aljuk, when I start a project, I clearly specify that I am in charge of the development, and that I decide what’s best for user experience.

This and the right price (which is higher than many others) + quality work, shows that I value my business, I don’t mock it. And the portfolio standing behind me is an argument to what I demand from the customer: understand that he doesn’t know these things as well as I do;
“trust me, I’m here to get you clients, not just to build you a website, or a brand.”

If they still don’t understand, I get to the final solution : conditional JS that pops up a div stating you should upgrade your browser, with link to Firefox (I know I’m evil :)) )

cosmin_gizmo@yahoo.com is my email, would be glad to keep in touch.

Jennifer, thank you so much for sharing this with us.
It’s not only useful, it also connects people with same frustrations

Cheers from Romania,
Cosmin.

When I’m working on a personal site or a vanity project I couldn’t care less for IE and I sing it from the rooftops. But I earn my bread as a gun for hire, and my clients have, quite rightly, a different view. For example, I run a site for a European commercial radio station with an 83% IE visitorship, and a site in the Middle East, where the only people with Macs are printers and designers, and everyone uses the browser that comes with their PC.

Now, I can tell those clients how utterly crap their copy of IE5.5 (yes, you read that right) 6 or 7 is and that the code I’ve written is “perfect”, standards compliant, semantic and sexy, but nobody’s interested, and they’ll laugh at me and think to themselves “heh heh funny internet guy, now fix it and make it work…” And the thing is, for each of “us” that feels like this, there are a thousand of “them” who couldn’t care less as long as they can send an email. “But I like IE, it comes with my PC” etc. And, in a sense, they’re right. Why should they care at my distress at having to butcher my code just so IE works…

A pox on your crappy browser(s) Mr Gates.

All the best Cosmin, and pardon my rant Jennifer. Sleep deprivation, the inability to rationalise last night’s css nightmare, and a client asking “is it finished yet?” gets me every time.

Indeed, aljuk, you have a point.

However, getting back to the IE6 support…if us, the developers, don’t show the users how bad it is, then who will?
Don’t you think it’s time we supported standards compliant browsers, that will make both our and our clinet’s lifes a lot easier?

All the best!

I never use the rollover anymore, I use the jQuery library and wrote my own rollover script implementing that. I will be posting that soon, and I will update this post when I do so.

If you’re building a product image gallery, do you really want to be editing a verbose css file every time you need to alter the gallery content? Or do you think it makes more sense that your CONTENT (the images in this case) live within the webpage / database set-up?

Use css where it belongs, for styling your site layout. Unless your nav needs javascript transitions, specify nav rollovers in css (using a single image and background positioning on the hover state to aleviate the need for preloading). If an image is CONTENT as opposed to a styling asset, use javascript for its rollover.

cheers.

Dan

I really don’t see the use of it, as long as you can do it in at least 2 ways with CSS..

1. …is the :hover you already mentioned, and frankly IE6 is soon to be replaced (as IE8 is on it’s way; also, in Safari you cannot make a form out of graphics, so it’ll show up like that anyway)

2. as Al said, use one single image for the rollover, and adjust it’s background-position. Fairly easy and with better support.
And less code, too

Anyway, I apreciate your time for sharing this with us :), thanks.

Also, rather than swapping images, sometimes it can be easier to combine the two images into one that is twice the height (or width) and simply adjusting the background-position property — saves having to preload.