About this ajaxy, flash based, media heavy direction the internet seems to be heading in. I mean shit, if there’s one thing a budget pc should be able to its browse the web and check email. Except its not that simple anymore, sites are so full of javascript and flash content it will throttle the CPU of most cheaper pcs making browsing the web a painful experience.
I think it’s a case of new technologies exploding out of sync with the browser clients who already have enough trouble trying to identically render pages, making the web developers designing pages smashing their heads against a wall (I speak mostly about IE here).
Another problem is the heavy use of out sourced developers, I mean yes they ARE cheap but they AREN’T necessarily GOOD. Most of these developers have never even read a book about interface design or even glanced at one, and to top it off alot of the time their code is messy, hacked together and flys as well as a brick with two sticks for wings.
I think most people can learn a thing or two about design principals from the more popular websites. YouTube, Google, Facebook, Flickr they all have something in common. They have a very minimalistic interface, now whether this is just to minimise the resources they use to speed up the serving of their content, or it could be that someone working at these places subscribes to the philosophy of “less is more”. A principal that everyone designing something should take on board.
The internet isn’t designed to be this media heavy, the strain on the infrastructure tells us this. Plus even Burners-Lee has come forward and said he didnt design the internet to be used in this manor. When will it stop? Will it get to the point where websites will actually have system requirements attached to the page to let you know that you need a top of the line graphics card just to look at today’s weather?
I will admit the current trend seems to be with development, lets just keep creating more and more layers to make programming easier and faster so we can lower costs and make more money.
Tell me this though? When you build the stack so high it eventually collapses and you’re stuck with a generation of programmers who only know how to drive the top most layer. Who rebuilds the stack for you?
