Facebook states that its mission is to make the world a more open and connected place, yet this isn’t the exclusive domain of Facebook, it’s a consequence of the open network it’s built on — the web. Whilst social networks have made it easier for people to communicate online, Facebook is attempting to go further by deeply integrating its closed, proprietary network into the fabric of the web. With products like Connect, Social Plugins and OpenGraph, Facebook has become a parasite, suffocating the platform that hosts it.
A well written and scathing polemic by Paul Robert Lloyd. I found myself agreeing with most of this, but one of the last paragraphs is perhaps just a tad much:
Now Facebook is hoovering up many of the best designers in our industry. As new features continue to encourage users to hand over more personal information, its designers have become devil’s advocates. Much like producing advertising campaigns for cigarette companies, working for Facebook has become an ethically questionable career move.
Ethics in design is a difficult topic, but I think this might be a bit of a stretch – it’s not like Facebook is killing millions of people or enslaving millions more with its highly addictive… Wait. Yeah, I guess I can see some parallels there after all. Still.
Really handy tool to batch-validate an entire site’s HTML. It’s a very slow at the moment, but as it’s in beta I’ll assume it’s only going to get better.
[...]The last point, rich advertising, is another artifact of the web ad glut. With sites filled with with crappy ads, advertisers pushed for attention-grabbing animated “take-overs” just as web sites started moving away from the balky browser-crashing Flash animations and toward simple, direct design that creates a connection with customers. We’ll see the crap fade away as soon as more adaptive formats are proven, the bankrupt web model is discarded, design starts favoring the users.
Couldn’t agree more. An excellent article from Roger Black in 2 parts (here’s part 1).
I was there because I just wanted to read something. Words. Black text on a white background, more-or-less. And what I saw — at a professional publication, a site with the purpose of giving people something good to read — was just about the farthest thing from readable.
I feel the exact same way: the average reading experience on the internet has gotten worse – if it wasn’t for tools like Reeder, Instapaper or Safari’s Reader mode I don’t think I’d read as much online content as I do now.
And don’t get me started on the absurdity of the myriad of “like-”, “tweet-”, “recommend-” or “google plus onesies”-buttons that we in the advertising industry somehow feel they must include in every. Single. Goddamn. Site. They’re ugly, they’re bloated[1] and above all, I don’t think they matter all that much.
Does the lack of one-click sharing buttons really make a difference to people who really want to share something? And has anyone ever been persuaded to share something they might not have shared otherwise, just by the presence of such a button?
I mean, I still share some stuff via e-mail for christ’s sake. I don’t even want to count how many steps that takes, and I still do it – whenever the content is worth it.
[1]Seriously, try inspecting a Facebook Like-button with Firebug or other developer tools: it’s an iframe, with a whole webpage behind it that loads tons of other javascript-, css- and image- files – just for one single button.
Principal Developer Evangelist of the Mozilla Developer Network Christian Heilmann weighs in on the semantics issue:
A lot of the debate about semantic value and using the correct HTML is kept alive by people who have been around for a long time and seen browsers fail in more ways we care to remember. Valid markup and sensible structure was our only chance to reach maintainability and make sense of the things around us. This was especially important in the long long ago. I remember using Lynx to surf the web.
What follows is a brief history of webdesign and he wraps up with some advice for the pragmatic use of HTML
If you write a document by hand, use all the semantics you can add in. This is your handwriting, your code is your poetry and people learn from looking at what you did.
If you need to write a hard-core application and every byte is a prisoner try to play nice with the semantics but follow your end goal of delivering speed. Make sure to tell people though that your code is the end result of conversions and optimisations and not for humans to look at.
Regardless of what you build – when you can use new technology (maybe in connection with old, like <div class="section"><section></section></div>) use it.
Remember that the web is not your browser and computer – add fallbacks for other browsers when using bleeding edge technology. When the others catch up you won’t have to alter your code!
The main focus of markup and web code that is not optimised for edge case apps is to make it easy for people to maintain it. If people can see in the HTML what is going on – win. If what only works with JS is generated by JS- even better.
More markup is not a crime when it is markup that adds value. Arguments that STRONG is worse than B because it means more code and slower loading pages are irrelevant in times of gzipping on the server
We can only escape the chicken and egg problem of new HTML when we use it. Right now, if you ask for support in browsers for new elements the answer from most vendors is that nobody uses them so why bother. And when you ask people why they don’t use them they tell you because browsers don’t support them. One of us has to start changing that.
Recommended reading for those of us walking the tightrope between semantic purity and just getting the job done.
The template > slot > ad mental model is engrained both in advertisers, planners and web sites. Providing space for ads needs to be broadened into multiple spaces for one ad concept. This requires closer collaboration between advertisers and web sites, designers and marketeers and sales teams.
Mark Boulton offers some ideas for marrying fluid, responsive webdesign with the need for fixed-width advertising banner formats.
Indulge me, if you will, in a little hypothetical. Consider the following scenario: you’re asked to design and develop a website for a big client. It’s a large company, with probably thousands of employees. A bank, for example, or a large pharmaceutical company. Or maybe it’s a government contract, or a big public sector player, like public transport or the electric or gas company.
What all of these clients have in common, is that 9 times out of 10 they’ll all be lorded over by a restrictive and overly protective IT department, who only updates their software and hardware every other decade. Which means the client will be looking at your work through the shit-tinted goggles of IE6. (more…)
