Over the past 15 years the World Wide Web as we know it has come a long way. Websites, designers and developers, and web based technologies have all evolved and aided in making the online experience into what it is today. Websites are no longer just pages of information. They are interactive visual experiences that are as fundamental to our everyday lives as cars or phones.
As new web technologies are created and introduced, old methods for creating things become redundant, and eventually die out. This is evolution, and this is how the web, and the world moves forward.
The problem we face as website designers and developers is that some older technologies tend to stick around long after they’re welcome. Browsers are a perfect example of this. If theres one thing that developers and designers have no control of its which browser the end user will use to display websites.
In general almost every aspect of what the end user will experience can be controlled by the creator down to the finest of points, but it’s still all relative to which browser the user is using. This becomes much more of an issue when users insist on surfing the web using technology that is well past its sell by date.
A prime example of this is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6, released in 2001, that still rears its ugly head today and causes a large number of issues for designers and developers alike. It’s not so much that there isn’t a solution for any issues IE6 may cause for modern web designs, but the time it takes to ensure the user experience is as regimented as possible could be immense. So much so that creating a websites nowadays almost always guarantees that you will be writing IE6 only stylesheets, scripts and markups.
The main issue that older browsers like IE6 cause is the lack of support for modern techniques. CSS3 is my main example here and probably the one that angers me the most. There are many new CSS3 techniques (such as border-radius and box-shadow) that are designed to make developers lives easier and help in creating prettier websites with more efficient code. Where creating a box with rounded corners would once require lines and lines of markup and images, now much less code is needed, hence more efficient sites.
The problem we have is that IE6 doesn’t support any of these new techniques so creating the same user experience for IE6 users means much more effort and less efficient websites.
Theres an ugly loop that designers and developers are now stuck in. Do we continue to write lines and lines of extra code to ensure users with IE6 can almost see how the end result was intended by the creator, or should we club together and refuse to panda to these redundant browsers in the hope that one day everybody will embrace the latest in what the web has to offer.
In my case the latter is definitely the obvious choice. If we continue to hold back our creativity because we’re afraid of how Microsoft’s ugly troll will chew it up and spit it out then the web will never reach its full potential. It’s our job as web geeks to push the web forward and embrace what new technologies have to offer.
YOUR WEBSITE NEEDS YOU!
