Rage against the IE 6

I recently started on this project to develop a site for the Electrical Engineering Society of the university. And all was going well, I tested the site out on Firefox, and it looked cool. But when I tried it out on Internet Explorer, it looked pretty half baked. The reason? I used purely standards compliant design with no tables and only the box model of CSS. It seems that IE has a lot of issues with the box model and many other standards compliant techniques. Now this was driving me up the wall because many users at the campus use IE because it is the default browser on Windows operating system. So I had to rethink the design to suit IE. This is not the only bug that IE6 has. Here is a list of them,

The Box Model bug
The Double Margin Bug
No Min Widths / Min Height
Stepdown bug (Normally when floating objects you can count on them lining up vertically until they break. That is, you could if you weren’t using IE 6. IE 6 appends a line break effect after each floated block element which will cause “stepdown”.)
No Hover States (Most modern browsers support hover states on just about any element, but not IE 6. IE 6 only support the hover pseudo-class on anchor elements,)
No Alpha Transparent PNG Support
And the list goes on and on and on…
This takes me to the point I am trying to make. We as web designers spend loads of time thinking and rethinking the look of a site, only to find that the site looks like crap on this horrible excuse for a browser known as IE 6 (Sorry about the language, it is just my anger talking!). I know all the web designers agree with me on this one.The time spent on hacks and workarounds for IE6 is time that should be spent on more useful things like improving the design and functionality of the site.

So if you are with me on this, All I am asking is to protest this monopoly of the IE 6 by switching over to a better browser such as Firefox, Opera or even IE7.

And for you webmasters out there who just want to voice your protest, just add the following code to your site with jquery to make your site look washed out on IE6. A neat little kick in the face of IE6

/*
*
* Black'n'White plugin 1.0
* $Date: 2008-06-17 15:38:15 +0200 (mar, 17 giu 2008) $
* $Rev: 177 $
* @requires jQuery v1.2.6
*
* Copyright (c) 2008 Massimiliano Balestrieri
* Examples and docs at: http://maxb.net/blog/
* Licensed GPL licenses:
* http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
*
*/

if(!window.BlacknWhite)
var BlacknWhite = {};

BlacknWhite = {
init : function(options)
{
options = jQuery.extend({minor : 7}, options);

if(jQuery.browser.msie && jQuery.browser.version < options.minor)
jQuery("html").css("filter","gray");
}
};

jQuery(document).ready(function(){
BlacknWhite.init();
//BlacknWhite.init({minor : 8});
});