n shiny browser. Therefore if you serve up a dumbed down version of the blog for the odd IE6 user, does it really matter? No.

However, if you are building a site for a national company, have looked at their browser stats which tell you that 6% of their visitors use IE6, then should you continue to treat those users in the same manner? Absolutely not. To do so could prove very damaging for the company. Why? Because in these instances image is everything. Usually these type of sites are content heavy, navigation is important therefore CSS is important in order to style the site, improving usability, readability and comprehension.

There seems to be a real hate campaign at the moment against IE6 which may have some valid points but doesn’t address what is often reality. That is that users either LIKE IE6 or that they are unable to upgrade. So with that in mind go easy on the IE6 user, sure encourage them to upgrade but don’t treat them as second class citizens.

Due consideration needs to be given to your potential audience before considering adoption of universal ie6 css. I recently developed www.nidirect.gov.uk and as a baseline tested it in Firefox 3, IE6 and IE7 before going any further with it. Over the last day browser stats tell me that 80% of visitors to the site have been using IE, 31% of which are using IE6. That’s a sizeable chunk and not one I’m going to ignore. Have a look at NIDirect, just how usable would it be with little styling?

Perhaps I’m slightly blindsided working in Government. We have developed our own set of strict standards and still develop for IE6, working on the premise that the market share is still sufficient, not to mention most civl servants have IE6 on their desktop. Time taken to develop for IE6 is just part of my job and an ethos I carry through to any personal work I do because I believe in working to the highest standards possible. Perhaps if I ran a private business where my developers where developing IE6 was costing me money I might have a different viewpoint.

The point still remains though, this should not be looked upon as a universal solution, its an on-the-odd-occasion solution. Please approach with caution.