I hate to make a "me too" like post, but as soon as I read his biography, I thought "... wait we should stop supporting X browser because some kid doesn't know how to support it too?".
Are we now just leveling the playing field so experience is irrelevant, and kids just out of college should be able to compete with those who have been working the field for ages (ages which I might add included a time when IE6 was the dominant browser, and you ignored it at your own peril).
Re: fresh out of college kids competing with the oldtimers, I'm thinking that yes, the field is being leveled and certain types of experience are worth less and less. The greater the pace of innovation, the greater the chance that new tools are adopted that make certain knowledge obsolete. This is good in many ways, but it also requires constant learning and change, which is frustrating. Not that it's right or wrong, but I think it's the reality. Once this plays out, I really think we'll see calls for unionization, which would be unfortunate.
Re: supporting IE6, there's a cost associated with that. So if someone shows me that 20% of my traffic comes from IE6 users and that traffic is profitable traffic (enough profit to offset the costs) then yes, let's support IE6. But I think the payoff on supporting IE6 is becoming lower and lower.
> we should stop supporting X browser because some kid doesn't know how to support it too?
No, we should look seriously at whether we need to keep doing things the cheap labor can't perform anymore.
Supporting IE6 is a Black Art, and keeping people who can perform Black Arts reliably is expensive. I suppose the traditional comparison is to COBOL codebases and greenscreen IBM development. If thinking about that convinces you IE6 isn't the mainstream anymore, go for it. The point is that increasing the number of different, and I mean really different, browsers your team has to know about is not free, as the cheap labor only knows the relatively tight cluster of post-IE6 graphical browsers. The article's the evidence of that.
... and keeping people who can perform Black Arts reliably is expensive.
I have nothing to add ("me, too!"), but would like to point out that this sounds like a line from a fantasy novel written by an economist. If such a thing actually exists, I would love to hear of it.
For the majority of websites it's not so much a Black Art as something anyone who designed websites more than 5 years ago should manage competently (assuming there aren't unreasonable requirements such as pixel perfection or reproducing every hover effect). The comparison is more finding someone that knows how to program Python instead of copy/pasting PHP scripts.
Html and css were not designed to be an arcane programming language, but a simple layout markup. If well designed then copy paste should work fine. Arguably we didnt quite make that simplicity, but I think your Python PHP comment is way off as far as html css is concerned...
Are we now just leveling the playing field so experience is irrelevant, and kids just out of college should be able to compete with those who have been working the field for ages (ages which I might add included a time when IE6 was the dominant browser, and you ignored it at your own peril).