Internet Explorer 6, (excuse my language) is basically the bane of the existence of the internet. The time spent wrestling with this car-with-square-wheels easily adds up to enough time to take a 2 month vacation. If enterprises would just give their machines a refresh with IE7 or even FireFox, the web developer world would be a much better one. Developers would be living much longer lives, have fewer grey hairs, have more girlfriends, and fewer wrinkles. Seriously, why are we enslaved by IE6?
I have yet to find a perfect and elegant solution that can be applied to completely negate the neediness of IE6 and the "if lt IE 6" tag you use to load up specific ie 6 css rules. The closest thing I've found to date is something my friend joe pointed me to. Yes again, Joe is a source of a lot of good ideas. It is a javascript library that fixes a bunch of stuff in ie 6: http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/
The IE7.js file makes IE 6 perform more like IE7, and they also have an IE8.js that does the same for IE7 to IE8. Problem is, it's definitely not a catch all and has a few problems, the biggest being that IE7.js works much better on ie6 than IE8.js does. In fact I got my IE6 in much better shape than IE7 faster.
The PNG transparency fix it comes with is by far the best one I've found so far, not messing up any of my existing styles, working on background images (though not on tiling backgrounds), just by naming your png's that you want transparent with a -trans.png extension.
And amazingly enough, position fixed works like a charm in ie 6! There are some other subtle fixes, like widths and such are less crazy, but still needs tuning.
I still spent almost 6 hours so far getting ie 6 to look and work better. lots of javascript problems that can't be solved, even using prototype and scriptaculous.
Biggest caveat is that this is not css, it's javascript, so your DOM loads real ugly at first, and then the javascript kicks in and adjusts everything. Load this file pretty early on so that other javascript doesn't start firing off without the fixes that the IE7.js provides. I feel like the slow experience, and the shitty looks you get are deserved for using IE6. Alas, I will be addressing all these issues into something more elegant. More on that later... much later.
One day, our geek children will be amazed and have endless sympathy for their father developers and ie6, while they happily develop and visit the Maldives in their hovercraft or with the teleporter.
What am saying? http://www.saveie6.com let the future feel the pain.
