Corporate IT just won't let IE6 die

Indeed, corporate is always going to be way, way behind the curve. Too big to move. I feel sorry for those poor corporate web coders. Although their jobs suck, I imagine that at least they're making good salaries and getting bennies.

Maybe those SEC guys who were surfing porn all day during the financial crisis were using IE6.

Having hand-coded semantic, valid, table-less layout and design for the past 10+ years in my own practice, I've now worked in the corporate world for the past 2 years as a contractor. (large companies like J&J) I can attest to how "behind the curve" they are, having only recently been upgraded to Windows XP. The entire business side is still running on IE6, with mainly the designers and some developers smart enough to install Firefox for development. (but some even can't because they don't have admin rights - go figure)

But let me tell you, I am disturbed on a daily basis to see the resistance to semantic, table-less, "pure CSS" for layout and design, mainly stemming from the mere fact that many of these corporations rely on JAVA developers to make design/HTML/DOM/CSS changes, who have zero experience with CSS/UI. While, yes, this can seem more 'efficient' from a production standpoint, no one takes into account the amount of time it takes to fix really poorly executed CSS by someone who has little or no understanding, and who's job it shouldn't be to do.

To me, asking a JAVA developer to be responsible for the design, UI/UIX, and CSS for a site is like asking your mechanic to paint your house. From my experience, a JAVA programmers job is typically functionality and backend, not design/layout/semantics/UI. It's what most are great at, and should be their focus. Many of the JAVA developers I have worked with are incredibly talented, and understand table-based layout (what was common 10 years ago), but when you get into DIVs and using CSS as the box model, they go blank. Yes, there are some really good JAVA developers who are also really good designers, and know DOM/CSS/HTML, but from what I have seen, it's uncommon.

Holding your company's potential back by not using "standards" compliant methods, solely because you are having the wrong people who lack the proper training/experience do the development/editing on your site is just bass-ackwards to me. It's one of the big reasons I am getting out and looking for a group that understands the need to use "standards compliant" methods. That, and I simply refuse to throw out the last 10 years of applying semantic, table-less layout and design. I will not be forced to regress back to nesting tables like a pigeon on hormone therapy.

Macaddict,
I feel your pain. I was a corporate whore for a long time. And nesting tables is indeed an evil practice, and that comes from someone who still uses tables in a very limited number of situations!

I marvel at the intellectual skill of Java coders and other genius programmers, for whom things like inheritance and polymorphism are as natural as breathing. It can be intimidating. Yet, it's always heartening to see how awful these superbrains usually are at handling presentation. And if they have enough testosterone, they will never admit it. That could mean ceding their position in the food chain.

I, too, work for a place that have alot of developers on staff; heavy programming backgrounds. The build most of the companies infrastructure and intranet, along with other web apps. These guys are old-school. tables nested 10 layers deep for everything!! I tried to persuade them to step into the current standards, but what do I know, im just the designer.

I have long wondered why such companies don't adopt a templating engine such as PHP's Smarty. Do Java and ASP.Net not have suitable apps?

I'd think the mid tier and back end boys would appreciate not having to worry about front end markup and presentation. Nor would the html/css guys need to sweat the logic and db stuff.

Just a thought. :shrug:

cheers,

gary