Dear Sam, I Respectfully Disagree Or Why All The Hoopla About Advanced CSS Properties

Earlier today I read a great post by fellow Fusion Ad publisher, Sam Brown.  It is a well thought out, well written article about educating your clients and being the boss.  For the most part, I do agree with Sam on a lot of his points.  We do need to work back and forth with our clients on ideas, and we need to educate them that all browsers do not work the same.  But settling for my sites looking like IE6 in IE6 just doesn’t sit right with me.  I don’t consider myself someone to talk down progressive enhancement, in fact, if I found a way to monetize it, I probably would.  It’s the new green, or is it black?

Look, I don’t complain about advanced CSS properties being used, I just don’t see the point. Support isn’t there in all the major browsers.  So why use them? (Shocking, I know) For the way I work, it actually would create more work to add advanced CSS properties, then to try to cover for them in lacking browsers.  Ha! Why cover for them, you ask?  Don’t be stupid you say, just forget about the lacking browsers - it’s their fault, not ours.  Your clients won’t care.

And that’s where you’re wrong.  Well, my clients in fact might not care, but you can sure as hell bet I do.  I take pride in my work.  I want it to look beautiful everywhere.  There is more than one way to get rounded corners working in a design. Advanced CSS is probably the easiest, but I’m not looking for the easy way out.

There is much pride and joy to be had for working with determination and passion solving problems that face my profession to deliver stunning sites that look and function the same in every major browser.  Lest we forget, many of our “cutting edge” solutions came from solving these very problems.

Perhaps, I can only really explain it one way:

“I want my sites to look Safari in Safari, and Safari in every other major browser out there. - Noah Stokes

Note: I do not hope, wish or intend this article to be a bashing on progressive enchancement. It is our future as developers and I embrace it with eager anticipation. It’s just not all here yet. Neither are flying cars, but I will be the first on board when it/they arrive.