In the middle of moving all those underscore delineated URLs to dash delineated URLs*, Google went ahead and announced the rel="canonical" scheme for defining the preferred URL for a piece of content. While it's not the biggest deal for me, other than the "/" vs "/index.php" question, for many people with more dynamic systems it's a big deal. Bravo to everyone involved as it's a really straightforward, easy-to-implement solution to a common, troublesome problem.
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Right now Internet Explorer 6 averages about 10-12% of my traffic here (11% for the past month.) While I won't dismantle existing support mechanisms, I will no longer test new features in IE6 and going forward I will not support or test for IE6 for the new version of the site.

The good news is, I rarely do anything here that will tax IE6 heavily and the redesign will likely be architected in such a way that it will probably work pretty well in IE6 even without specific attention. The bad news is, 11% equals about 6000 people and the thought of annoying, even slightly, that many folks over a month worries me. The thing is, I just can't support three versions of a browser, especially when one of them is such an odd man out. IE7/IE8 are comfortably supportable browsers. IE6 plainly sucks.

Spurred on by this:

Microsoft: IE 8 won't be done until 2009

So I've got to draw a line in the sand.

Now if I can just convince them to do the same at work…

To make use of the native getElementsByClassName I rewrote my getElementsByClass function to use the method where possible.

Here's the code*:
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Here's it is.

//height for IE6. Thankfully IE6 messes up height in a useful way
height:350px;
//height for everything else. IE6 looks at this and says "wha?"
height:auto;
//min-height for everything else. IE6 is baffled by this.
min-height:350px;

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Answer: When it's a unique identifier.

Check out this class attribute generate by my beloved WordPress' upload feature:

class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4590"

See anything suspicious? I sure do. wp-image-4590 is a unique identifier being passed off as a class. Why? I actually have no clue as I'm not privy to the thought process behind that particular piece of code What I do know is pretty much demands to be an ID. When I teach this stuff to people, I say "If it's unique, meaning there will ever only be one of them, make it an ID. If there's more than one or it's a general descriptor, make it a class." So I look at that code block every time I upload an image and I frown. Then I blow away the whole class attribute away, since I use none of them.

This is just splitting hairs, I know. Using a class like that is basically harmless. But, truth be told, splitting hairs helps me solidify my ideas about the way these things should work. That, in turn helps me improve the way my crew and I do our thing. So? Hairs I split and everyone is happier.

I'm just doing my small part to make the web a better place one nitpicky, semantic post at a time.