Re: Make wp-admin-bar relative position and inline within header instead of footer / absolute position?
Ah hadn’t considered load times as Boone points out, although I don’t really see that there would be a huge issue there and there are many more things going on that do cause page content rendering issues. When I see document elements flowed in this way and visually re-ordered it tends to be from a somewhat misguided belief that it benefits anything even though the supposed benefits have never been proved in any testing and somewhat disproved from an accessibility point of view. In light of this elements purpose I would actually tend to think it’s best placed as it is, if I were designing a theme from scratch I would probably go along with it’s positioning in the footer area, but… one does need to consider text rendering and assistive devices if this element and it’s links are important then where do they fall in the document flow when the page is read by screen readers or rendered sans styles plain text, these are considerations all too often overlooked.
One thing to consider though is how IE6 handles things or not as the case may be, position :fixed is not understood by IE6 look at the default theme in that browser!
If staying with position:fixed then do add rules for IE6 overridding fixed with absolute using Conditional Comment stylesheets targeted for IE6 or lte IE 7 and use star selector filters for any IE6 specific rules. IE6 sadly is not quite as dead as many would love to believe and many companies and organizations are still using it and not able or willing to upgrade.
