Web Design Museum

People romanticize Flash these days. Especially people who weren't old enough to struggle with it.

Used improperly – as it very often was – Flash was a resource hog far beyond even the craziest of today's web sites. In many circumstances it could actually crash your computer. Not just the browser, but the entire machine. Sure, the operating system and the browser were complicit, but I'm not going to blame a broken window for not being bulletproof. Plus, it seemed like there was forever update after update after update every time you tried to view a fancy web site. Updating plugins isn't a big deal today. It was a big deal when it happened over a 56k dialup connection.

Can you imagine someone today thinking, "Oh, this looks like an interesting web site. I'd better close every other window and program on my computer, so it doesn't crash." It's unthinkable.

I hate that today's web sites are all boring and desaturated and flat. But I love that I can browse the web and keep a dozen other programs open and doing work at the same time.

Watching all of the new things people are doing with canvas and WebGPU and whatnot makes me think we're heading back to the bad old days of Flash. It seems like an arms race between people who want to turn a browser into an operating system, and browser makers trying to keep everything tidy.

A lot of it is monkey-see-monkey-do. And realted, the widespread use of common frameworks instead of people actually understanding how web sites work and doing their own programming.

I build a web site for a hospital that was fast and responsive and accessible. A manager complained that it didn't look like a "real" web site because the pages loaded instantly. She wanted me to put in a mechanism so that every time someone clicked on a link a loading spinner would appear for a few seconds before the next page loaded. Because that's what "real" web sites do.

A lot of the designs were also somewhat flexible via Flash/Flex and not HTML alone.

When a non-trivial number of users have widescreen displays a layout designed for a 4:3 aspect ratio ends up either crowded on one side of the screen or floating in the center with large margins on either side. A layout filling a 16:9 aspect screen will end up being different than the 4:3 layout. This feeds into mobile as well, your 4:3 or 16:9 landscape layout for desktops either looks terrible or is broken on a mobile device in a portrait layout. The graphics that look good at 96dpi start to look shitty on HiDPI screens.

It's entirely possible to make responsive layouts that handle all those cases. CSS and HTML have lots of options for responsive layouts. The main limitation is time/money. It's a lot of work to build a "magazine" layout that is responsive and displays properly on all devices. It's possible just difficult. It's much easier to make a layout that looks equally bland and lifeless across all devices.