Broken pages & CSS layouts part 2
It looks quite like a designer’s hybris to assume that non-support of a major browser would change anything on market share. Web design is about serving customers, not about changing markets.
If your site, or the one of your employer/customer breaks, it’s you who’s getting blamed and asked to fix it. If you blame it on IE, then this doesn’t change a thing. Just fix it or get lost. Contrary to your belief web designers are not the center of the universe.
IE7 already works very well with most sites *because* it is more standard compliant, and due to security reasons and MS marketing it’s share will be relevant pretty soon after release.
Aside from the fact that it’s very funny to see MS people ask the community to please remove all the hacks they had to put in to get their pages to render on previous IE versions (really, I laughed out loud) I would like to point out that THE REASON we have all these hacks is the giant marketshare of IE 5 and 6.
Given Joe Public’s upgrade path (many are STILL using 5.5, or even 5.0 by the looks of my logs) I don’t expect IE7 to become mainstream for a long long time to come, and with Firefox reaching maturity and Opera becoming free as in beer it might never happen.
To expect people to fix their pages because you’re creating what is destined to become another niche browser (yes, I’m talking ’bout IE7)…well, you don’t get out much, do you?
If I were you I’d go the MS way and code in CSS-hack-hacks, because hell will freeze over before the community will work with you on this one.
As others have pointed out, it’s a little odd to make this request now when most web developers don’t even have the ability to test their code on IE7. Release the IE7 public beta and I’m sure many of us will jump on this request.
