UI Freak

Most UI developers consider IE6 evil. The CSS support is less than ideal. In fact it just plain sucks.

So there are all kinds of sites dedicated to IE hacks and Microsoft bashing. But since 2001 (when IE6 came out) Microsoft has improved their browser. In fact the current version 8 actually supports all of the CSS that 6 was supposed to. Oh wait that was a little Microsoft bashing. Sorry.

IE6 is still being used by a huge percentage of people. It varies depending on the audience of your site. But as much as 40% is not that unusual. This is just crazy. The problem is that the average computer user doesn't know how to update it to a new modern browser. In fact they don't even know that what they are using is "old and busted".

So as a UI developer there are several things that you can do to combat IE6.

1. You can code a site to use CSS that was only supported by IE6 and forget about all the cool new innovations over the years since 2001.
2. You can create different CSS for IE6 and use JavaScript to detect the browser and load whatever is required to display your site properly.
3. You can hope some rouge developer out there creates a virus that goes and deletes IE6 from all the computers around the world.
4. You can educate the users that come to your site that they are using an old browser.

Here at UIFreak we have decided to take the higher road and just do number four.

To assist with this we use an out of the box jQuery plug-in that was created for just this one purpose. It is called jReject.

The plug-in took a total of 5 minutes to implement, like most jQuery plug-ins. The hard part was finding a computer that still had IE6 on it to test the site. The average computer geek hasn't used IE6 in years. So we ended up having to create a clean Windows XP virtual to do the testing. But now we have a nice solution to tell the person that they are using a really old browser and provides links to several modern browsers to let them upgrade.

Now if every site had a similar solution in place, we could rid the Internet of this obvious evil!!

I love jQuery! There are some amazing plugins that people have put together to make a website more dynamic and easy to use.

Sliders are very popular right now. Most are made for HTML or for Images. But this slider allows you to put anything in the content area. So they called it the AnythingSlider.

Here is a list of features:

• Slides are HTML Content (can be anything)
• Next Slide / Previous Slide Arrows
• Navigation tabs are built and added dynamically (any number of slides)
• Optional custom function for formatting navigation text
• Auto-playing (optional feature, can start playing or stopped)
• Each slide has a hashtag (can link directly to specific slides)
• Infinite/Continuous sliding (always slides in the direction you are going, even at "last" slide)
• Multiple sliders allowable per-page (hashtags only work on first)
• Pauses autoPlay on hover (option)
• Link to specific slides from static text links

Well worth the download.