Don't Forget: Keep the Web Simple

Posted by Matt on October 09, 2015 · 2 mins read

I just had the pleasure of being reminded how simple and great the web is at An Event Apart in Austin, TX.

In one of the talks I attended, Jeremy Keith reminded us that though the web has become a complicated beast, it is still amazing in its simplest form. And we shouldn’t forget that.

This sentiment rang very true to me - It made me recall the pure excitement I felt back in the mid-1990’s, when I was 13 years old, putting my first web pages on the Internet. A kid like me could create something from nothing, and better yet, self-publish it and have it accessible by the whole world. Anyone could see my content!

Since I started my professional career, I’ve been focused on very large web applications, many times with heavy server side work. More recently, I’ve worked on large Single Page Applications that run lots of Javascript in the browser.

I love what I do, but these types of applications have been complex beasts to work with. There have been days where all my time is spent wrangling the latest-and-greatest Javascript frameworks, leaving me frustrated because such-and-such plugin doesn’t work with AngularJS 1.2, or whatever the framework du jour is. Or why I cant get my Grunt build working that day.

Along this path, I forgot about the power of a browser rendering simple HTML and CSS. And perhaps more importantly, having that content be globally accessible in one simple place - a URL.

These ideas of were underscored by almost every other speaker at An Event Apart. They reminded us that in order to create the most useful web sites for a user, we need to forget about fancy layouts and CSS. Instead we should focus on content first and ask ourselves: “What is most important for the user?” We should make that content simple and easy to find, regardless of how advanced their device or web browser is. Then, get it captured in plain, semantically meaningful HTML markup. The rest will fall into place.

I write this with the hope that it will help me remember these ideas for the next web app I build.

My notes for An Event Apart from Austin 2015 are posted on Github