I wrote a piece about IE6 for .net, interviewing Remy Sharp. Sharp argues people should stop banging on about ditching IE6:

We all know IE6 should die. Microsoft knows IE6 should die. Heck, even IE6 knows it needs to die. It’s been walking around like a fucking zombie for years.

He says either don’t support the browser (and potentially lose clients) or just offer support as a separate charge. I agree with this (as might be apparent from the article itself), and it seems most of those commenting do too. My favourite is ‘leegriffin’ with:

You don’t see mechanics saying they simply won’t service that old 1990 Ford Fiesta because it can be a pain in the backside, they just charge appropriately.

Exactly.

According to MacRumors, iWeb is dead:

One concerned iWeb/MobileMe user emailed Apple CEO Steve Jobs to ask about the fate of the offering, and reportedly received confirmation that users will indeed need to find alternative hosting for their sites once MobileMe is officially discontinued. All existing MobileMe users have received free subscription extensions through June 30, 2012, at which time the service will cease to exist and the transition to iCloud will be complete.

Assuming the email is genuine, Jobs replies in typically succinct fashion; the user asks “Will I need to find an alternative website builder and someone to host my sites?” and Jobs replies: “Yep.”

Frankly, this isn’t exactly a shock. iLife was updated in 2011, and iWeb was noticeably unchanged from its 2009 incarnation. The app also didn’t make it to the Mac App Store, unlike iPhoto, GarageBand and iMovie. It’s almost certain that iDVD has also been shot in the head.

I’m in two minds as to the news itself, though. As a web designer, I always found iWeb ‘quirky’ (that’s putting it as kindly as I can) and its fixed-page means of creating sites (and, worse, blogs) seemed anachronistic in an age of WordPress and Facebook. Nonetheless, I know a lot of people who find the application easy to use and they will be disappointed to see confirmation of its demise. Still, this is a good opportunity for the likes of RapidWeaver and Sandvox to grab some users, along with enterprising developers to create iWeb-import tools for said apps.

24 Ways has been running for several years now, providing 24 end-of-year articles for web designers and developers. It’s like advent, except the tasty treats are web design tips, not chocolates.

This year, the company is releasing an annual. The idea is to compile everything over the season into an 80-page book, then fire the proceeds at Unicef. The book’s only going to be on sale until the end of December and is looking for sponsorship, so:

• If you’re a wealthy but charitable sort, sponser the thing (PDF).
• If you’re in the web industry, buy the thing.

As you may have noticed, this blog got a natty new theme last week. One of the things I wanted to do was make it hugely obvious which links have been followed. I therefore decided to style visited links with text-decoration: line-through. The thing is, this didn’t work. I was baffled, and so stood up, pointed to the sky and yelled: “TO THE GOOGLETRON!”

After my dog did his “what are you on?” face, I ended up finding Apple KB article HT4196, About the security content of Safari 5.0 and Safari 4. It says this:

WebKit

Impact: A maliciously crafted website may be able to determine which sites a user has visited

Description: A design issue exists in WebKit’s handling of the CSS :visited pseudo-class. A maliciously crafted website may be able to determine which sites a user has visited. This update limits the ability of web pages to style pages based on whether links are visited.

Further testing this morning regarding :visited suggests that the limits in WebKit are now severe. As far as I can tell, this is the list of properties now available to you when styling :visited in CSS:

• color

Great, huh? (Do leave a comment if you know of any others that work.) And with a good chunk of the world being colour-blind, what’s supposedly a fix for security is in reality also a punch in the face for accessibility.

The BBC News website got a redesign this week. Naturally, lots of people hate it, but that’s because people hate change. I’m largely on the other side of the fence, and, objectively, the BBC’s mostly done a good job: the site content has room to breathe, the space-wasting left-hand nav strip has been ditched, there are no rounded corners, and although the amount of home-page content hasn’t been reduced, the design feels less cluttered. (That said, as Adam Banks wryly noted on Twitter, White space is like the comma: you have to put it in the right places, not just sprinkle around.)

However, I do wonder how much testing the BBC did across platforms. On my Macs, article body text is significantly less legible than it was previously. Delving into the style sheet, it seems the corporation’s centred on Helvetica Neue in grey for most of its text (falling back to Arial for anyone who doesn’t have this installed—in other words, anyone but Mac users). This is baffling, since Helvetica Neue is designed for print design, not the screen; and while Panic sometimes uses the font on its website, it’s doing so for what’s effectively a read-once advert, not many thousands of news articles. (Crucially, Panic also has the text in black, not a mid-grey, thereby hugely increasing readability.)

The BBC News redesign is therefore a great example of single-point of failure in web design. It looks great, the layout works, and even the headings look good. It only falls down when you start trying to read an article—but unfortunately for the BBC, that’s the main point of a news site’s existence.