Internet Explorer 6 is facing unprecedented, high-profile criticism. Could this be the start of a broad public movement to persuade users to finally abandon the browser? While the arguments presented by developers and designers over the last decade have largely gone unheeded, declarations from government institutions and media providers may carry more significance. Posing the browser as a security risk and an obstruction to new, feature rich web applications is a clever and completely justifiable argument.

July-August 2009: Digg considers dropping IE6 support, YouTube begins phasing it out

15 January 2010: Microsoft admits the attacks on Google’s system by Chinese hackers permitted by a flaw in Internet Explorer

16 January 2010: The German government issues a strong recommendation for users to upgrade or switch browsers

18 January 2010: A government agency in France responsible for cyber security restates Germany’s assertion

1 March 2010: Google will begin phasing out IE6 support for Docs and Sites

end of year 2010: Google will begin phasing out IE6 support for GMail and GCal

Attempting to style inline objects consistently across multiple browsers and platforms is difficult enough with unpredictable standards support — trying to maintain that exact style across form input elements as well has been near fantasy until recently. Thankfully, with the combined knowledge of the web development community and rapid adoption of reworked web standards by modern browsers, solutions are available.

For a recent project I had the task of applying one consistent button style to form inputs, anchor tags, and a handful of paragraph tags — with varying widths and background colors. Taking a cue from the brilliant work already posted on the Filament Group (which is derivative of the ALA sliding doors method and the work of Kevin Hale at Particletree), I developed a class that is applicable across a variety of elements. The examples given were generally applied to the button element; my project called for standard inputs with type ‘submit’. The class scope is left open to allow for easier application to non-form elements. A few instances:

<a href="#" class="input-btn-link"><span>Add to Favorites</span></a>
<a href="#" class="input-btn-link small"><span>Add to Favorites</span></a>
<input class="input-btn" type="submit" value="Add to Favorites" />
<input class="input-btn small" type="submit" value="Add to Favorites" />
<input class="input-btn medium" type="submit" value="Add to Favorites" />
<input class="input-btn large" type="submit" value="Add to Favorites" />
<p class="input-btn">Add to Favorites/p>
</p>

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