PNG Images in IE6

PNG is obviously the best choice for images when designing websites. This can be argued of course, but the file size is small, and most importantly, there is true transparency available. If you ever see a cool little badge floating around on a website, chances are that it’s PNG. That said, I don’t use them.

Why? Because IE 6 does not support them. And IE 6 is still on my list of browsers I make a site look good for. I’ll probably have to debug in IE 6 for atleast another year while people migrate over to IE 7, then IE 8. So, I guess I can’t use PNG’s – unless I found a super smart work around – which I did! Check out this guys PNG fix for IE 5.5 (which is dead to me) and IE 6:

IE PNG Fix

I haven’t implemented it yet, but will in the very next site that I build. The solution is clean and non intrusive – please let me know if you have used this and what you think in the comments below.

There is good reason to discontinue support of older browsers, and Microsoft even now recommends to quit building sites for Internet Explorer 5.

Here is what they say

Basically, they can’t build there own websites to work with such an old browser. While there is benefit in making sure your website looks good across all browsers, there is always a line you must stop at, for fear of not being able to implement cutting edge technologies that otherwise could not be utilized.

The Site Smiths, for the record, builds sites that degrade nicely down to Internet Explorer version 5. We follow a philosophy of offering the nifty bells, whistles and interactive components to users with modern browsers, but not leaving those using outdated software in the dark.

The best of both worlds. I learned about this general theory from…Jeffery Zeldman maybe? I’ll have to research and post an amazon link here. When you start dealing in the world of CSS design the same names keep coming up, and Zeldman is definitely one of them.

Getting a website to look right across multiple browsers seems to often be a pain. If the site design will allow for it, I suggest beginning with a template you know will work well across multiple browsers, thus alleviating the need to trouble shoot once you have already built the site.
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