If they are go­ing to make a big deal out of it, wouldn't it be a bit less hyp­o­crit­i­cal if their site would val­i­date? So if peo­ple ac­tu­al­ly stopped us­ing In­ter­net Ex­plor­er 6, what will be the next ex­cuse to com­plain about how hard the life of a web de­vel­op­er is? Like no­body else in IT has to sup­port odd sys­tems that won't go away. If you don't like that then get out of the web de­vel­op­ment busi­ness if you can. But most of those HTML mon­keys prob­a­bly can't, lack­ing the de­sign skills to make it into a prop­er de­sign job and lack­ing the de­vel­op­ment skills to make it into a prop­er de­vel­op­ment job. They are the IE6 of the me­dia in­dus­try.

Most oth­er de­vel­op­ers have skills that they can use to au­to­mate part of their own tasks, so the bor­ing parts of their jobs have since ages been re­placed by make, au­tomake, au­to­conf, svn, apt, etc. and some can even de­vel­op their own IDE to suit all their needs. But web de­vel­op­ers only have the skills to blog about the prob­lems they have, which leads to a huge pile of posts and web­sites about is­sues, and hard­ly any­body who ac­tu­al­ly pro­vides a so­lu­tion that doesn't in­volve read­ing some semi-of­fi­cial way-to-long tu­to­r­i­al only to be able to man­u­al­ly im­ple­ment a workaround, which you then would have to re­peat for every site you build. No won­der they get tired of sup­port­ing IE6 and the only so­lu­tion they see it to make it go away.