When creating this blog, I ran into this problem. I was using PNG images with transparency, which IE6 does not support. I didn’t want to support IE6, and my logic was, if we keep supporting older browsers it just hurts our designs and doesn’t force people to update. I was going to have a message appear on the blog if you were using IE6, telling you to update to IE7 (or better yet get Firefox). So my question is when can we drop IE6? Should we be trying to force people to update, or should we just wait until they update on their own? Well right now standards are everything and people are stressing accessibility, which means having your site available to everyone. So the answer is we should support IE6, at least until a very small percentage of people are using it. With all that in mind, I decided to support IE6, and redid the header to not use transparency.

Lucky for me it was easy to support IE6 with this blog. However there are some designs which it would be impossible not to us transparency or do something that IE6 can’t do. So here is the other million dollar question, should we sacrifice a great design for accessibility? In most cases it shouldn’t come down to this, because you can use a separate style sheet for IE6. If I did have to choose it would be design over accessibility. I don’t believe the quality of a site should be compromised ever, and if that means a small percentage of people are not going to be able to see that quality, so be it. I know I am probably being a little contradicting, but that’s how I feel on the matter. Now I am in no way say accessibility is not important, because it is very important. Design should only overcome accessibility when it is absolutely necessary.