DON'T DO IT! IE 6 isn't worth going bald, especially if you are a girl! I feel the same way, though I don't play with my hair when I'm deep in thought. I usually squeeze a foam muffin (yeah, I know its weird). IE 6 sometimes makes me pay more attention to what I am doing, but usually I have to modify something that shouldn't have anything to do with the problems that it is presenting, and it fixes it. I would be able to develop most sites in about half of the time if IE 6 were dead. Unfortunately, I still have to cater to IE 6
Odd thing is, IE is rarely a problem for me because I know 99% of the time you throw haslayout or some other goofy workaround at the problem, problem solved. The thing I'm hitting up against lately that's driving me nucking futs is the spotty CSS2 support in Firefux. I'm finding myself spending more time diagnosing why certain CSS doesn't work in FF or behaves COMPLETELY unlike what the specification says than I do in Opera, Safari and IE COMBINED- to the point I've more than once had to write Gecko specific hacks into my code or completely take a different tack on approaching the problem. Sometimes it's simple **** like the lack of PROPER inline-block behavior, but other times it's stupid **** like it not using the same default line-height, rounding up all fractions AND tracking fractions across values (something NO other browser does), or not having the flow position be the default for an absolute element. (that last one can REALLY drive one nutters) I really do hate gecko and every browser made in it... buggy bloated piece of CRAP I have to kill the task every five to twenty minutes. Compared to that, IE6 is a ****ing GEM. Part of why whenever someone holds up a gecko based browser as an example of standards compliance, I reply "How's that support for align in colgroups and display:inline-block coming along? Still struggling with pre-wrap? Hey, still having your default fonts ignore the system metric while PT doesn't? Oh wait, I know, it's not a bug, it's a feature..."
It isn't surprising. Every coder knows that M$ doesn't care about independent standards at all and their web browsers have always been imho the worst (IE 7 is great improvement but alternative browsers still kicks its ass). Less secure, full of weird illogical bugs, bloated etc... On the other hand, that IS NOT AN EXCUSE - every coder should be responsible for cross-browser compatibility of his work!
Dude, that makes it WORSE because you know it's something stupid-simple. It was worse earlier, though, because I was trying one of those goofy negative margin set-ups and it turned out I was not giving the floats their proper respect so I was forced to change HTML content order (ew)... after that battle I thought I'd won and then... dun dun dunnn.... IE6 acts completely different on each page (I have three with identical code in the header where the problem is) AND Tredosoft IE6 acts different than Fake IE6 4 Linux!! So the baldness is definitely coming, but luckily I have a hat with a duckie on it.
Should rarely be neccessary... Hmm. You want I could have a look... It SOUNDS like you probably are trying to do something 'the hard way' as there isn't THAT much difference between 6 and 7 - despite wild claims to the contrary.
It was definitely the hard way, and everyone at a certain other forum was like, just do it the normal way. I started with a float so I could have the right column stuff last in the source, floated left, and then bumped up and around with negative margins. Because the box that column was supposed to sit in was flex-width, that had to be the float. And Gecko was cool with that, also IE7. But Opera and Safari threw a fit was were all like, you didn't state a real width on that float so we're shrink-wrapping it. Ug. I gave up : ) I kinda wish I'd saved my original page, because actually I got everything to work in ALL browsers with that... but when I went on to copy that page and change the content to something else (anything else) and without that right column (only belongs on the first page), nothing worked. I thought it was pretty neat, but I couldn't get it to work and it must've been a fluke that Opera and Safari were okay with that first flexible float. But I sure learned a lot. Hmmm, I wonder if I can recreate what I did on that site. I'd be real curious to know why everyone rendered it properly even when it was apparently breaking some rules.