I get that the “Woo, let’s all pile on 24ways.org” thing is well over a week old, but it’s only just now that I’ve sat down and thought about what it is precisely that gets up my nose about the whole affair. I also think that waiting for the worst of the shitstorm to pass is never a bad thing.
I’m really enjoying the articles (which I am reading in RSS; it is uncomfortable otherwise) but I feel like the idea of 24ways as a Good Thing for Christmas has been somewhat tarnished. It’s not even the design that annoys me most. I think what’s most troublesome is the accompanying attitude surrounding the design and in the feedback.
Good design should serve the content, not the other way around
The issue many have raised is: why is this so hard to read? Big parts of it are practically illegible to me. I discovered much later that commenters’ URLs and the date (and comment permalink) are sitting right there beside their names. My monitor calibration seems fine and my vision (with glasses) is pretty much fine also. I can see it now I know it’s there, but I completely overlooked it the first time.
That’s by no means a showstopper to me accessing the content, but what the hell? I think the contrast is a little better on the body text on articles at the moment, but it’s still kind of squinty; would it really be so hard to have made those a little darker to begin with? I’m no designer so you can take this with as large a grain of salt as you like, but I do have some taste and I honestly can’t see how the design would be made less tasteful by making the design a bit more solid and a bit more easy to read.
I get that this is targeted towards Web developers and yes, Web developers get excited over clever visuals. But I think this is part of what I find somewhat grotty about the whole situation—why should the design come ahead of users’ comfort? When did that become a good idea? Why would ‘I wish to show how clever I am’ come ahead of ‘I want to serve my readers the best way I can?’ It might not be a deliberate decision but it does seem to have had that effect. It smacks of ye olden days when ‘good design’ was a byword for inscrutable Flash with shiny transitions and tiny fonts.
Worse yet, it leads poorly by example. Can’t we be innovative and usable?
It’s called graceful degradation, not just ‘degradation’
Another issue that has been raised and only partially addressed is why does this look crap in $BROWSER? The Internet Explorer issues have been fixed after the fact, but it hardly seems like they were tested in the first place. It’s not like a few pixels were out of place; as we see in Nick Cowie’s post, it was really horrid and clearly untested.
Haven’t we been trying to push the idea of graceful degradation to beginner Web developers? This is a site that’s supposed to show you 24 ways to impress your friends. At first it worked incredibly poorly in IE (they certainly fixed that quickly) and quite shabbily in Opera 9 (not fixed right now; just bearable). I had a little whinge about the Opera thing on Twitter today and was told by Drew McLellan to upgrade to the Opera 10 alpha, which I already did last week and reverted cause it was kind of hinky, actually. (Maybe he should tell Technorati to do the same; the websnap has snapped a shitty snap indeed.)
Graceful degradation is still important—even more so if we’re trying to push the envelope with CSS3. Yes, we have lots of good browsers with better support. No, that doesn’t mean it’s cool to tell people to upgrade to an alpha browser or use a nightly build or read it as RSS. If an article crossed my desk at work that said “You know, you can put this into production today and fuck the uncool browsers. Tell them they have to upgrade to some alpha or nightly build!” I’d suggest quite strongly that it shouldn’t be published until at least an acknowledgement of a workaround for everyone else was added. It’s like saying “Best viewed in Netscape.” I thought we were beyond that.
Attitude much?
When Steven Clark raised some quite valid concerns about the legibility of the site, his post was met with the following:
If the visual design isn’t to your tastes, the RSS feed offers full content with no design (and always has)
Oh, this is like those ever-so-useful text-only versions “for the disabled,” amirite? No? Really? (To paraphrase a wise head: “You might as well say ‘Accessibility? Fuck the blind!’”)
Steven’s concern was not that the design “isn’t to (his) tastes”. His problem, as is one of mine, was that it is difficult for him to read to a point where reading it at all is a chore. That’s not just taste; that’s a perfectly valid usability and accessibility problem. It is irresponsible and thoughtless to invalidate these concerns. Worse, it encourages shitty behaviour from folks who are trying to emulate what they see as “best practice.”
And the other thing
Steven then asked the perfectly acceptable question of whether this design would have been more strongly criticised had it not been part of a ‘rockstar’ site like 24ways. It is a real pity when questions like this are then dismissed as ‘shit-stirring.’ That’s not really fair, and it’s a question that I think we should ask.
No one ought to be above or beyond criticism for making a poor design decision, even if they are a ‘rockstar’ or a conference regular or has 1500 followers on Twitter or whatever. It is right to complain, as Veerle Pieters did, that people make comments like ‘oh this sucks’ without some well-thought-out rationale for this. It’s not cool to then have a crack at someone for asking questions you don’t like, and that’s what this smacks of.
So there you have it
A very cynical reading of this minor fracas is as follows:
- “Best viewed in” is a totally legitimate response to cross-browser woes
- Design is king! Content be damned!
- RSS solves all your usability/accessibility woes! It’s not like we care!
- Who are you to criticise us?
Is this how we impress our friends?
Again, like I said. I am really digging the articles. But I guess I’d like the whole site a lot more if this hadn’t happened.
