
The Web Development Discipline - spjwebster
http://isolani.co.uk/blog/standards/TheWebDevelopmentDiscipline
======
pekk
This isn't about "web development discipline," it is a rant about how people
should support IE6 cheerfully, with the idea that it is normatively incorrect
not to support it.

Whether or not to support IE6 is reasonably a business decision based on your
audience and resources for implementing. That balance shifts over time (note
that we are not having this discussion about IE3, 4 or 5 any more).

If you need to support IE6 then yes, support it from the beginning. If you
don't need to, then don't.

There is a valid role for advocacy and social pressure here, it is not writ
from God that "thou shalt support IE6 even if it be costly with little
benefit."

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emehrkay
I think the biggest understanding of what this blog post is saying comes when
the developer finally says "fuck it, IE will just have square corners."

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jamesu
Personally speaking, I don't target IE6 for the same reason i don't target
IE1,2,3,4 or 5: I don't have the capability or resources to do it.

I guess that must make me a bad web developer then!

~~~
nefarioustim
Obviously this doesn't make you a _bad_ web developer, as such, but I'd
question your rationalisation here.

What capability and resources do you need that you haven't already adopted for
cross browser support elsewhere?

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Flam
I think it's less the fact that the development process is undisciplined, and
more the fact that it is just a bore to recode something beautiful for people
who couldn't care less about it.

~~~
spjwebster
The point of the article is that if you're "recoding something" then you're
not approaching cross-browser development in the right way. Dismissing IE
users as "people who couldn't care less" and writing off proper cross-browser
support because "it is just a bore" really doesn't (or shouldn't) have a place
in professional web development.

I have worked as Head of Development at a 3-person agency, as a Senior
Developer and Front-End Architect at Yahoo! and now as Web Architect at a
medium-sized company. On all the sites I've worked on (with their varied
budgets and development team sizes), dropping support for IE6 would have been
putting our desires as developers ahead of those of the users who are still
using that browser. In the end, supporting IE6 actually wasn't that hard; you
just have to control what "support" means.

Yahoo!'s Graded Browser Support gets this right. Though it no longer
explicitly categorises the browsers it lists into A- and C-Grade, those grades
still exist. Rather than Yahoo! prescribing which browsers should get the full
experience and which should get a core experience, they leave it up to you:

> _The GBS focuses on specifying which browsers need a verified usable
> experience based on factors such as market share and influence. Defining
> what is “usable” and specifiying acceptable levels of degradation are left
> for teams to decide._

From <http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2011/07/12/gbs-update/>

That's not to say the GBS is perfect. Using global browser market share may
make sense for an international behemoth like Yahoo!, but you really should
make your own decisions based on the browsers your users are actually using.
Make sure you're looking at unique visitors rather than page hits though,
because if a user comes to your homepage and sees an obviously broken layout
they're not likely to hang around very long.

In short, supporting IE6 is actually easy if you can justify giving those
users just a core experience (minus bells and whistles) and have a development
team that knows what they're doing.

~~~
Flam
I guess I misunderstood the point of your article. Sure, if your IE6 user base
is large enough, you pretty much have no way to get around providing support
for that browser. And I agree it is easier to test IE6 compatibility
procedurally, after each coded page or measurable milestone, rather than at
the very end of the website's development.

~~~
spjwebster
It's not my article, though I did submit it to HN.

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mattmanser
This position is even worse than the junior developer's, I hate developers
with a 'You're doing it wrong because even I know how to do it' attitude. This
guy's an accessibility developer , it's his job to know this shit.

First, he's delusional if you think you can learn Html, Css or Javascript in
an afternoon. HTTP? Good luck reading through and _understanding_
<http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html> in an afternoon.

I'd happily wager money that of a cross section of people who are employed as
'web developers' only a small percentage would know what a http response even
looks like.

But the real killer is that he may work for companies who can increase their
profits sufficiently by supporting IE6 that they can pay for all the extra
mental effort involved in supporting IE6, but I don't.

I'm not doing it wrong by writing sites that aren't IE6 compatible. I'm
deliberately deciding their business isn't worth the extra engineering or
testing cost.

In the end Html5 is coming and people are starting to stop supporting IE6.
We're already beginning to see the trickle of 'we don't support IE6' of major
sites before the flood hits.

It's not poor engineering, it's just the future. I felt sorry for the junior
web dev, he should have checked, but this guy's attitude is worse imo.

~~~
spjwebster
> I'm not doing it wrong by writing sites that aren't IE6 compatible. I'm
> deliberately deciding their business isn't worth the extra engineering or
> testing cost.

That was the whole point of the article. Don't drop IE6 support because all
the cool kids say you should, or because yourfavouritewebsite.com has;
actually look at your browser stats and other metrics and make an informed
decision.

From the second paragraph in the article:

> _The browser support of your website must be directly correlated with your
> target audience._

Browser support should be based on research and business realities, not
developer whim.

