Those of us who design and develop on the web typically have a deep hatred for browsers that don’t follow or respect web standards. For many of us today, the most common culprit is Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6 and even version 7. Many discussions have been had over this very topic, and how we as web professionals work with or against such issues that plague our work.

Dennis Sheridan did the initial build of the Refresh Louisville website. It is a masterpiece of XHTML, CSS and DOM Scripting, as all of his work is. Dennis applied the proper CSS techniques and tricks to tackle non-standards compliant browsers to ensure that the design I created was intact on those browsers that were inferior as well, as is common practice. Thanks for all the hard work Dennis.

Now comes the exciting but painful low blow where I say that I have ignored all the work that Dennis put into these tasks and completely removed styling for Internet Explorer, versions 6 & 7 on refreshlouisville.org. At this point, I’m giving IE8 the benefit of the doubt, but ultimately, I just haven’t done enough research on the state of IE8 and compliance to make a call. Although, development efforts like this don’t leave me hopeful.

It is likely hard if not impossible for most of us in our work lives, personal sites or anywhere else to make such a shift, however Refresh aims to educate and deliver on our promises and goals, so I’ve made this small step in an effort to back that up. For those of you not in the previous discussion, it’s worth mentioning the idea came from a blog post from Dan Cederholm a few months ago.

For those interested, here is the code used to achieve the stylesheet switch:

<!--[if gte IE 8]><!-->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<!--<![endif]-->


For those folks visiting the site with one of the offending browsers, they get a polite but direct message about our position:

<?php
if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE 6.0') || strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE 7.0')!== FALSE) {
echo '<div id="notice"><br />We at Refresh &hearts; Standards-Compliant Web Browsers like <a href="http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/">Firefox</a>, <a href="http://www.apple.com/safari/">Safari</a>, <a href="http://caminobrowser.org/">Camino</a> and <a href="http://www.opera.com/">Opera</a>. To view this site as the designer intended, please upgrade your web browser won't you?</div>';
}
?>


So here’s to small steps and the ability to educate those around us.
*Raises glass*

Update: In response to Andy Clarke’s solution to this “problem”, I’ve implemented the Universal IE6 CSS found at Google Code. I think this is a great enhancement of the previous solution.