I Give Up!

I really wanted this website to work under Internet Explorer 6, but I’m afraid I have to admit defeat. I’ve done too many little things, like fixed positioning and transparent images (PNGs with alpha channels) that IE 6 can’t handle. The drop-down menu uses a lot of those transparent PNGs as background images.

I tried to get the website to work by using Dean Edwards IE7.js, an amazing JavaScript file that tries to make IE 6 work like IE 7 (for instance, transparent PNGs and fixed positioning work), but I just couldn’t get it to work reliably. Also, my goofy method of using iframes on the index page just makes loading the page too slow.

For those of you who are wondering what I’m talking about, let me explain. On the home or index.html page of this website, I have two iframes (inline frames) that load two of the best stories, in their entirety. On other websites I’ve designed, I’d go ahead and open the stories I want to feature, copy the headline, first paragraph of the text, maybe the artwork, and paste that into the index page. But this was a pain, especially if I caught a typo in the first paragraph, because I’d have to fix it in two places.

So instead, all I do is plug the iframes with the actual stories. They’re loading in their entirety, although a JavaScript formats the stories differently when they’re in an iframe. It does mean the index page is opening two additional pages, but because the content is then cached (unless the user has disabled the cache), it’s then quicker when the user clicks on a story.

But because the stories also have transparent PNGs and require fixed positioning, they also include the IE7.js file. In other words, viewing the home page requires loading IE7.js three times, once for the index.html page itself and twice for the two stories.

So, I’ve decided to drop support for reading this website using IE 6 and I’d like to apologize to those readers, except, of course, they can’t actually read this because I’ve redirected them away.

I really would like to get the site to work in IE 6, but it would require linking to separate css stylesheet files. If I could find a reasonable way to make conditional statements deliver an IE 6 version, I would jump at it, but I’m afraid I’m flummoxed for now.