We Need to Talk About the Front Web Part 1: Introduction
Last November I had the pleasure to give a talk at FFConf, in Brighton. What follows is the introduction of a series of articles with a much more verbose version of what I've presented that day in only 35 minutes.
I code and design for the web since there was no design possible in it, and since then I've started noticing that something was fundamentally at odds with the uniqueness and strength of the front web.
For some reason — that I hope we will be able to understand later in this series of articles — the front web is systematically undermined, and the main targets are precisely the aspects that make the web a powerful medium.
The experience we have using the web deserves our attention; when the web loses, we lose too.
While these attacks are systematic, I'm not sure how conscious and intentional they are: are we never satisfied with what we have and we keep trying to improve it, or are we just “breaking things”?
Whether we are breaking things around or trying to improve the front web, what is clear to me is that instead of getting the most of it, we just keep making it heavy, inaccessible, unmanageable, and offering a very bad UX. It is hard to say who is benefiting from these attempts.
If you are less than 35 years old, you've always known the web, and you may take it for granted, forgetting how valuable it is for the world we are living in, and why. So, in order to understand and try to fix what is going wrong with the front web, I believe we need first to increase our awareness about what makes it so unique and powerful.