Propaganda Party: The Pop Stalin Design Manifesto

Hey all (or all two of you)! I’m in the process of doing my yearly blog redesign and I’ve made the big decision not to support IE6 when the redesign is deployed. I’ll still continue to hack away for clients who insist that their IE6 crowd stays pleased but I figure the small amount of visitors I get overall probably aren’t using IE6 to begin with and the few who are, will still be able to get the information, it just won’t be pretty (they’ll also get a nice little message at the top of the page urging them to upgrade).

The Redesign

In the redesign I am trying something new for me that will, hopefully, help with some IE6 issues off the bat. First, I’m employing a modified version of Eric Meyer’s reset.css–I’m going to zero everything out and start from scratch. Second, I’m going to use the strict XHTML doc type opposed to transitional–IE6 is quirky enough without putting it in quirks mode. Third, I’m going to attempt to make the layout as semantic as possible–my goal is to use less div’s. Finally, I’m wading into the position:relative and position:absolute waters. I’m using some shadow effects for my design and instead of using a lot of drop-shadowed graphics, I figure if I layer things, I need two graphics instead of ten (not a real number, just tossing it out there). Another thing I’m going to attempt to do is change the way I name things. I read a great article written by Andy Clarke called “More on developing naming conventions, Microformats and HTML5” and am going to attempt to use his model for my mark-up.

The redesign will be a learning process for me and that is a good thing in my mind. I’d say I have a fair handle on CSS, except for the matters I stated above, and it’s about time I master those as well. It’s been an interesting proposition thus far and I’m enjoying and frustrated by it in equal parts. Hopefully, things will work fairly well in IE6 (except for the PNG graphics that allow the transparency I’ll need) without creating a separate stylesheet or hacking my way to get an eight year old browser to behave as current browsers do.