According to my site statistics, there are several dozen people reading this site with Internet Explorer 6. With Internet Explorer 7 being only a few months old, this is certainly to be expected (my stats also tell me that almost no one — which means around 2% — of people visiting this site are using Windows Vista). I talked a bit about information sharing and compatibility before, but Internet Explorer 6 presented a whole new challenge for me with the design of this site.

When adapting the theme of this site, I checked for compatibility (i.e. the site not looking like crap) on both Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 — but then started to get messages from people saying that things were unaligned and looking just generally messy on Internet Explorer 6. So then I had the problem of how to test on Internet Explorer 6, since I already have Internet Explorer 7 at home (I need to also state here that I am not a designer, and anyone who is a designer is probably having a chuckle at my introduction to a problem they face every day).

So I was elated when I came across Multiple IE — which allows you to run pretty much every version of Internet Explorer on one machine at the same time. But guess what? It doesn’t work on Windows Vista (which I recently upgraded to).

This is a very specific case of a couple of different applications, browsers and operating systems not working together, which is certainly a common scenario in any IT environment. But as more and more generations of the same software emerge, the interactions between all of this software is becoming exponentially more complex — since in a fictional interoperability diagram, a line must drawn from every operating system to every application and browser.

So this begs the question: wouldn’t having standards that work from one platform to the next make more sense? The short answer is yes, with a but. Too often, companies have substantial financial incentives to push one ’standard’ format over another (Blu-ray versus HD DVD is a classic example of this kind format war insanity). And on the other hand, you can completely throw design and standards out the window and still be successful (MySpace is notorious for having horrible, antiquated HTML).

So fear not, Internet Explorer 6 users. I’ve tweaked the design enough that you should have a decent experience browsing Uncommon Knowledge. But if you can (that is, if you’re not still using Internet Explorer because you’re on a corporate network and they haven’t made the move to IE7), I’d highly suggest an upgrade to Internet Explorer 7, or even better, Firefox.

Update: One final thought on this. As I headed over to validate my site at the W3C’s markup validation service (please don’t bother trying to validate this site there, it definitely needs some work in that area) it dawned on me that there is another force at work here as well. For the small-time business owner who’s trying to put a simple page together for his or her business, standards don’t really matter as much as just creating something that looks decent at an affordable price. Since my site doesn’t pass validation, I certainly can’t be too critical of others for failing to adhere to standards — but how to create comprehensive standards that are simple enough for even a novice to understand is certainly a whole other complex issue in itself.