The Web isn’t uniform
The other day I tweeted my annoyance at the fact that I visited 12 websites and used my 20mb train wifi limit. This tweet spurred a discussion/argument with a good friend about what is suitable for building on the web. His argument is that by building things that required more processing power, more bandwidth, faster connections etc allows us to push the world forward and that if we didn’t do that we’d all still be using 2g phones. My position was more that there are still more than 1/2 the users of the web using 2g connections and that those who are creating content, you and I, often do so from our Ivory Towers of high speed internet and retina screens. We should be building our sites for everyone, not a select few.
Today I stumbled across this article that puts my point of view in words that I was unable to do so….
It’s a privilege to be able to use breaking edge technologies and devices, but let’s not forget basic accessibility and progressive enhancement. Ultimately, we’re building for the users, not for our own tastes or preferences. Sadly, not everyone is born with an equal chance.
Here are some of the Web giants—Trello, Facebook, Gmail, Dropbox and AirBnB, sans JavaScript. Some of them handled it better, some worse. From zero information or pointers, that might as well be flipping a bird, to half-functioning interfaces informing about the potential bottlenecks.
As an active empathy practitioner I imagined what the ongoing no JavaScript Web browsing experience could be. While the percentage of these users might be relatively low, we fail to remember that until the scripts load, that scenario is true for all of us.
An excerpt from The Web isn’t uniform
