Designing the Modern Web

A few simple truths that can help solve bigger digital challenges.

Designing and developing for the web has always been a moving target. Browsers and technologies have been perpetually changing requiring constant evolution of skill set but there are still some overarching truths that remain. In this article I have outlined a handful of what I think are some of the most commonly overlooked challenges when designing for the modern web that we should consider more deeply as we continue to define the future of web design practice.

The web is inherently rickety

HTML and CSS do things that they were never intended to do back when they were originally invented. My guess is Tim Berners-Lee did not anticipate the hot mess that we find ourselves in today. Rendering code in a browser has always been a tricky thing. Every browser version and update handle things a little differently and always have. How browsers on mobile devices handle the rendering of HTML, CSS and Javascript compounds the fragility of how we not only build web experiences but how we maintain them as well. We have to remember that it has been less than a decade since more users accessed the internet from mobile devices than desktop.