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Thanks for the comments Dark.
I may be missing something here but I really don't see how colour accuracy matters for web design, especially in the case of IE. Then again I only do a very limited amount of freelance web work, so I'm not an expert.
The way I see it is, because of the nature of the web - and the fact that as you say, most people use IE which is not colour aware, that nothing's going to be rendered accurately anyway. You do indeed have to cater for IE users, but nomatter how perfect you make things at your end, with a 100% sRGB monitor and absolutely perfect colour rendering, what the user sees is not going to match anyway. By using IE as a target, any hint of colour accuracy is thrown out the window because at the viewers side, the colours are not going to be accurate. sRGB might be what the users are supposed to see but it's not what they will see. So you can still cater for IE perfectly when designing on a wide gamut monitor - so long as you don't design exclusively for IE (and for the sake of web standards and interoperability, I sure hope you don't).
Long story short, it doesn't matter if your monitor is colour accurate to sRGB or not, because the user's display won't be. Having a wide gamut monitor doesn't stop you designing for sRGB. You can emulate sRGB perfectly fine with a colour managed browser, or by turning down the saturation. But the users can't, so it doesn't really matter how accurate it is at your, so long as it looks approximately OK in sRGB. Designing on an sRGB monitor won't change this (or at least, I can't see any way it will).
I'd measured a half dozen or so monitors at work (uni computing lab) and every one of them had a dE of above 5, none of them had a gamut that properly matched sRGB, and not one had an accurate sRGB gamma curve either (most were close to 2.2 though).
While much of this is just my opinion, feel free to correct any facts that might be wrong. But as I see it, if your audience does not have accurate colour reproduction the best you can ever do is just approximate. And in my opinion, with the correct adjustments, a wide gamut monitor can approximate sRGB perfectly fine.
Now the situation changes if you don't have accurate colour reproduction either (for example due to lack of hardware calibrator) but in this case an sRGB monitor is still not going to be fully accurate, and downloading/copying someone else's profile is probably going to get you closer to sRGB than most typical desktop monitors anyway.
Again this is really my opinion more than anything. I'm not trying to bundle you all into a "doesn't care about colour accuracy" group, but gain, I may be missing something, but I just don't see why a wide gamut monitor would make it unacceptably difficult to design for IE or sRGB. Since the output will never be accurate whatever you do, all you can do is to reasonably approximate what it is likely to be.
I may be missing something here but I really don't see how colour accuracy matters for web design, especially in the case of IE. Then again I only do a very limited amount of freelance web work, so I'm not an expert.
The way I see it is, because of the nature of the web - and the fact that as you say, most people use IE which is not colour aware, that nothing's going to be rendered accurately anyway. You do indeed have to cater for IE users, but nomatter how perfect you make things at your end, with a 100% sRGB monitor and absolutely perfect colour rendering, what the user sees is not going to match anyway. By using IE as a target, any hint of colour accuracy is thrown out the window because at the viewers side, the colours are not going to be accurate. sRGB might be what the users are supposed to see but it's not what they will see. So you can still cater for IE perfectly when designing on a wide gamut monitor - so long as you don't design exclusively for IE (and for the sake of web standards and interoperability, I sure hope you don't).
Long story short, it doesn't matter if your monitor is colour accurate to sRGB or not, because the user's display won't be. Having a wide gamut monitor doesn't stop you designing for sRGB. You can emulate sRGB perfectly fine with a colour managed browser, or by turning down the saturation. But the users can't, so it doesn't really matter how accurate it is at your, so long as it looks approximately OK in sRGB. Designing on an sRGB monitor won't change this (or at least, I can't see any way it will).
I'd measured a half dozen or so monitors at work (uni computing lab) and every one of them had a dE of above 5, none of them had a gamut that properly matched sRGB, and not one had an accurate sRGB gamma curve either (most were close to 2.2 though).
While much of this is just my opinion, feel free to correct any facts that might be wrong. But as I see it, if your audience does not have accurate colour reproduction the best you can ever do is just approximate. And in my opinion, with the correct adjustments, a wide gamut monitor can approximate sRGB perfectly fine.
Now the situation changes if you don't have accurate colour reproduction either (for example due to lack of hardware calibrator) but in this case an sRGB monitor is still not going to be fully accurate, and downloading/copying someone else's profile is probably going to get you closer to sRGB than most typical desktop monitors anyway.
Again this is really my opinion more than anything. I'm not trying to bundle you all into a "doesn't care about colour accuracy" group, but gain, I may be missing something, but I just don't see why a wide gamut monitor would make it unacceptably difficult to design for IE or sRGB. Since the output will never be accurate whatever you do, all you can do is to reasonably approximate what it is likely to be.
