Google has too much time on its hands

It took several people, several iterations, and several months, but Google has finally — finally! — redesigned the buttons that you can click on in Gmail.

Whew.

Read an abridged version of the story — with comments! — here. A taste:

If we were going to undertake the task of recreating basic HTML form controls, we knew there were a lot of details that need to be accounted for and thought through. Like all the possible states of a button: resting, hover, focus, active, toggled-on, and disabled. There are also the accessibility ramifications of creating non-standard controls. I’m sure we haven’t factored in or solved every access issue yet. But engineers are working on that.