So, partly as an outlet for ideas that I have rattling around inside my brain, and partly to get some more experience with web design and content management software, I've decided it's time to have a blog. I am on track to discover Twitter sometime around 2017.
As you can tell from the site design, I am not blessed with artistic talent. In fact, I'm pretty minimalist when it comes to visual design. But that doesn't mean the same thing has to apply to functional design, which leads into one of the ideas I currently have rattling around inside my brain: idealism vs. practicality.
Nice segue, huh? It came into my head while debating how much effort I should expend to accomodate users of Internet Explorer 6. As anyone who has touched a web page in the last couple years knows, IE6 is the bane of web developers worldwide. It supports standards incompletely and incorrectly, contains too many layout bugs to count, and has a general "fuck you!" attitude left over from the good ol' days. Trying to make a page render correctly both in IE6 and modern browsers is a herculean task, and often requires betraying some of core principles of good web design, such as abstraction and semantic layout in favor of numerous hacks, kludges, and conditional statements. It's a nightmare, and makes good web design at least twice as hard as it would otherwise be.
And yet, the latest polls show that 18% of all internet users are still using IE6. Should those poor deluded souls – nearly one in five – be excluded just because they would require some extra work? Thankfully that market share is decreasing every month, but it's a point that's been lingering in my head. Clearly the general question is where the balance between idealism and practicality should fall: one of the fundamental controversies of modern social sciences.
I'm following a pretty typical pattern so far: from pure idealism in my childhood, to nearly pure practicality when I grew up and realized what was actually involved in making the world function, and now, as my years grow ever more wizened, firmly in the middle. For years I called myself a pragmatist, but the older I get, the more I find myself edging back toward principles.
Even though I was blessed with some of the best teachers in the world, I was never any good at history in school; I just don't have a head for names and dates and geography. It's only because I'm beginning to have lived long enough to see some history unfold in real time that I get a good appreciation for the types of relationships involved, and the more I see of those, the more I think that sticking to principles is the practical thing to do – in the long run.
I saw Saddam Hussein go from being a politically expedient ally against Iran to being the bogeyman of the last 20 years. Same deal with Osama bin Laden. Going further back, our good friend Stalin in WWII. In finance, decades of deficit spending are taking a serious toll in the form of devaluation of the dollar and a per capita debt burden that dwarfs the average yearly salary. These situations are clearly ill-advised in the long run, yet we keep on doing them for the short-term gain. And we'll keep doing it with our dependence on oil, our unwillingness to demand respect for human rights from our major trading partners, and the tragedy of our war on drugs.
Our shortsightedness reminds me of a young person who puts all his money in low-risk, low-return investments like bonds and CDs while ignoring the fact that higher-risk choices such as stocks will most likely provide much higher average rates over the 40 years until he retires. Yes, it's easy and gives you less to worry about in the short term, but in the long run you'll just be shooting yourself in the foot. We're shooting ourselves in the foot a lot these days, as our national compromises of the last century come home to roost. Would we not be better off now if we hadn't been so quick to jump in bed with some questionable decisions in the interests of fixing the here-and-now?
So, all that is a long and boring way of saying: No, I'm not supporting IE6 on this site. I'm coding to standards, organizing semantically, and using the generally supported subset of presentation rules. Making life easier for users of substandard technology just removes any incentive for them to upgrade to something better. IE6 is holding back web development as a whole, and it needs to go.
Now, if I could only convince my bosses of that...
Since 127 A.D. 