> You should seriously consider how you are doing your CSS right now and how > you should begin planning for the not so distant future of IE6 being the > minority browser. Microsoft wants to ditch IE6. IE7 will be part of a > service pack upgrade to xp and as part of the fabled vista platform.
Just because Microsoft *wants* to ditch IE6 doesn't mean it happen just like that. Based on that logic: considering how old IE6 is right now, you'd think that would mean nobody would be using IE5. Right? Wrong. I know thecounter isn't scientific, but it's a big sample; and they're still reporting 3% IE5.x. http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm shows up to 8% for some samples, which highlights the slow-moving software of large organisations (including .gov). In any case, that's a lot of people still sitting on *really* old software. Pushing IE7 out as part of a service pack doesn't guarantee anything either; consider all the users out there who don't have broadband yet - many of them don't install service packs. A lot of people just don't update their machines at all, for whatever reason. > I will > put my neck out on a limb right now and say that the majority of your > traffic by the end of October will have the ability to use :hover pseudo > classes, first-child, alpha-transparency png graphics, attribute selectors, > etc. You are far more optimistic than I am. I'd guess a high take-up rate; but after the IE userbase gets to about 50/50 IE6/IE7 I think it will slow down a lot. We certainly won't be able to ignore IE6 in October. ...but, obviously, I really hope I'm wrong and you are right :) > Further, they just announced their xmlhttp requests to match the other > browsers. We will see better pages and markup very soon. If they've really fixed the CSS bugs they claim to have fixed, life will be much better. CSS layouts won't be subject to such a time blowout due to IE bugfixing, which will make it more likely that large firms will switch over from old school table designs. > Consider this an open door. Remember the discussions about what true > professional web developer is? Working towards an IE7 population is a true > professional. Building pages with IE6 hacks is a 2005 professional. Personally I think it's worth showing some caution and waiting for the final release of IE7 before we start trying to design for it. A lot can change between beta and final release. Ben -- --- <http://weblog.200ok.com.au/> --- The future has arrived; it's just not --- evenly distributed. - William Gibson ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
