As someone else mentioned, IE9 and above requires an upgrade from Windows XP, an upgrade many people and many companies cannot afford.
Google Chrome is free and works on Windows XP just fine.
http://google.com/chrome
As I understand it, WordPress still officially supports IE7 let alone IE8.
We *should* drop IE7 support. IE7 is an inherently insecure browser, and using it leaves you at risk.
IE8 on a fully updated XP is also inherently insecure, but in other, less-risky, ways.
@otto: While it is true that Chrome works well in IE and that IE7 and IE8 under XP are insecure, these facts are irrelevant to the discussion. We have no control over what browsers the end-users choose or are forced to use, and our role as web developers is not to police the web and the tools being used to access it but rather to convey information.
The IE debate often ignores the core reason why IE in its different iterations is still prevalent: In enterprise environments and many other circumstances, one browser is chosen as default and no other browser is introduced. This is a decision done at sys-admin level and can have reasons that go well outside of the web in general: Intranets, custom apps, the list is endless. Writing IE off as a bad choice is ignoring the reason why many use it. And simply saying “switch to Chrome” gets us nowhere.
I am of the same opinion as you: Users of IE8 should upgrade. But I know that many of those users can’t. Therefore I do everything I can to provide them with a great experience as long as that does not interfere or lessen the possible experience of those with modern browsers. As this minor issue in Twenty Twelve is a deliberate choice of design model that can be easily reversed with no performance or experience difference for anyone other than the IE8 users, I see no reason why it can’t be done.
@mor10: I’m sorry if this is off topic but I have followed nearly all of your web courses on Lynda.com (most recently the one on making wordpress themes responsive) and find them so helpful and informative!
I am currently used to making websites for clients by creating a custom child theme based on twenty ten. At the moment I have a default wordpress child theme that I use as a starting point for most of the websites I create. I am now wanting to start creating responsive wordpress sites using twenty twelve as a parent. How would you recommend I go about converting my current default site (or an existing site) to using the twenty twelve theme? Should I start from scratch with my style.css file and what about the custom functions I have included (which mostly came from your WordPress 3: Building Child Themes course – thankyou for that). Also I have custom page templates, custom categories and have changed many of the php files (header.php, footer.php etc). This sounds like it’s going to be a lot of work.
Sorry if this makes no sense or is too vague but I would really appreciate your help and advice 🙂 Thankyou
@paul.cass82: It is impolite to interrupt another poster’s ongoing thread with a question of your own that has nothing to do with the original topic. Please post your own topic.
Sorry about that I’m new to this. Although I thought the question was related to the thread as I was talking about using the twenty twelve theme as a base for a child theme.
@paul.cass82: It’s a common mistake when you first start with forums. Send me a message at designisphilosophy.com and I’ll answer.
@mor10
Do you have any near future plans of a lynda.com course using twenty twelve? As someone who is new to WordPress and my skills are mainly html and css, I really struggle with simple things like adding a footer widget area to twenty twelve (which i am trying to figure out now).
Landon
@landonab: Though I can’t talk about upcoming and in-production courses on lynda.com what I can say is that if I were to update the Child Themes course, it would be logical to follow the same line of reasoning used when deciding to use Twenty Ten as the base for the original course. Pardon the vagueness.
@mor10 now I have to go watch it again to get the reasoning bit 🙂
Thanks for the response and look forward to more courses!
@landonab: I’ll save you the trouble. The reasoning for going with Twenty Ten originally was that it was the default theme for WordPress and that it is a rock solid baseline theme that is well documented and easy to work with. As this forum thread implies, that is exactly how I feel about Twenty Twelve as well. Draw your own conclusions ;o)
I was looking forward to using Twenty Twelve as a responsive base but after encountering the IE8 issue I’m sad to say I have to forgo it.
The refusal to cater for the fourth most popular browser globally is a surprising and disappointing move. A broken navigation menu for 1 in 8 visitors just isn’t an acceptable compromise.
Some of the attitudes expressed in this discussion (e.g. “the user should upgrade their browser or tough”) are additionally surprising and pretty much anathema to the precept that is graceful degradation and demonstrates ignorance to the spectrum of plausibilities as to why a browser user is limited to a specific browser version.
As mor10 has elucidated, it is our role to deliver the content rather than poorly attempting to dictate how we feel it should be received. Browser usage as it exists and browser usage as we would like it be are incongruent. WordPress should endeavor to pander to reality instead of subjective idealism.
At the very least, an IE8 fallback superior to the current implementation should have been applied. Not all theme users possess the technical know-how to remedy this themselves.
I’m certainly considering using Twenty Twelve as a parent theme instead of a “framework” because of its balance between features and simplicity. I don’t understand why this theme wouldn’t have a widgetized footer, though. Almost everyone is going to want to have a footer that they can control. I’d even like to see the ability to upload a footer image, just like the way you can upload a background image.
I also love that this theme is responsive because in today’s day and age, everyone’s site should be expected to look good on a tablet or phone. I’d love to see this theme use a simple grid structure, though, rather than the hard-coded content and widget area. This would let us take advantage of the new static home page features to make a really nice layout with some simple styling. For example putting some elements in a two or three column layout.
Also, to chime in on the browser compatibility discussion… I do understand why the theme designer would want to keep this default WordPress theme simple, browser compatibility is by far the hardest CSS coding out there and way beyond a typical user’s ability to address. So I feel that browser compatibility should be a huge priority in a theme designed for this purpose. This theme isn’t even distributed with WordPress core yet and there are hundreds of thousands of sites using it on WordPress.com as their *production* site theme.
