Of Time And The Web

The script and video of Jeremy Keith´s talk at border:none in Nürnberg. Two of Jeremy´s statements resonate:

• The real problem of the web today is not advertising, it´s tracking!
• When a user navigates to a URL, it shouldn’t feel like they’re installing a piece of software.

Here are some quotes:

Today it is possible to create beautiful websites that make full use of colour, typography, layout, animation, and more. [but users experience] A tedious frustrating game of whack-a-mole with websites that claim to value our privacy while asking us to relinquish it.

This is not a technical problem. It is a design decision. […] the problem is with the business model of behavioural advertising. That relies on intermediaries to amass huge amounts of personal data so that they can supposedly serve up relevant advertising.

But contextual advertising, which serves up ads based on the content you’re looking at doesn’t require the invasive collection of personal data. And it works. Behavioural advertising, despite being a huge industry that depends on people giving up their privacy, doesn’t even work very well. And on the few occasions when it does work, it just feels creepy.

The problem is not advertising. The problem is tracking. The greatest trick the middlemen ever pulled was convincing us that you can’t have effective advertising without tracking. That is false. But they’ve managed to skew our sense of perspective so that invasive advertising seems inevitable. […]

Third party cookies and third-party JavaScript enables users to be tracked as they move from site to site. The web gone from having no state to having too much.

There is hope. Browsers like Firefox and Safari are blocking third-party cookies by default. Personally, I’d love it if third-party JavaScript got the same treatment.

Jeremy is also covering Single Page Apps.

[The phrase „single page app“] refers to an architectural decision. That decision is to reinvent the web browser inside a web browser.

In a sense, it’s a testament to the power of JavaScript that you can choose to do this. Browsers render content and perform navigations, but if you’d rather recreate that functionality from scratch in JavaScript, you can.

But should you? Browsers have increased in complexity so that we can build without complexity. We can use the built-in power of modern HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to make web browsers do the work. If we work with the grain of the web, we can accomplish more and more with less and less code.

But that isn’t what happened. Instead developers have recreated form controls like dropdowns and datepickers from scratch using divs and lashings and lashings of JavaScript. […]

When a user navigates to a URL, it shouldn’t feel like they’re installing a piece of software. […]

Instead of assuming that a single page app architecture is needed, ask what users need to accomplish. Instead of assuming you need a CSS framework or a JavaScript library, see what you can do in browsers today with native CSS and vanilla JavaScript. Don’t include a bunch of dependencies by default just in case you might need them. Instead, as Rachel [Andrew] puts it: Stop solving problems you don’t yet have.