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The majority of our time as web developers is spent writing markup (xhtml and css). Because we are committed to building the most functional, usable, and accessible sites, we do our best to adhere to web standards. So, we often refer to the CSS 2.1 Specification, a 384-page document fully defining and explaining the many properties of standards-compliant CSS programming.

Now, this document is great, but it is still up to the browser and device creators to support all of the properties set forth in the specification. And, we know that certain properties just aren’t going work in certain browsers.

With great care, we learn the ins and outs of the specification and the idiosyncrasies of all popular web browsers, then write code accordingly. Of course, we still must diligently test and tweak our code and make sure that it does in fact look just as intended.

Then comes IE6 to ruin the day. IE6 is an out-dated piece of technology that just won’t die even though Microsoft released the next generation of Internet Explorer long ago. IE6 is the bouncer that throws you out of the club for no reason at all. You are being a respectful gentlemen, following all the rules then suddenly IE6 comes up behind you, grabs you by the collar, and tosses you out onto the street.

And we deal with this, we have a laundry list of IE6 workarounds that force it to act right. Throw in a little more tweaking and cleaning up of code and before long we have IE6 displaying our work as it should be displayed.

So, last night I was a bit distraught when we received an e-mail from a client with the following IE6 problem.

The list of videos on their site was displaying a bullet next to each video when it should not have been. The client sent a screenshot of the problem and luckily she was savvy enough to have the “About Internet Explorer” dialog open displaying the browser version detail. It was version 6.0.2900.5512.xpsp_sp3_gdr.080814-1236 to be exact.

Next, I opened up IE6 on our computer and I saw no bullet. So, I opened up the “About Internet Explorer” and found that we too were running version 6.0.2900.5512.xpsp_sp3_gdr.080814-1236.

Client IE6 View	dynamIt IE6 View

That’s not fair.

We work too hard to have IE6 render pages on a whim. How am I supposed to solve this when IE6 refuses to play nice?

Do all of us web developers a favor by finding one non-tech-savvy friend and assisting them in downloading Firefox or Opera.