Sprinkling a little jQuery in a page to add interactive menus and AJAXify some form submissions was quite nice.
What I don't miss from the jQuery times is how painfully limited CSS was, e.g. to add rounded corners to an element (e.g. a button) required something like 11 nested elements (4 corners + 4 edges + 3 rows to contain them). The corners themselves needed image files: to support different background colours you could either use GIFs with transparent backgrounds, but they appeared "jagged" due to aliasing; you could use PNGs which support an whole alpha channel, but lose IE support; or you could create a bunch of different versions for each occasion.
What I don't miss from the jQuery times is how painfully limited CSS was, e.g. to add rounded corners to an element (e.g. a button) required something like 11 nested elements (4 corners + 4 edges + 3 rows to contain them). The corners themselves needed image files: to support different background colours you could either use GIFs with transparent backgrounds, but they appeared "jagged" due to aliasing; you could use PNGs which support an whole alpha channel, but lose IE support; or you could create a bunch of different versions for each occasion.
I'm glad I do backend dev these days ;)