Realise Digital

It's traditional for web developers to despise Internet Explorer 6 with a burning passion, and to endlessly complain that if only they didn't have to consider it, their lives would be so much simpler.

Many of Realise Digital's clients still use IE6 while at work. And it's for this reason that we've always needed to build sites with it in mind. A recent article on Betanews perfectly sums up this situation.

What is a more difficult sell, is the idea of progressive enhancement. As browsers become more sophisticated, many visual elements - such as rounded corners and drop-shadows - can be achieved without complicated background images, nested mark-up and multiple style rules. If we use these methods, only modern browsers will display these effects.

The bad news is that neither curved corners, nor box shadow are supported by IE6. Or IE7. Or IE8. Only IE9 supports CSS rounded corners, and box-shadows.

So why am I trying to sell this idea, when I've been banging on in favour of building sites to appeal to rich old men and young, sexy couples? (you know - minorities) Well, I'm not suggesting for a moment that we stop supporting IE6. I'm suggesting that IE users see a very slightly simplified version of the site. One which might not match the design, pixel for pixel, but one where everything is in the right place, and all the same content is visible. This approach has recently been taken by Standard Life and Tesco Bank.

Accessibility has never been about the same experience for everyone. Just because the colour blind miss some of the colours, that doesn't mean they should miss out on any of the text. Accessibility is about removing the barriers to access. It wouldn't promise the experience is the same for all.

But why should you make the experience worse, for some users, just so my job's easier? Using progressive enhancement can reduce development time and make individual pages load faster. Making small changes to a site can be done by developers, without reading lengthy documentation. It also makes it easier to make web layouts which can scale elegantly from smart phone, to hi-def.