AlexAitken.net

The grid-based design be­hind much of today’s web was re­vealed to me a few years back as I was serving as in-house Tech­nic­al Lead for a ma­jor cor­por­ate re­design. My team worked with de­sign­ers from an ex­tern­al agency, and as their comps star­ted com­ing across the wire it was quickly clear that visu­al com­pon­ents were be­ing aligned to a four-column grid. Every­one liked the or­der and or­gan­iz­a­tion af­forded by the grid. When it came time to turn comps in­to code we went with the 960.gs css frame­work and to this day, design and de­vel­op­ment of new solu­tions takes place with­in the con­text of the grid.

Al­most all ap­plicatons we in­ter­act with on the web are form driv­en. User-sup­plied data in; sys­tem con­clu­sion out. To be sure, a dec­ade plus of ex­per­i­en­ce and in­nov­a­tion has seen UX im­prove by leaps and bounds. But we’re still build­ing forms, and to that end I al­ways en­joy re-vis­it­ing the ba­sic ques­tion of how to build them well. Here’s the es­sence of a re­cent stab.

IFrames get a bad rap. In the early days their cross-browser sup­port was spotty and even now, in­cor­por­at­ing them in mis­sion-crit­ic­al de­ploy­ments re­quires a good reas­on and a con­sidered ap­proach. But there are good reas­ons. And giv­en a per­fect storm of cap­ab­il­it­ies and lim­it­a­tions, an iframe can serve as the av­en­ue to a seam­less ex­per­i­ence where user in­ter­ac­tion would oth­er­wise be punc­tu­ated by popups, scroll­bars, or host switches.

IE6 is in the ICU. Developers are still forced to accommodate the 8-year-old browser’s maverick rendering engine but we also find ourselves on the dawn of a new era that isn’t defined by a market-leading millstone. IE7 and 8 come markedly closer than their little brother to true standards support. Firefox, long the coder’s favorite, has found larger love and the webkit rendering engine of Safari and Chrome continues to walk the line. We are, in effect, very close if not already at the IE6 tipping point whose far side promises unencumbered development to current and native browser capabilities.