The more things change
I spent the last couple of days of last week working on a new website, where we are taking a fully progressively enhanced approach to the user interface. It really did feel good to be working this way. Not having to worry about things like non-CSS drop shadows or corners freed up my head to more carefully consider other choices. Like laying out quite a bit of a busy header using absolute positioning. Not something I’d done before. But starting with markup that is just the way you want it makes you more inventive about keeping it that way.
The other thing I noticed is that the details still remained and demanded attention. I’m not sure I was expecting this. Buttons, clean and simple though they were, still needed to be teased into the correct vertical alignment. CSS still needed to anticipate a change in text-size that would start shifting elements out of their original positions. It was still as tricky as ever. IE6 was still a pain, although not, it turned out, as much as Firefox 2, which has quickly become a persona non grata around here, due to its lack of display:inline-block. Who’d have thought?
Anyway. The process was initially frustrating because I thought I should be making faster progress than I was, but it ended up being kind of a relief. It’s good to know that thought, consideration and creativity are still as necessary as ever. Just used more in the right places.