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Breaking The Broken Web

Kyle Simpson
September 17, 2015

Breaking The Broken Web

The web is broken. We have to break it to fix it.

Kyle Simpson

September 17, 2015
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  1. "perfection is achieved, not when there's nothing more to add,

    but when there's nothing left to take away" Antoine de Saint-Exupery
  2. The Unsucked Web Manifesto WHEREAS, the web is built on

    an amazing collection of features that's ever-expanding, both in complexity and in size of resources; WHEREAS, designers and developers currently exert near-complete control over the experience a user has on their site or web application; WHEREAS, designers and developers tend to design for the best experience, making assumptions of free, fast, unlimited bandwidth to deliver this experience to users; WHEREAS, user access to a lower fidelity experience is often treated as unimportant to business goals, and usually given the same amount of (non-)care as Accessibility concerns, which is to say little to none, or as older "unsupported" browsers (like IE6); WHEREAS, many users are often disenfranchised from this web because a site or web application is too big—either too costly in time to download over slow internet, or too costly in money over metered bandwidth, and must unfortunately therefore make a choice simply not to visit at all; WHEREAS, principles such as progressive enhancement and responsive design are nearly universally accepted among the community, but mainly only focus on device capabilities and characteristics instead of user choice; WHEREAS, we can build a web that embraces users and gives them choice over their experience; WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following principles of unsucked web design: THAT designers and developers of sites and web applications must be free to continue to adopt the latest and greatest web technologies as appropriate to their goals, including retina images, web fonts, etc. THAT all sites and web applications must also at a minimum provide a useful, if significantly limited, low fidelity version that consists variously of: HTML/text, basic styling, a few (low- resolution) images, etc.
  3. WHEREAS, principles such as progressive enhancement and responsive design are

    nearly universally accepted among the community, but mainly only focus on device capabilities and characteristics instead of user choice; WHEREAS, we can build a web that embraces users and gives them choice over their experience; WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following principles of unsucked web design: THAT designers and developers of sites and web applications must be free to continue to adopt the latest and greatest web technologies as appropriate to their goals, including retina images, web fonts, etc. THAT all sites and web applications must also at a minimum provide a useful, if significantly limited, low fidelity version that consists variously of: HTML/text, basic styling, a few (low- resolution) images, etc. THAT designers and developers of sites and web applications must begin to intentionally design the web inlayers, not unlike the original principles of progressive enhancement, and not dissimilar from breakpoints in responsive design. However, these layers of features must adapt not only to device capabilities, but also to user choice. THAT no matter how powerful a user's device may be, or how awesome its screen, designers and developers have to respect that a user may not want to pay the time or money for those retina images, web fonts, etc. THAT developers know how to fiddle with settings to control some aspects of this already, but regular non-technical users do not, and should not have to. User choice over the desired fidelity of experience on a site or web application must be easily expressible in the main UI of a browser, and must be on a per-site basis. For instance, a user may choose in loading a particular site between "Faster Load" or "More Features". THAT ultimately, if there's a conflict between a user's expressed (or default) choice of fidelity of experience and the experience offered or forced by the site or web application, user choice must take precedence. Browsers must respect the user choice and refuse to download (not just suppress display, as in responsive design) resources that exceed chosen fidelity.
  4. build the minimal web experience a user needs build the

    best web experience you can dream up