I want to say that the orange iPhone is the official Micro.blog-themed phone, but the orange color isn’t really a close enough match. Gonna have to see these phones in person. Especially curious about the weight and balance of the Air.
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The iPhone 17 Pro actually looks like a pretty big change. Aluminum, huge camera bump, crazy thermal system, faster AI, presumably more RAM.
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Hypertension notification is fantastic in theory, but I’m skeptical that this can be done without a new sensor. Seems impossible with heart rate data alone. But I guess if it only sometimes works, it still has the potential to save lives.
So Be It
A year and three months later, a follow-up on leaving the web industry. I was supposed to have distanced myself from that by now, to speak about it lightly. Not true.
Disclaimer: most of the content for this article comes from a few posts of mine published between 2013 and 2014 on the blog of my then co-directed web design/dev London-based firm. Sometimes things don't change.
Applying to jobs bearing the title 'Front-end Developer' never landed well with me. Seeing how I never accepted the demise of web designer, the imposed division between developers and "UX designers" felt like the fruit of a narrow-minded vision. Without any doubt, it was a large contributor to the multiplication of horrible and unusable web products. As a designer who can code, with an extensive experience, I used to be comfortable in being present at each stage of a web production.
After spending more than two decades working for all kind of clients, building a familiarity with how browsers behave, developing a knack for making simple concepts shine, honing a natural ability to discern the best typography for each situation, I could achieve what I consider a good web design:
- Creating websites that worked well on any browser, maintaining a visual consistency without obsessing over every cross-platform minute differences.
- Coding with web standards for sustainability, durability, and maintainability.
- Learning WCAG guidelines and ARIA roles enough to make them accessible to everyone.
- Staying away from pointless buzzwords, such as "pixel-perfect", "above the fold" or any other soundbites constantly regurgitated by every recruiter in the industry — and probably by "AI" now.
- Relentlessly testing my work against the proper validators.
Working with the largest clients made me realise what people want, but especially with what they don’t want. That is why I addressed accessibility and performance from the get-go, instead of an afterthought.
Reinventing the wheel
I’ve witnessed many tech fads throughout my career, especially web frameworks, with their cycle of time and energy wasted to learn the stack, only to see it slowly morphing into something different, or simply cease to exist. One recent example being JAMstack, which I kind of welcomed a while ago, before realising that it even had the JAM acronym upside down: familiarity with progressive enhancement would make it evident that Markup should come before APIs, with Javascript as a last step to add interaction, when and if needed. I get it: MAJ would not have given a VC-funded Silicon Valley startup a funky name to extract enough money.
Ironically, while each and every framework shared the same theoretical goal of stop reinventing the wheel, it ended up in a deathly spiral of doing precisely that: reinventing the wheel by using different names and architectural starting points.
I used to be baffled as to why the web industry kept behaving this way, shifting from one fragile cauldron to the next, creating unmaintainable cathedrals on quicksand while trying to reach El Dorado: the ultimate vendor lock-in. With all that's been happening over the last few years of late-stage capitalism, I now understand why.
Yet, I've always preferred to create my design and code 'system' — modular, easy to apply and adaptable, based on a solid foundation of accessibility, usability, performance. My work did NOT need Javascript or any progressive enhancement, because it should have been the foundation. Other people were supposed to improve on that, using progressive enhancement if required.
Does this mean that I'm out of the game in today's upside-down web industry? So be it. Happy to have pivoted out of it. Sitting by the river, watching the dead results passing by: a web full of crap, slow, inaccessibile, fragile, broken. Good riddance. Enjoy your JS-only designers, and the way nobody notices the oxymoron.
My tech stack was made of solid semantic HTML, even when created by either PHP or a static site generator (the Liquid template language, for example), and well-structured CSS. Jeremy Keith said, CSS is simple but not easy, which is why developers who are not familiar with web standards always fail.
Someone wrote this on their blog — and I'm royally pissed that I didn't take note of the name, or the URL:
CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap or Tailwind might be a good way to quickly work on prototypes, but they hinder knowledge of CSS. Using them as the foundation for a workflow is the telltale sign of developers who don't know how to properly approach design and web standards. Web design takes time, care, and proper testing. Trusting frameworks to do the heavy lifting is part of what make websites unusable and inaccessible today.
Hopefully, I'll find out the source one day.
Similar and related concepts are talked about in these articles:
- It's 2023, here is why your web design sucks, by Heather Buchel.
- Tailwind and the Femininity of CSS, by Elaina Natario.
- Tailwind marketing and misinformation engine, by Tero Piirainen.
