Thanks to an article on Life Hacker I finally got around to uninstalling the crappiest Beta ever: Internet Explorer 7. Now I can see the horrendous manner in which ie6 renders this site. I can’t stand that kind of imperfection; really, I can’t. So I went in and hacked up my stylesheet a little (only 3 hacks) so now it displays virtually the same in ie6 as it does in all the other browsers that know what the heck they’re doing. Once ie7 becomes the standard that ie6 is now I’ll remove the hacks.
The only problem with using ie6 hacks is that now my stylesheet doesn’t validate and yes, I know I could create an [if ie] conditional stylesheet but it’s not worth my time for three hacks. Of course, how many of you actually checked to see if it did validate in the first place? Not many I’ll bet. Most of you are just concerned with whether my blog “looks” right to you. I say that not in a condescending way but in a way that acknowledges the fact that the vast majority of people don’t care one iota about valid code or web standards or anything else on the backend of blogs. What most people care about is 1) content and 2) aesthetics. How that content gets there and what’s behind the aesthetics is inconsequential. For most people, all that matters is it’s there and it works.
Of course, that doesn’t mean we as bloggers shouldn’t care about web standards, I’m just saying that most people don’t care about them. And lets not forget that for whatever reason any part of my blog with comments on it, such as individual posts, doesn’t have valid XHTML either. It’s probably my own fault that each comment vomits non-valid code but hey, whaddaya want? I’m a professional youth minister, not a coding guru. That’s a grim truth I’ve been faced with after being accepted into 9rules. Many of those guys are like demi-gods compared to me. They do things with code that I didn’t even know were possible. At any rate, I hope to pick up a few more readers now that Open Switch displays correctly in ie6.
What are your thoughts on web standards, valid code and ie6 hacks?
