We should look into not serving OOUI styles for IE 6 and 7. That might be a better way of providing grade C support (T124905) than trying to make the style look right.
OOUI PHP is mostly using fairly semantic HTML for the widgets, and the demo page looks almost good when stripped of its styles:
We could probably make it pretty good by switching some <div>s to <span>s and maybe adding some <p>s in strategic locations. That would surely be a good thing to do anyway.
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Declined | None | T124905 OOUI interfaces are hardly usable on IE 6 & 7 | |||
| Declined | None | T124932 Look into not serving OOUI styles for IE 6 and 7 |
We'd probably need ResourceLoader support for IE conditional comments, or bypass it for loading the styles.
For a more practical example, here's how Special:BlockList currently looks on IE 6:
And here's how it would look without any OOjs UI PHP styles:
After weighing in at a longer conversation with @matmarex the necessary work needed to make several widgets acceptable rendered in IE 6&7, also with regard of future maintenance and extensibility, not serving the styles to these two browsers and let it just render native browser widgets seems to be the best solution.
I'm inclined to agree as well. Looking at the second image in T124932#1970430, we might also want to use <fieldset> for OouiHtmlForm.
Implementation isn't trivial though, because we have quite a few abstraction layers interacting at the edges. If we want to exclude with conditional comments, that is. Not sure that's worth it.
Might be better to improve the semantic nature of the HTML. Then, even with the broken CSS applied, it will render more gracefully from a better starting point.
If we really want to unload some CSS, I'd recommend we reconsider and instead evaluate possibility of a "Universal stylesheet" for IE6-7 (with all regular styles unloaded, not just OOUI, in favour of a super generic base stylesheet - skin agonistic).
As discussed on https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/273761/, fieldset & legend are particularly difficult to style accurately - so this may be to the detriment of grade A browsers.
T159178: Use <span> rather than <div> for things that are not meant to be block elements will probably make this more tenable. Also, we did T131823: Reconsider OOUI's intentional avoidance of `<fieldset>` and `<legend>` elements due to browser inconsistencies some time ago (<legend> was temporarily reverted due to T151061).
Happily declining this with T232563: Drop IE6 and IE7 basic compatibility and security support approved.