To Hell With Bad Browsers — the sequel

Almost exactly eight years ago, Jeffrey Zeldman wrote To Hell With Bad Browsers, in which he implored web developers to start ignoring Netscape 4 because its standard support sucked majorly. Yesterday several large Norwegian sites placed a warning against IE6 on their pages.

Web developers from all over the world are following this initiative with interest. To Hell With Bad Browsers is obviously in for a remake.

Just now I added an IE6 warning to QuirksMode.org (not that my visitors need any; this site probably has the most browser-savvy audience in the world). I also wrote an upgrade page that attempts to explain the problem and its solution to end users.

I’ll probably work on this page some more; I wrote the text quickly and it can probably use some light editing, or maybe the insertion of an extra paragraph about security.

I’d like to call upon all my readers to think about following the example set by the Norwegians. True, we web developers are mainly preaching to the choir, but somebody has to start.

So add that conditional comment to your site and outline the possibilities. If you wish you can use my upgrade page to gently explain what’s going on, but you can also write one yourself, of course.

Conditional comments and Ajax

Incidentally, I discovered that you can also add conditional comments to your pages later on; they don’t have to be available when the page is being rendered. That doesn’t hugely surprise me, but it’s always good to know that what should work in theory actually does work in practice.

I added this to my header.txt file, which is included by Ajax on every page:

<!--[if lte IE 6]> <p class="ie6"><strong>IE6?</strong> Really? Isn’t it time to <a href="/upgrade.html">upgrade to a better browser</a>? (Unless you’re here for testing purposes, of course.)</p> <![endif]-->

The conditional comment is parsed and obeyed when I set my header’s innerHTML to the HTML contained in header.txt

Good to know.

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