But regardless! Let me know how it goes. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised and be preaching your strategy for new projects moving fwd.

All of your points are definitely valid. We considered everything you mentioned, but at the end of the day decided to go this route. The IE7/IE6 stylesheet is extra work, but the way we have it set up I don’t think it will take much more than a day or two to get it to work 95% as well as our CSS tables do. It’s something Mike is tackling in the coming week or two, so if it doesn’t turn out to be as easy as we think maybe we’ll change our mind.

Adam

Here’s a website with examples of META tags you can use in IE8 to force IE7 compatibility:
http://www.thesitewizard.com/webdesign/prepare-your-site-for-ie8.shtml

Being a web developer myself, this post leaves me extremely conflicted. Of course, I strive to be as compliant as possible, whenever possible. But one thing I’ve learned the hard way, year after year, client by client, is that 100% compliant websites (that attempt backwards-compatibility) lead to two things: much more work than is necessary for you, the developer, and a worse user experience for at least a couple of years.

You wrote a post just the other day that I liked, about not thinking *too* long-term when making business decisions. To me, this post should be an extension of that idea. The technicalities of your ecommerce layout is essentially a business decision – something that will determine how successful your website is and how much work you will have to put into it. I absolutely guarantee that IE8 won’t have majority market share at *least* until the next time you change your designs. That is the time to be thinking more seriously about IE8. When IE6 came out, it took a good couple years for IE7 to even the playing field. IE8 will be no different. And coding for a 2-year minority is like releasing a product today that a market doesn’t exist for until 2 year for now. You should be planning that product, of course, but in the meantime, something easier for you to maintain and sell should be released today.

That being said – you expressed your concern that without programming for IE8, you’re forced to use either tables or floating divs. While this is technically true, there are solutions out there that make floating divs extremely to understand & use. Blueprint CSS is an *excellent* CSS framework that we use extensively:
http://www.blueprintcss.org/

Also, this is a very important note: you mentioned IE8 and issues with the new “compatibility view”. There is actually a way for you, as a web developer, to force your website into compatibility view, thus causing the user to not have to choose themselves. It’s as simple as a META tag:

Here’s the joke: Despite IE8′s enhanced standards compliance, there’s one issue – I’ve been keeping tabs on this subject for the past 6 months, and many web developers are apathetic to IE8. For the time being, the general consensus is to simply throw that META tag in your site, have it render exactly as it did in IE7, and call it a day… I’m not saying it’s a longterm solution. But you know what, I agree. IE8 has no market share, and it won’t have significant market share for at least another 1-2 years. That is the time to overhaul code. In the meantime, tools like Blueprint CSS do an amazing job making CSS2 easy to use in a modern-day standards-compliant way.