When creating a website a designer sits down and codes their website, which looks fresh and shiny in IE6… job done! No it’s never that simple is it.

To be a good web designer means creating a website that is accessible and usable in a wide variety of browsers. An absolute minimum for me would be IE6, IE7 and FireFox. In fact, i tend to try and have a look in IE5, IE6, IE7, FireFox, Opera and Safari, as well as exclude css for Netscape 4.

I’m interested in knowing what other people think on this subject. Is it important to be backward compatible, and if so, to what level?

The issue that keeps cropping up for me is IE5.5 & IE6 not being able to render transparent PNG’s properly. Here’s an excellent resource for fixing IE6 PNG transparency issues. Previously I used a javascript solution, however I found this caused an uncalled javascript onload function error in other browsers due to the conditional comments that are only relevant to IE. The method I have linked to above uses a CSS behavior which works in IE5.5 and IE6, but is simply ignored in other browsers.