We have just hit lunchtime in this and I am really enjoying it. Andy Clarke is a great presenter/host and knows his stuff so its always a great learning workshop.

I think the main thing that seems to come from a lot of the presentations or workshops I have been to recently is “Progressive Enhancement”. A lot of this has been banded around the web in various blogs. It is mainly based around the idea that the web is always evolving and enhancing, and that a website does not need to look the same in every browser. Dan Cenderholm provided the best answer to this here (which is a great site!).

I suppose the most difficult thing about this is getting yourself out of that mindset. As a graphic designer at heart I find it really difficult if work is not finished properly and to my perfecting standards, and I think that is why I find it so hard to let go concerning IE6. It dosn’t help that my work stats show half our users still use this (so called browser). I ended up spending far to much time getting this website finished for IE6 just because I was thinking in that mindset and it didn’t really occur to me, luckily I didn’t let anything in that progress hold me back from the design I wanted to implement and using advanced techniques for Gecko/Webkit based browsers. I will be and I am constantly adding new features to fully utilize these features and will be doing a project on the iphone and CSS3 coming up soon. I won’t be supporting IE6 in the new CSS I am doing and a lot will not work properly in IE7 either but importantly it won’t break the site, it just won’t be as pretty as Firefox, Safari and Opera.

In conclusion I think it is really important that as web designers we push forwards standards and semantically correct code, the latest browsers allow us to do this (well some of IE7) and constantly looking to implement the new features and enhancements the future thinking browsers allow us. At the end of the day as long as its not broken in IE6/7 and still functions why not let the people who use the next generation browsers enjoy a much richer browsing experience. Now just to get myself out of the mindset and convince my boss

Will update this post this evening at the end of the day