Does your blog still render in IE6?

I got really curious a short while back, if this very blog would still be somewhat readable in the crown prince of terrible browsers, also known as IE6. And, while I was contemplating that evil thought, I said to myself what about others like Mozilla 1.5 or Netscape 6?

IIS

While this blog is statically generated, it still needs a local web server to be browse-able, due to the directory structure that provides the so called pretty-permalinks.

No permalinks that end with /index.html here. Oh no, no! Not on my watch.

Now, there’s absolutely no better choice than [IIS][iis] for this very purpose, right? Besides, a bastardized (personal?) version of it is available right under our very own finger tips, via the infamous Add or Remove Windows Components”.

Then, I dropped all the files into C:\Inetpub\wwwroot, and then added index.html to the list of files recognized as a Default Document.

Microsoft Peer Web Services

It turns out that Microsoft used to ship an utter monstrosity called Peer Web Services, which was supposed to be the equivalent of IIS for Win9x.

The more you know!

With all that out of the way, it was time to fire up each browser, and take a look.

IE6

Mozilla 1.5

Netscape 6

The “Final” Verdict

I would be lying if I didn’t mention that I did end up making a couple of minor tweaks.

First and foremost, I added a couple of additional font-families like Verdana and Tahoma to make the fonts somewhat more palatable, and a tiny bit easier on the eyes.

Then continued with adding render-fallbacks inside the <video> and <audio> elements (tags?), so that they render a link that can be used to download and view the media.

<video muted controls width="1024">
    <source src="ie6.mp4" type="video/mp4">
    <blockquote>
    Your browser does not support the video element.
    Please click <a href="ie6.mp4">here</a> in order to
    download and view the video.
    </blockquote>
</video>

But overall, everything is pretty much readable at a 1024x768 resolution. What about that very annoying horizontal scrollbar? I really wasn’t in the mood of doing more layout sizing and padding kung-fu in order to make it all fit inside a 1024px wide viewport.

Sorry, not sorry!