Why Web Designers Should Like IE 6

Cascading Style Sheets are what makes the Web not boring. CSS is descended from SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), which was created in the 1970s. The first version of the CSS standard was published in 1996, with version 2 being finalized in 1998. Version 3 is still under development.

The first browser to fully support CSS1 was a browser that only one person remembers: Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac. You read that right: The first CSS standards-compliant browser was created by Microsoft. That was in 2000, four years after the standard was first published and two years after CSS2 was released. Other browsers played catch-up in the months following.

The problem with the Internet in the time leading up to the adoption of the CSS standards was that no one had been willing to wait for the standards body to, well, standardize, and so they implemented horrible proprietary things like <blink> and <marquee>. Each new version fought to not only include the newfangled tags that its competitors had introduced, but also to create new features of its own. "Best viewed on <browser x, version y> at <designer's screen resolution>" became all too common.

So who was our knight in shining armor who delivered us from this? Internet Explorer 6.

Indirectly, of course. IE 6 in and of itself was not particularly revolutionary, except for the fact that its Standards Mode hewed more closely to the standards than any other major browser at the time (sorry, Opera, even back then you weren't a major browser). The revolution was its competitors.

See, IE 6 had something called Quirks Mode. Basically, if your HTML document had a certain doctype (or no doctype declared at all), the browser would fall back and render the page like IE 5 would have. This was to keep old pages from breaking. One consequence of this was that the infamous "whitespace bug" was perpetuated. CSS2 support was also not as good as it could have been. Mozilla and others jumped into the fray at this point, reigniting the browser wars. The result? Today, because IE 6 was so bad, we have Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and IE 9 (which will supposedly implement the standards way better than any previous version of IE).

Thank you, IE 6.