I think all of you "IE6 sucks, ignore it" people are missing the point that it does not take a significant amount of time or effort to ensure that people browsing with IE6 can still use your site, or even that your site is displayed reasonably correctly in IE6... if you start with good coding practices. But that's the problem here: the vB/CurseForge/WowAce design starts with the assumption that everyone can (or wants to) use scripted sliding flying popup dropdown menus to access basic site functions. If you start with that, and then try to reduce for IE6 users, it's a losing battle. If you started with the assumption that nobody can use that crap, and then add it for useragents that can, there's not really much extra work to be done.
The same applies for 90% of the things I've complained about in this thread. The initial design assumptions that everyone is running at a minimum of X x Y resolution with normal vision and normal motor skills mean that the site is significantly less usable for people who don't match those assumptions. Using the header graphic as an excuse for fixed width is just silly... there are long-established methods using CSS that could easily handle an elastic layout while preserving the integrity of the header. :(
Do you volunteer on doing that? I bet Kael will take you up on the offer :)
Besides, from what i've learned in my WebDev time, you can do everything perfect, follow all coding practices and whatnot, and still, there will be one Browser (which really usually is IE6) that just fucks you, and forces you to add ugly hacks to fix stuff that should've been trivial in the first place.
Also, the "sliding flying popups" are just divs with a absolute position and a z-index, CSS standard since forever, even before IE6 was even deployed, see my previous comment ;)
I could probably just redo the skin with tables instead of divs and IE6 wouldn't have an issue with it, but didn't we all learn in webdev schools that tables are not for layout? :( But then again vBulletin uses tables too, so huh ..
Oh, and btw, i've already spent a significant amount of time fixing the skin for various glitches in various browsers, and i can asure you, it DOES take alot more to get it working perfectly in IE6. But as i said, you're welcome to help
I could probably just redo the skin with tables instead of divs and IE6 wouldn't have an issue with it, but didn't we all learn in webdev schools that tables are not for layout? :( But then again vBulletin uses tables too, so huh ..
Although the "web standards" guys would say don't use tables, in reality using tables can greatly help more browsers render your layout correctly. There are a large number of CSS "problems" in IE6 and other browsers that are fixed by using tables, thus eliminating any "hacks" and alternate stylesheets.
Oh, and btw, i've already spent a significant amount of time fixing the skin for various glitches in various browsers, and i can asure you, it DOES take alot more to get it working perfectly in IE6. But as i said, you're welcome to help
From what I saw of this site's state in IE6, it would take a great deal of work. Like Phanx said, the site needed to be built from the ground up for IE6 compatibility; most of the assumptions that were made need to be changed in order to work.
I'm sorry guys, but the official stance on IE6 compatibility is a degraded support. We're going to fix some of the issues with IE6 on the forums. But the target list of browsers is Safari3, Opera9, IE7, FF3. We go for degraded support with IE6 and FF2. We end up picking up Chrome by targeting Safari3.
Ive done some fixes to IE6 support, the dropdowns seem to be working fine, and the layout is not totally screwed up anymore, except that userbits bar there .. working on that
Only real issue left, pngs with transparency ... damnit MS :(
Also, the "sliding flying popups" are just divs with a absolute position and a z-index, CSS standard since forever, even before IE6 was even deployed, see my previous comment ;)
Yes, but they're still annoying, and they still don't work correctly or at all when JavaScript is not enabled, and they do have a slide-in animation, putting them squarely in the "sliding scripted popup menu" category. ;)
Yes, but they're still annoying, and they still don't work correctly or at all when JavaScript is not enabled, and they do have a slide-in animation, putting them squarely in the "sliding scripted popup menu" category. ;)
With JavaScript disabled, the whole forum defaults to the non-javascript controls, which is just a "Search" link that opens the advanced search box, and the Quick Links box toggles the 2nd-Level Nav to have some more links. The "Thread Tools" becomes just a link to the bottom of the page which has all the links to subscribe threads etc.
Well the post editor widgets are not working 100%, but thats to be expected. Good enough to read and write posts, fancy formating options without BBCode requires JS again ;)
Maybe we can put in a User selectable option to disable the JS controls, if that would be wanted to have.
I would love an option to disable the scripted controls for everything but the post editor.
Also, with regard to your comment about the "Quick Links" box... when JS is disabled, following that link simply reloads the page and replaces "Quick Links" with a couple of other links, none of which are tasks most forum visitors are likely to be interested in using frequently or ever (this is an addon development forum, not MySpace). I went into detail about this some pages back, but essentially, when JS is disabled, why force the page reload? Why not just show the extra links in the first place?
IE6 don't "understand" alpha channel on PNGs. IMO everyone who uses such an old browser shouldn't whine if the page is useable but looks ugly :P
Yarr, the biggest concern has been functionality, not looks, for degraded browsing, so I wouldn't worry so much about the pngs presenting properly, especially when you don't really see them much after scrolling down and reading posts. Sounds to me like most of the IE6 users may just be normal wowace members who are stuck at work with shitty browsers. :p (As mentioned previously). So as long as it works, things are readable, and they don't have menus half a mile away, I presume they wouldn't care much about trivial asthetics.
Would a corner tag mentioning that 'wowace would look much better on an upgraded browser' be too naggy?
Really about the only option is to have a second set of the images as gifs.
All the js workarounds suffer from some issues with certain types of images. (mainly related to css background images)
Correct. It is possible to do alpha-channel PNGs as foreground images in IE6, using a DirectX filter trick, but doing so causes terrible performance issues. It is not possible to do alpha-channel PNGs as backgrounds in IE6 without major scaling problems etc., not to mention the performance. It's far, far, far better to do GIF replacements for downlevel browsers. I went down the DirectX filter replacement trick road for a few years and it took months of development to undo that mistake.
<script src="http://gist.github.com/21557.js"></script>
The same applies for 90% of the things I've complained about in this thread. The initial design assumptions that everyone is running at a minimum of X x Y resolution with normal vision and normal motor skills mean that the site is significantly less usable for people who don't match those assumptions. Using the header graphic as an excuse for fixed width is just silly... there are long-established methods using CSS that could easily handle an elastic layout while preserving the integrity of the header. :(
Besides, from what i've learned in my WebDev time, you can do everything perfect, follow all coding practices and whatnot, and still, there will be one Browser (which really usually is IE6) that just fucks you, and forces you to add ugly hacks to fix stuff that should've been trivial in the first place.
Also, the "sliding flying popups" are just divs with a absolute position and a z-index, CSS standard since forever, even before IE6 was even deployed, see my previous comment ;)
I could probably just redo the skin with tables instead of divs and IE6 wouldn't have an issue with it, but didn't we all learn in webdev schools that tables are not for layout? :( But then again vBulletin uses tables too, so huh ..
Oh, and btw, i've already spent a significant amount of time fixing the skin for various glitches in various browsers, and i can asure you, it DOES take alot more to get it working perfectly in IE6. But as i said, you're welcome to help
Although the "web standards" guys would say don't use tables, in reality using tables can greatly help more browsers render your layout correctly. There are a large number of CSS "problems" in IE6 and other browsers that are fixed by using tables, thus eliminating any "hacks" and alternate stylesheets.
From what I saw of this site's state in IE6, it would take a great deal of work. Like Phanx said, the site needed to be built from the ground up for IE6 compatibility; most of the assumptions that were made need to be changed in order to work.
Only real issue left, pngs with transparency ... damnit MS :(
(This post was written with IE6, i feel so bad)
But that's not the point why they say "don't use tables", it's accessibility.
True. It sort of depends on the situation. In some cases the only reason people avoid tables is because it's not "semantic".
Yes, but they're still annoying, and they still don't work correctly or at all when JavaScript is not enabled, and they do have a slide-in animation, putting them squarely in the "sliding scripted popup menu" category. ;)
With JavaScript disabled, the whole forum defaults to the non-javascript controls, which is just a "Search" link that opens the advanced search box, and the Quick Links box toggles the 2nd-Level Nav to have some more links. The "Thread Tools" becomes just a link to the bottom of the page which has all the links to subscribe threads etc.
Well the post editor widgets are not working 100%, but thats to be expected. Good enough to read and write posts, fancy formating options without BBCode requires JS again ;)
Maybe we can put in a User selectable option to disable the JS controls, if that would be wanted to have.
Also, with regard to your comment about the "Quick Links" box... when JS is disabled, following that link simply reloads the page and replaces "Quick Links" with a couple of other links, none of which are tasks most forum visitors are likely to be interested in using frequently or ever (this is an addon development forum, not MySpace). I went into detail about this some pages back, but essentially, when JS is disabled, why force the page reload? Why not just show the extra links in the first place?
This might help.
Ask the vBulletin developers? :)
IE6 don't "understand" alpha channel on PNGs. IMO everyone who uses such an old browser shouldn't whine if the page is useable but looks ugly :P
Yarr, the biggest concern has been functionality, not looks, for degraded browsing, so I wouldn't worry so much about the pngs presenting properly, especially when you don't really see them much after scrolling down and reading posts. Sounds to me like most of the IE6 users may just be normal wowace members who are stuck at work with shitty browsers. :p (As mentioned previously). So as long as it works, things are readable, and they don't have menus half a mile away, I presume they wouldn't care much about trivial asthetics.
Would a corner tag mentioning that 'wowace would look much better on an upgraded browser' be too naggy?
All the js workarounds suffer from some issues with certain types of images. (mainly related to css background images)
Correct. It is possible to do alpha-channel PNGs as foreground images in IE6, using a DirectX filter trick, but doing so causes terrible performance issues. It is not possible to do alpha-channel PNGs as backgrounds in IE6 without major scaling problems etc., not to mention the performance. It's far, far, far better to do GIF replacements for downlevel browsers. I went down the DirectX filter replacement trick road for a few years and it took months of development to undo that mistake.
I did not whine at all. I was only asking...
PS: I'm surfing with Opera on my USB stick now, so everything is fine (for me).