web dev disappointments 2009
The world of web development is particularly prone to hypes and magic of the day. Every week there's a new best thing ever, often hyped by leaving out all the bad stuff. 2009 was not much different from the years before. This article is a little recap of the smelly stuff they tried to force down our throats.
10. All css frameworks are awesome
Or at least, that's what they want us to believe. I spent too much time this year trying to figure out how a particular css framework works, only to find out it's not really helping me. At all. These frameworks are definitely not a good thing and the time they're supposed to save you is lost on thoughtful and well constructed css setups. No more css frameworks for me in 2010.
09. Twuuuuuut
I'm on Twitter. I don't do much with it, but I'm on there. I still hate the inhumanity of the tool though. Shortened urls, bad user experience, dozens of desktop apps to fix the shortcomings, unreadable posts and untraceable discussions. Not worth the hype if you ask me, and it surprises me that no-one has taken the time to make a better version of Twitter yet.
08. css animations
The idea is cool, although I fear abuse will be much more common than sensible use. They shouldn't be used for functional presentation (expand/collapse) as css is a tool for presentation, not functionality. I also wonder about the practical implementation and who's going to do it. Animators will have a hard time with programming their animations in css, programmers will have a hard time with the creative process of the animation. And older machines and browsers will have a hard time handling the animation, pretty much ruining the effect altogether (same limitation as JavaScript animation). One thing is certain, css animation are not the next best thing and need a whole lot of rethinking before they might live up to their hype.
07. Go to br.gro.pbb.fs
Shortened urls. Revived by Twitter, horrible to use. Blindly following links without knowing where you'll end up is quite simply annoying. That and the fact that they look like utter gibberish in normal text. And they are known to mess up site stats. The benefits you ask? I have no idea. Unless you have a mere 130 character cap to work around.
06. No more ie6 excuses
If you like to stop ie6 support, fine. It's not very "web-like", but each firm or developer has to make the decision for himself. Just stop making up all these horrible excuses. Designing for the future, designs don't look the same in different browsers anyway, ie6 users have it coming ... The Digg survey revealed that about half of the remaining ie6 users have little to no control over their situation. If you stop supporting ie6, you're cutting those people off. That's your choice, be man enough to face it.
05. Chrome = Safari
Chrome uses Webkit, so there's no extra work required when doing browser checks. Right? Hah! I've had more differences between Safari and Chrome than I had between Safari and Opera or Firefox this year. That and the fact that it's still a browser that adds absolutely nothing and is gaining popularity just because of Google's pushy behavior. Nopes, still not a fan.
04. html5 header tag, where's the functionality?
Quite irritating to see the discussions on html5 where people are questioning the "lack of functionality" for new tags like header and footer. Ten years of html awareness and we're still having these discussions? Come on people, if you want to work with html, at least learn what it's all about. Let's hope html5 will refresh people's memory in 2010.
03. Google everywhere
Google is too pushy. They try to be everywhere, their marketing is aggressive and people are simply accepting everything they do, hyping it as the best thing in the world. While in fact Google is lagging. Their output is often below par (time to update your search!) and their marketing simply deceptive. Google is thriving on fandom, never a good thing.
02. css rounded corners
Let it be clear, there is no decent support for css3 rounded corners in any of the latest browsers. Three of the major players have browser-specific extensions (with a different syntax) and nested elements can still spill over the rounded corner of its parent. The implementation is buggy, not standard and not global. If you're using css border-radius, you're not designing for the future. You're merely avoiding some http requests (which is still a good thing though).
01. browser support for all
The word "standard" lost a lot of its meaning in 2009. I already hinted at it above, but "support for all browsers" is becoming time-consuming business. You need 4(!) font files if you want to use web fonts, 2 types of videos for native video support, browser-specific syntaxes for new css properties ... we can make things work in different browsers by writing separate code for each browser. This is everything but a standard, only getting us back to the place we've started. These browser extensions are fine for experimenting, just don't tell people they "can use it without any trouble at all".