There is a word going around, responsive, and I want to say up front that it does not frighten me. It intrigues me. It is a challenge, and I have always liked challenges.
But underneath the excitement there is a weight I feel keenly, which is the responsibility to encompass every device. Any and every one of them. When someone reaches your work on a device you never imagined and meets an awkward, broken version of it, that lands on you. You spent months making it beautiful, and they found the one version that was not.
The trouble is that you cannot please every device, and trying to becomes a kind of mundane bookkeeping. A caveat here for this width. An exception there for that browser. I keep thinking there must be an easier way than this.
In the beginning there was the World Wide Web Consortium, and for a long time the standards they set did a great deal of good. I only wish more people had followed them. Internet Explorer reads a thing one way, Gecko reads it another, Safari reads it a third, and each is fairly sure it is right.
Different browsers, different engines, different sizes, different rules. Add them all together and building honestly for the web in this moment feels like sitting in a room where no one quite agrees on what a sentence means.
And yet I would rather have this problem than the old one. The old problem was that the web only worked in one place. This one is that it works everywhere, badly, and that is a far better problem to be given. I just wish it were easier, and I expect I will keep wishing that for years.