Today is a good day for the web. Internet Explorer 8, which actually has reasonably good standards support, is now more widely-used than Internet Explorer 6, which is horrific to code for (Internet Explorer 7 isn’t much better).
It’s always been hard to write good quality web sites that work in Internet Explorer 7 and below: generally, I’ve always taken the approach of writing sites to comply with the standards and then to put in hacks specifically to address the problems introduced by IE6 and IE7. The sooner that we can disregard these browsers, the better.
Despite the stupid marketing campaigns Microsoft’s been pursuing to try to increase adoption of IE8, I’m at least a little thankful that they’re apparently working. I’ll be so glad the next time I can launch a site and not even have to think about using <!–[if IE 6]> conditional comments.
I charge clients 20% extra per job to support IE6, no negotiation. I’ve not checked any of my sites in IE6 for nearly two years now, and no-one has complained, nor have any clients baulked and taken their work elsewhere.