While I agree with your sentiment, this is not really true in the Real World (tm).
My philosophy, as a webdev of...8 or 9 years now... is that you should test in IE so that the IE user experience is passable / acceptable. IE users should be able to access your site and not see a broken site. It can be degraded; it can even automatically redirect them to a page that says "your browser is so old and busted we can't show you our new hotness -- go upgrade, biatch."
There are 2 main reasons for this:
1. If a user views your site in a shitty browser, and it looks broken, they aren't going to think "oh, maybe my browser sucks" they are going to think "why does this website suck?"
2. Look at your analytics data. It's entirely possible that your Techno-Progressive-Hipster site is purely Webkit/Gecko based browsers, but it more than likely isn't -- chances are you've got somewhere between 20% to 70% of your users using IE. Would you really not test your site for that many of your userbase? Are you really going to reject that much of your traffic?
The sites I work with are pretty progressive about their IE support and are willing to only support back to IE8 (or in one case, IE7), so IE6 is no longer a concern. It's fine to advocate using better browsers, and it's even fine to design your site to the W3C specs explicitly (eg. go for the gold with your CSS and HTML5), but you should always test and at least provide your IE users (however many they are) with a degraded, yet stable, experience, at least. Base it on your analytics data.
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While I agree with your sentiment, this is not really true in the Real World (tm).
My philosophy, as a webdev of...8 or 9 years now... is that you should test in IE so that the IE user experience is passable / acceptable. IE users should be able to access your site and not see a broken site. It can be degraded; it can even automatically redirect them to a page that says "your browser is so old and busted we can't show you our new hotness -- go upgrade, biatch."
There are 2 main reasons for this:
The sites I work with are pretty progressive about their IE support and are willing to only support back to IE8 (or in one case, IE7), so IE6 is no longer a concern. It's fine to advocate using better browsers, and it's even fine to design your site to the W3C specs explicitly (eg. go for the gold with your CSS and HTML5), but you should always test and at least provide your IE users (however many they are) with a degraded, yet stable, experience, at least. Base it on your analytics data.