Hopefully not chiming in too late here, great discussion so far.

Just when much of the IE6 fanbase decided enough was enough and began the upgrade path to IE8, another large set of corporates come into view for us though. Parts of the Asian market mainly; China, Malaysia, others.

As I've read so far, it's clear that everyone is pretty much right in their views: it's a tough call to announce an all-platforms framework, while at the same time denouncing support for a few platforms, coupled with the need to reach into the future by making the most of technologies that will benefit everyone (eventually..).

While I agree with Ryan's mention of BBC's Cut The Mustard approach, I still have to acknowledge Daryl's very first comment, "The client has an expectation that whatever device they go on it should look the same.".. and I can only hope that some serious 360's happen when Matt's countdown really hits home.

On the costing front, I already add an IE factor to projects with legacy browsers. I'd be really interested to read some customer stories and scenarios on the ways that they can make allowances, so we can use that as ammo for those that won't. Bringing progressive enhancement to the party to save the customer money, backed up by hard stats and success stories hopefully can help - Alan's "open and honest approach".

So maybe cutting IE6 lose won't be a realistic option for some of our projects, others too, but the plug-in architecture and Open Source liveliness of Adapt made me read Chris' post a few times over, and generally agreeing that there's an opportunity here for fringe projects to supply browser support and plugins. Sven, I understand we're discussing Core here, so is it a possibility to identify not only the baseline specification of the chosen technologies, but also keep a running and responsibly active Issues list of weak points in older browsers?

Perhaps providing "support" for older browsers might not be the way forward, but perhaps providing some level of support for the contributors whose intention it is to bolt on fixes or otherwise, to include IE6, is an option. It might even be enjoyable to make lists of the ways that IE actively destroys everyone's hard work, Quirks Mode has certainly enjoyed many years of doing it!