Patrick O’Neill is a web developer living and working in Brooklyn, NY.

While responsive web design with CSS media queries is rippling through the web design community, I question its practical use for business websites. Jason Grigsby has an excellent write-up of the technical reasons for skepticism, so I won’t go into too much detail reiterating them.

Browser sniffing is bad. We all know this, but there’s a massive gorilla in the room: Internet Explorer. While needing JavaScript workarounds specifically for IE are far rarer than CSS, I still find myself needing to use different code for IE – when animating PNG-24s, for instance. Most of us (at least, those of us using jQuery) have grown accustomed to using jQuery.browser for this purpose – even if we know it’s not the best practice.

I’ve seen a couple variations of Paul Irish’s solution to target styles to versions of Internet Explorer and found them all lacking in one critical aspect: the ability to target IEs less than or equal to a given version number.

Lately, I’ve been spending a good deal of time evaluating résumés, poring over code samples, and interviewing potential candidates for front-end web development jobs. There is a huge variety of skill, experience, and craftsmanship out there. Most of what gets to my inbox ends up being mediocre, some of it is awful, a small subset is good.

I’ve been working on a little JavaScript library, which I’m calling jsBASE. It provides two independent pieces of functionality. First, it loads a queue of scripts asynchronously to prevent blocking. And second, it acts as a runner – executing functionality based on a manifest.