Camp Olowalu is a fabulous place. Yes, we’re staying in a tent, but it’s a tent with a raised wooden floor, a sink, and a hot shower. Steps from the beach. There are (minimal) electric lights (but no plugs) and even WiFi. Not great WiFi, mind, but perfectly serviceable WiFi. Or it should be, except that we’ve raised a generation of web hacks who build sites that demo well on their gigabit internet connections with current generation hardware, but fail miserably in the real world — more often than you might expect. So this WiFi, which solidly provides hundreds of kilobits per second and is up over 90% of the time, becomes mostly unusable because of the nearsightedness of the web hack who coded it.
I noticed this today when reading an article on typography. It was entertaining and well-written, but it was all-but-unreadable because the lazy way in which the web site was coded meant that when the WiFi glitched, the page disappeared and was replaced with an error message. When the WiFi returned, so did the page but your scrolling position was lost. Many images never displayed at all. My experience with typographers is that they tend to understand that readability and accessibility are key attributes of good design. Poor design excludes people with vision problems (myopia, cataracts), perceptual problems (dyslexia), and spotty internet connections. So the author was extolling the virtues of a type face that has survived and thrived by being robust through time and changes in technology and fashion — while presenting the essay on a web site that absolutely does not function unless you’re using the latest-and-greatest. It will also, likely, cease to function well with tomorrow’s technology and will soon appear dated and out-of-style.
I can already hear the web hacks whingeing that they need all their frameworks and dynamic elements to produce a site that looks modern and beautiful.
BULLSHIT
First, many of the “features” of that site detract from rather than enhance the viewing experience, good connectivity or no. Even if you believe they’re, say, cool enough to justify the detraction (is the site there to look at, or to communicate?) they could all be easily implemented with technologies that would degrade gracefully, be more performant (by leagues) and would much better stand the test of time.
Folks who were around in 1984 with Apple first released the Macintosh will remember how you could spot a Macintosh-generated letter from across the room, because people felt they had to use at least three different typefaces and several adornments just because they could.
It was ghastly. It won’t be too far into the future before we see today’s web sites the same way, and want to scream at the web hacks “what the hell were you thinking?!?”
—2p