I just saw this video where Miriam Suzanne talks about how web was built to be device-agnostic and how that’s the reason CSS is built the way it is — with its (in)famous cascade. And I love that web. It’s cool and nice... Until it’s not.
We have clients that want pixel perfect websites (yeah, they’re not extinct); That think the focus outline style is strange and ugly and want it gone; That straight up say stuff like: “Those people are not my target group!”.
We have designers that come up with stuff that can’t even be rendered on screen without burning through the client browser’s resources. And then the client comes and says something like: “It works fine on my latest $5000 laptop.” Or even worse: “Why is this epilepsy attack-causing animation so slow? And make it more flashy!”
How did we get here? What happened?
How did the web that was made so people could share information free of constraint became this heavy and bloated thing that can be used properly only latest and fastest machines with fastest internet connection?
And I know about progressive enhancement, but that means not everyone will be able to see this eye-bleeding monstrosity we’re building and everybody needs to see it, no one can escape! And it takes more time/money to build it.
</sarcasm>
This is something that I’ve been pondering over for some time now and I want to know what other people think and maybe find some answers.
And here’s the video I mentioned at the beginning: Why Is CSS So Weird? - YouTube. It’s awesome, I suggest you watch it.
Comments, go!
And where else do I post this so those clients and/or designers can see it and possibly offer some answers?
Top comments (2)
Hi Zoran, first of all great read! I agree on this much, web is bloated and CSS is weird. Question is, why is that so and in which direction is this going?
I think that any technology is treated like a tool. Let's take hammer for example (you can use it to build things or to hurt yourself if you use it in a wrong way). In some way, this is actually what is happening to web today.
We are "hammering" features and shinny new (essentially useless) effects and stuff in some crazy competition among web sites and information providers.
I think there are several problems here:
Web features (front and back) are essentially buildups. "Whenever something gets too complicated raise it to the next level. Proof of that is kzilion of different frameworks, frameworks for frameworks, dependencies for handling dependencies, and additional code designed to organize and orchestrate even more complexity... by adding more complexity.
Web development and UX turned into a MTV, with shiny over quality and owners love it. In my experience I had projects where we installed 20+ dependencies only to accomplish something that is essentially visual tuning of something that was already good and useful. Shiny over speed and quality I would say.
Clients care about look and feel, functionality is 2nd place... For example, "Why is CSS so Weird?" post has 1800+ views in several days (from comments you can conclude that most of them are developers or industry related people. Author of this test has 2k subscribers.
I did a quick YouTube search on "most shiny button css" and I got this youtube.com/watch?v=uNjfslp6Qnc , 190k subscribers :)
To wrap up (because I could go on and on).. there are two things.
1) Less is More - We should appreciate minimalism when possible.
2) Pareto principle - roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes - Meaning, we could probably accomplish 80% of web experiences with only 20% of bloated stuff, if we would just focus and be guided with minimalism instead of "next shiny thing".
Peace and out
Thank you for your comment my good sir!
Dependencies for handling dependencies -- I laughed at that one more than I should.
We as a society have entered a stage of mass-production, mass-media and other mass-isms long time ago and I get that competition requires speed of delivery, but almost all UX studies that I read say that consumers don't like the new shiny things... And I'm off to a philosophy of consumersim, I'm gonna stop here.
What I want to know is why overdoing it so much when so much less is what we actually want and need.