Last month, I had posed the question: When can we hide from IE5/Win?. In retrospect, I probably should've titled the entry: When can I hide from IE5/Win?. Because, as others have rightfully pointed out, what matters most are the statistics from your own site, not others.

But the reason for that entry hasn't changed. I wanted to take the pulse of IE5/Win in a very non-scientific, general way. And there were some good numbers throughout the comments. Essentially, IE5/Win users make up an average of 4% in the stats that were collected. Some less, some more, of course. So, my curiosity has been cured. IE5/Win numbers are (not surprisingly) dwindling -- what that means for you and your site can vary.

But catering to IE5/Win isn't that hard

Sure, this is true is most cases. For someone who already knows the pitfalls to avoid when authoring CSS for IE5/Win, that is. On this site, for instance, I've pulled out the necessary hacks (the obvious ones, anyway) that make IE play nice into their own separate stylesheet. There's really only a handful of them, so on the surface it appears that I'm not doing much to make IE5/Win look like everyone else. But what about CSS newbies, those that are trying to grasp the basics? What I was trying to get at in the initial entry was that it would make learning this stuff much easier without having to explain box model problems, etc.

It's not impossible to bend IE5/Win into the same designs that more standards-compliant browsers render, but it can't hurt to take a look at your site's statistics, getting a handle on what your audience is. It could help in deciding how much bending you want to do.