Internet Explorer 6 and below and web design
Internet Explorer 6, A.K.A IE 6, was released in year 2001. After more than 9 years the number of users using it is still significant for some to ignore. It is a big challenge for web designers to continue building websites at the standards of 9 years ago. Especially for a web browser that is notoriously known to have many parsing issues and that is no longer supported by it's developer.
According to recent web statistics of w3schools the use IE 6 has decreased down to 7.2% in June 2010. Although people have many free upgrade options to modern web browsers such as Internet Explorer 8 , Firefox 3.6.6 , Safari 4.0.3 and Chrome they simple prefer to stay with their old web browser. There are many factors that might be the cause of this such as laziness, inability to install new software, loyalty ,etc.
One school of thought that is quite popular among web designers in dealing with IE 6 and below is that "we cannot keep on using old technology" . Displaying a kind message asking IE 6 users to upgrade their web browsers as they may have difficulties viewing the website with their browsers is appropriate. According to the usage statistics outlined above the usage of IE 6 has decreased more than 3 percent in around 6 months. At this rapid decent we can expect IE 6 to be obsolete in the near future.
Another school of thought is : "We can try to accommodate IE 6 users to a certain extend and as much as the time and the project budget permits." This usually corresponds to a situation where the expected audience is much more than the average 7.2 % and thus it is absolutely necessary to make the website design compatible with IE 6.