The Good news

The new Internet Explorer 9, which is going beta in the following days, will support if not all, a big part of CSS3 modules. It will also support several HTML5 elements. Even if test results publiced by Microsoft have been criticized as been not exactly “accurate”, they definitely show Microsoft change in policy towards CSS3 and Web Standards in general.

Microsoft was the last company to join a growing list of giants evangelizing Web Standards: Google, Opera and last but not least: Apple.

History lessons

IE became widely popular for it’s subjective interpretations, notably of it’s “special” CSS box model. IE bug solving has cost time and money to developers and IT managers worldwide. Most importantly, it has delayed the use of new CSS3 properties such as border-radius, or selectors like first-child and last-child, which could simplify development, decrease web pages size and help build fancier web pages without worrying about Cross-browser support.

Even if several browsers interpret standards differently, the “cross-browser” science exists principally because of older versions of Internet Explorer.

Not going forward

Despite all the above facts, still managers and IT professionals hesitate to use these new technologies. They (technologies) are considered as “experimental” or sometimes even “academic” things, that cannot apply to problems of today. If Apple’s success is not enough to push these people forward, WHO/WHAT IS? (Mr. i-Jobs himself is going strong for HTML5 and against Adobe Flash).

Reasons

Often, Business people do not want to “sacrifice” a small percentage of their visitors still using old browsers. More visitors equals more publicity equals more money. But the math are not as simple as they seem: Time saved by maintaining broken browsers equals money too, and it could easily match up the loss of a small percentage of users. Moreover, it would push these folks to upgrade.

I do not think that managers or business people are the only ones responsible for that. I am convinced that there are some folks, call them “Web Designers”, that were taking a nap when Jeffrey Zeldman publicized that. I think that there is to some extent a number of developers that would not be happy if hacks and IE conditionals were to die, because that would take away half of their skills. They would have to learn new stuff, they may would be obliged to learn.. (drums) JavaScript!

Conclusion

Microsoft is changing its policy towards Web Standards and we have never been closer to a totally semantic web. People should start investing more time and money to innovation and creativity and less fixing 10 year old browsers.

Youtube announced that it’s dropping support for IE6, and Microsoft replied that they are trying to push IE 8, but there are corporate clients that need more time before deploying new software.

Several web guru’s argue that such a move as denying content to IE6 users is extreme and harms accessibility, and we should rather stick to presenting content using a simple CSS file, or even just with skipping IE6 hacks and giving a broken layout. Although the latter opinion sounds more politically correct, I personally believe we reached a point where we need to take more serious action, if it was for things to move ahead. And of course, I would for sure prefer to inform my visitor he can’t render my website correctly because he is using an old browser, rather than showing a broken webpage and making it seem like “it’s the page’s fault”.

If you’re a designer and you want a smart solution in order to suggest your visitors to upgrade, consider ie6update.com solution.