Browser Thoughts

[DemonOuterverse]

I'm a middle aged hand on as far as internet time goes, I say middle aged because my first browser was AOL and MSIE4 and not Netscape 1 like some. But, I've been around long enough to see a lot of browsers come and go. One thing I keep seeing brought up recently is the refusal to urge abandon old and broken browers for better ones.

Why should we keep developing for (MS)IE6 when (W)IE7 and others are far better to work with. We as web developers and standards orgnizations (like W3C) are responsible to bring higher quality content as new things become available, so why should we be the ones to choke down our vision and goals for the sake of someone still using something like (MS)IE6? Should we not take responsibility to encourage users to update to better alternatives?

I just see the push to continue to support bad apps like (MS)IE6 as one that is detremental not just to the internet as a whole, but to the user of said app. It seems like this mentality has only been established in the days since the fall of Netscape. If that mentality were in place we would still be under the absolute barebones of HTML with statements of "Don't use IMG tags or develop for Netscape 3 because you'll drive all of your NCSA Mosaic and Lynx users away." This resisitance to utilizing the innovations over the past few years is, in my opinion, harming the web. Frankly, I don't give a damn that (MS)IE6 has a larger market share, that doesn't mean we should willingly support it knwing that it is bad. If web deveopers stop dumbing down to meet (MS)IE6, people will stop using it and so far very few are willing to give users a reason to STOP using it. Quite bluntly, we need to start dragging people kicking and screaming into the 21st century's Web2.0 and beyond.