Fantastic article describing something much better than I could. How the web sucks because it’s too heavy.
I mean, it’s ridiculous at this point. Why? He explains the situation this way.
So for web programmers and web designers, it’s just cool to work on the next thing because complexity. I think it’s a bit bullshit.
What he calls complexity is just a Look At How Big My Dick Is contest. It’s not to make the web better, it’s to make brogrammers –I mean we had to come up with a term for them- happy because of how smart they are. That’s unhealthy. What it does is that it allows people to solve problems with one skill. Thanks to hardware getting better Brute Force works, basically. But it doesn’t really solve anything that would allow a better experience for all of us. That’s why despite computers vastly superior to what they were ten years ago, websites still load and break browsers. It’s fucking bullshit.
It’s Feature over Fix and it’s an endemic problem from the Web to Windows to everything.
Solving issues of rendering a website in countless formats and rendering engines while making it fast AND profitable is challenging and a complex problem with many more angles and more responsibilities than simply go “let’s code some cool, hard shit”. The funny thing is, in the end it’s actually easier to say “fuck yall use only this, it’s nifty we worked hard to be able to have parallax effects” than go toward more simplicity that works every time for everyone.
Engineers love to do hard and useless shit all the time like run Windows 95 on a 3DS. What the actual fuck.
Which brings me to the second point of why the web has become an obscure creation process: they don’t want you to learn. Designers and programmers don’t want you to make websites easily, that’s their jobs. The more those jobs have become a norm –they didn’t exist 15 years ago- the more complex making a nice website has evolved into. You have to modify a .html a .css and a .js now to do anything, with no consistency whatsoever, libs dependency it’s a nightmare than only people getting paid to do so, do.
I hope it reverses back to what it was. All tech-literate people today know that any text article should load instantly even with shitty connections and a couple pictures.
Engineers and designers reverting back to minimalism –not the fake one we see online these days, actual minimalism- would change things more than buying a bigger data plan or a new phone.