Video: in conversation with Ethan Marcotte
I recently had the good fortune to sit down with Ethan Marcotte, coiner of the term “Responsive Web Design” (and much more besides) to talk about the past, present and future of the Web, and designing for this medium.
So enjoy this first of a series that will also include Karen McGrane, Sara Soueidan, Jen Simmons, Rachel Simpson and Russ Weakley.
You can also find follow up notes from our conversation, and a full transcript below.
These conversations were first published at the Web Directions website, where you can find a lot more like this.
Notes and Further Reading
Responsive Web Design.
The A List Apart article by Ethan that gave the name to the phenomenon, and which outlined the key patterns and practices, with examples from Ethan’s redesign of the Boston Globe.
Image Replacement Techniques
“IR” techniques were developed to allow images to be used in place of text, in ways that were still accessible. [editorial, I always thought they were a terrible idea]
Sydney Morning Herald (December 29, 2004 Edition)
The Sydney Morning Herald, a Fairfax Media newspaper is considered one of Australia’s key newspapers. Their 2004 redesign was a very early, CSS and standards based design for such a significant, large-scale publication.
Emulating Network conditions
Using tools to emulate network conditions, in this case Chrome’s developer tools. Other browsers developer tools similarly allow you to test your site as viewers of networs of various speeds might.
Trent Walton Device agnostic
Trent Walton’s article that refers among other things to “hostile browsers”.
Dao of Web Design
My article in A List Apart that Ethan (very kindly) remembers, and from which this podcast takes its name.
Stewart Brand
From the Whole Earth Catalogue to the Long Now foundation, and much in between, Brand’s influence on the internet, the Web, and the wider world is impossible to overstate.
How Buildings Learn
Brand’s 1997 work on architecture thatEthan refers to.
Shearing layers
and their applicability to web site design
Brian Rieger’s article on Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality
What are these things, and how do they relate to the Web?
VR nausea research
it even has a name, “Virtual Reality Sickness”
Jetpack Futurism
My article on “jetpack futurism”, and the common tropes of visions of the future that I argue in many ways constrain our ability to predict, and invent the future.
Transcript
[John] So, I have been on a 20 year mission to stop people who use pixels on the web. Very occasionally there’s a photo of a real-world object.
But it’s just driven me crazy that we like pixel perfect, we had this conversation, you know, with Russ Weekly just before. I mean, how do you feel about pixels?
[Ethan] Well, you shall have my ax on this campaign, John. Yeah, I mean it’s, I don’t know, I’m pro pixels as a concept, I guess. I think it’s, like I rarely use them in my work anymore. If anything it’s more of a fallback. You know, if I’m —
[John] So when you’re doing a page layout or like a break point or when would pixels appear in your life?
[Ethan] Pixels, pretty much exclusively, it’s like if I’m setting something in rems, you know, I’ll have like a pixel-driven fallback, but, otherwise, I like to be as relative to the users environment as possible. So whether it’s percentages for layout or ems for type sizing or rems, it’s really about like trying to be less perscriptive about what the layout’s going to do in specific points. So, yeah, pixels are more of like a, I don’t know, a fallback scenario for me. It’s not a starting point.
[John] I guess they are an artifact of the medium, in the sense that, well, that’s what we’re actually looking at.
[Ethan] Sure.
[John] By the same token, once we start, you know, how many times to this day on expensive websites do you see clear, images that are clearly not, for want of better term, retina-friendly. And especially text that is rendered. I mean, I, you know, even from the very beginning I was fiercely opposed to image replacement techniques.
[Ethan] Yeah. Sure.
[John] And they’re always, and it took about 15 years for us to get rid of those.
[Ethan] Right.
[Jphn] And, really, the retina screen, I think, above all probably killed off image replacement techniques.
[Ethan] Yeah, I think that’s right. I think that’s right. Yeah, it’s this weird sort of like, I don’t know, optimism that we have as web designers like, you know, we’re gonna sort of set down what the design’s gonna do and just sort of set it down perfectly and just there’s always a sort of expectation that it’s gonna perfectly translate to the end user, and I think we’re still working our way out of that a little bit.
[John] Do you think it’s a deep-seated, it’s almost like a belief, isn’t it? To me it’s what I alluded to all those years ago in that article was that idea that to me there’s a, if we see these as actually artifacts of print or even bugs of the print. I mean, the thing about print is, as I get older, I didn’t wear these glasses 15 years ago or 10 years ago.
[Ethan] Right. Right.
[John] As I get older, I find it harder and harder to read things and more and more what impinges in paper, right? So the fact that we’ve got this beautifully fixed medium where the designer has complete control over every aspect of it, to me is increasingly a bug, because I can’t adapt it to my needs. So it’s almost as if we just, you know, I keep coming back to that, we just have to give up on the idea that we have that control. It’s not a good thing.
[Ethan] Right, no absolutely, and I think that plays in a lot of other aspects of our work, I mean like you know there was that performance discussion around responsive web design as somehow being just like bloated by default, right? Like if you’re building a responsive site, it’s somehow like three times more expensive to download or something. I don’t think that’s a problem with responsive design, and last time I was at Respond I sort of like, you know, that was, my talk was kind of a response to that, but I think like a lot of those assumptions about like what web design means is still really grounded in the aesthetic and it doesn’t really talk about the network that we’re designing for, which is another material, right? So like assuming that that font is always gonna perfectly download to the end user, what if they’re over a 2G connection that’s incredibly like high-latency, like if those files aren’t actually accessible, what’s that experience —
[John] What if the server’s down?
[Ethan] Right, exactly.
[John] Especially, on the 3rd party server, like Typekit or like some other service.
[Ethan] Yeah, absolutely. I’ve got a screenshot on my laptop of Apple, Apple Store homepage, where the CDN had basically just failed in my region. So all I was served was just plain HTML. It was still useable, but it’s like —
[John] But you see how much of the text they still render as, they still render a lot of text as images.
[Ethan] They do.
[John] It really astounds me.
[Ethan] They do, but I was still seeing the old text anyway. It was still something I could browse through. It wasn’t pretty, but it was useable.
[John]I remember years ago, I think it was 2004 or so. So I knew some folks who were involved with The Sydney Morning Herald here, which is like a major media site here, and funnily enough at the conference we got on this week, they’re doing a major redesign. We’ve got them coming, talking about this, but this particular redesign I did back in 2004 where they went very status based, and they decided, for Netscape 4, which had, from memory, maybe five set of users with Netscape 4? They decided we’re gonna turn off all style sheets. We’re just gonna render it, and because it was very much driven by the standards based HTML CSS, turned off style sheets, and they started getting these emails from Netscape 4 users saying, “Thank you, for improving the experience.”
[Ethan] Wow.
[John] So because I’m getting a plain page, it was loading quickly, because obviously older device, probably older computers, older users potentially over slower networks, it actually, by giving them less from the design, the visual design perspective, it actually delivered a better experience, and so much so that people actually actively thanked them for that.
[Ethan] Totally.
[John] And I think that’s a data point even though it’s 12 years from, I keep bringing it up, because I think it’s a really interesting example of the error we can get into in thinking that it’s about the specific visual design we have in mind.
[Ethan] Well, we actually had that when we were working on the Boston Globe where there was this out, this was back in 2009–2010, and they had an outsized portion of their readership who were using BlackBerry 4 devices, you know, which are not great browsers, but they’re decent, right? I mean you can access the web, but if you give them more than like a couple KB of JavaScript they run into the woods screaming. So, I mean, we gave them a very basic experience, but their readership was incredibly happy about that. They could actually read the stories on the Boston Globe for the first time, so —
[John] And at that time, that would have represented probably a significant, relatively affluent, professional group because that was the body of people who were using BlackBerry at the time.
[Ethan] Right, absolutely, but I think there’s this thing, and I’ve been talking a little bit more about this lately, is like there’s this sort of assumption as designers and developers that like our view of the web perfectly represents everybody’s view of the web, right? Like the latest Android, the latest iPhone, and I think that’s an incredibly optimistic view, but it’s also kind of detached from the reality of what the web actually looks like.
[John] In my youth, I was a Mac developer. I’ve sort of have this association with the web there, as well, but I remember there that Apple, you know it would track what Apple did. If I had a, this might be apocryphal but I still have this strong memory that Apple refused to give developers the latest models of computers, because it gave them a false sense of their user, you know, when they’re writing operating systems or applications, if you’ve got the very latest technology. So to me, that’s actually stayed with me as a sense of, you know, like a way in which of keeping in mind, as you say, you are not the user. You have access to the most recent and you update all your software all the time.
[Ethan] Exactly.
[John] You probably pay top dollar for your network or you work in a company that does, and you know I don’t think enough people explore the developer tools that allow them to throttle their own networks and really get a sense of what’s this actually like in the real world, right?
[Ethan] Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think like the more we can do to kind of reminder ourselves that our, like we are outliers in a lot of senses of the word, like Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, had this study a couple of years ago, or not even a couple of years ago, last year about like estimating that like 60% of the world’s mobile data connections are sub-3G. You know, and it’s like well if that’s the case then we’re building pages that are like two or three megabytes in size, it’s like who are we actually designing for? So, yeah, I think it’s a massive missed opportunity to look kind of beyond the layout in front of us. You know, Trent Walton had that essay, I think about a year and a half ago, called Device Agnostic, right? Talking about device agnostic design as like this unifying design principle for him and his practice in Paravel, and in it he’s talking not just about like different size screens, but he’s talking about hostile browsers, which I love that phrase. It’s like browsers that don’t care about the fidelity of your design. It’s just like we’re gonna render whatever we can.
[John] Well, you got an Opera Mini, for example, that is deliberately mangling your design for the greater good, right?
[Ethan] Yeah, exactly.
[John] So you can either fight that, and, of course, you’ve got things like ad blockers and user implemented technologies, and I think ad blockers are only the start of what we’re gonna start seeing, in terms of users taking back control of the design that you have.
[Ethan] Yeah, no, I couldn’t agree more. I think that his argument, and it’s one that I share, it’s like you know we need to see the web as this hostile medium, and we need to basically sort of design for those adverse conditions. And he’s got this great line about like cars designed to perform in extreme heat or on icy roads, you know web sites should be built to optimize for that inherent variability of the medium, and that goes back to what you were talking about a Dao web design, you know, the ebb and flow of things on the web isn’t just about layouts, it’s about spotting that works or people want different size screens, and we need to account for all these factors when we’re designing for the web.
[John] So you’ve talked about the importance of the work of Stewart Brand.
[Ethan] Yeah.
[John] And in particular, How Buildings Learn, a kind of seminal work, and we’ve definitely, we use the term information architecture. We’ve used that for nearly 20 years now when it comes to describing what we do on the web. We use these analogies and metaphors from architecture, but I wonder why is it we keep coming back to that. Obviously, the web started our way of thinking about it very much is around print design, and they’re the metaphors we bring with it, but we actually are making a fundamental mistake about looking at the web. And what can we learn from architecture? What do you think the lessons there are?
[Ethan] Yeah, I mean I think that, I think we look to architecture for a lot of the same reasons we look to print, just because it’s like this much deeper tradition than anything we have on the web, which is all of three minutes old compared to design disciplines that have been around for centuries or millenia, and I think the things that architecture can teach us, at least broadly, are, you know, really kind of revolve around planning for change over time, you know, building something sustainable. I mean, so Brand talks about his, what he calls shearing layers, right? So in any design system you have different rates of change, right, when you build a space. So you’ll have like the lot that the building stands on or the structure, the load bearing elements, and those are incredibly slow and expensive to change, but they provide structure for all the faster moving ones, like the skin of the building all the way down to the stuff, the cats and dogs, the lamps, the chairs, the things that change on like a monthly basis. He’s basically arguing that like the slow systems can strain the quick system. So by understanding like what the slow systems are, you can more effectively design and plan for change over greater periods of time, and that’s the thing that I think like on the web we’ve sort of danced around a little bit, but I don’t think we think about enough, like thinking about content hierarchy or the structure of the document independent of the layout or the typography that we’re actually building on top of it. Like the HTMLs, the slow system, and everything we layer on top of that is like the stuff that’s really susceptible to change and failure. So how do you actually plan for that failure and design for it is something that I think we could actually learn a lot from architects.
[John] It’s interesting that, in some respects, the most obvious analogy of what we’re doing when it comes to the web now, as opposed to, say, 10 or 15 years ago when the web was very much a communication. It was owned by marketing communications teams and tended to be words and images, very little interactivity, and it’s role was to convey information almost in a broadcast sense. Whereas, now I think what we see it doing, and so obviously there the lessons from print and the analogies and metaphors from print made a lot of sense, in fact, maybe also shaped why we were using the web in that way, but I think, ultimately, because there were slow networks, because there were underpowered machines, because browsers were relatively simplistic things, we kind of pushed it to its extremes and we found the best thing it could do for us, sort of the web could do for us, at that time. It was really communicating in a very visual, written way.
[Ethan] Yeah. Yeah.
[John] Now, obviously, we’re starting to do things that are much more akin to traditional software engineering. You know we’re, basically, increasingly, the things that once upon a time were Windows apps or Mac apps or whatever they were, are now very much kind of built in the browser, and even a lot of kind of supposedly native apps within iOS and Android are very much using web technologies, and I think we’ve been through a period where that kind of dropped away a bit. HTML 5 was the biggest mistake Facebook ever made, and, you know, whatever whatever. The truth is all along and increasingly, I think, we’ve seen the web as a delivery mechanism for that more traditional software layer of interaction is happening. So it’s intriguing to me that we haven’t necessarily learned a lot of lessons from software engineering when it comes to the web, which, you know, like did learn these sort of lessons about maintainability, longevity, many years ago, but perhaps architecture’s an even better kind of example of things, systems that are built to last decades and generations.
[Ethan] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s something appealing to me about that like that idea that you are building something that’s gonna last beyond the current iteration of the design, I mean —
[John] Because we traditionally just chucked it out, right?
[Ethan] Right.
[John] Here’s a new version of even the things like Twitter were throwing things out and starting again not that long ago.
[Ethan] Sure. Sure. Yeah, and I think like, you know if you’re building something that’s gonna be laid out in a certain way or interact in a certain way, I mean I think like there’s that larger question of like what if somebody doesn’t see the design as I do, right? If they’re having this read aloud to them in a different context or, you know, what if a network connection does fail and some like critical asset doesn’t actually land in the browser, it’s like, I like that idea that, sort of, planning beyond the layout in front of you to think a little bit more broadly about how people are going to be interacting with this stuff. So, yeah, I’ve gravitated toward architectural metaphors in part because of your article, but in part because like I’m more of a liberal arts guy, but you know I think like the thing about the web is we’re borrowing metaphors from I think any sort of tradition that can kind of teach us what we’re doing right now, and maybe that’ll change in about another decade or two when we’ve actually got on our metaphors to work from, but, yeah, it’s early days yet.
[John] Well, one of those metaphors, maybe, is the browser. I mean the browser is this thing which is almost synonymous with the web, you know the blue E, but we’ve already had devices that essentially, well even Chrome OS, essentially boot into the, the browser doesn’t really exist. And I wonder what are your thoughts around this idea of the browser as a metaphor?
[Ethan] I mean, it’s still pretty compelling to me, at least, I mean, most of my day is spent designing documents that people are going to be browsing through, but Brian Rieger wrote this really wonderful article around VR and augmented reality and like thinking about like how all these different new contexts that are kind of emerging could all essentially be layered on top of the web, like thinking about delivering something, you know, a mobile friendly presentation to everybody, but then treating all the rest of these like weird contexts as higher up the experience stack, he called them. So like, how can we actually start with a well-structured document and then sort of enhance that content presentation for, you know, Oculus Rift or a more augmented view of the design? I think it’s early days yet to try to figure out that stuff, but, yeah, I think it’s kind of compelling.
[John] But I also, I guess, when I allude to the browser, I allude to a context in which people see web-based content. So it’s not necessarily just, say, things like the DOM or JavaScript or HTML CSS are going to go away.
[Ethan] No, sure.
[John] But rather the idea that where that stuff lives is somehow in this sandbox, as opposed to like being, essentially, the default way, the only way we access information in and through a device.
[Ethan] Yeah, sounds good.
[John] All right. (both laughing)
[Ethan] No complaints about that, yeah.
[John] Yes, well the alternative is we all learn C, and I think I’m too old for that right now.
[Ethan] Yeah, that’s when I get a new job slinging burgers or something, but yeah. (laughing)
[John] Yes, well we might get to what our future holds as we get older in this industry, which is one of those questions, but something akin to that. So, obviously, one of the big early adopters of the web, specifically from a commercial perspective, was traditional media. You know and they went down the path of essentially how they always made money, which was advertising around rich content, professionally developed content. You know, people often complain. Media providers, Rupert Murdoch, I often think disingenuously often complains that people aren’t willing to pay for news anymore, but the truth is that 80% of revenues in newspapers were traditionally around advertising and only 20% were around the subscription or the payment for the actual paper itself. The problem it seems, and the reason why I ask this of you, is that you’ve obviously had quite a bit to do with traditional media, certainly, in the last kind of half a decade or so, but the amount of money that traditional media can charge for an impression, obviously with the rise of ad blockers, we seem to face, obviously, a crisis for those traditional media companies, except at the scale of Facebook and Google. And even, Facebook kind of is making billions of dollars, but on a per user basis, you know Apple makes more in a week per user than Google does a year. So, we don’t want to see these things go away, I think.
[Ethan] No, yeah.
[John] What do you think’s gonna happen there?
[Ethan] (sighing) I don’t know, it feels like a bit of a cold war on the web right now between ad publishers and traditional media outlets. Because display advertising in a lot of senses is kind of killing the web as we know it. I mean, I’ve worked on some projects recently and you know building these wonderful, nimble, responsive experiences, but then as soon as like the ad feed gets introduced it’s like, you know, you’ll get something that’s like well under a megabyte, you’ll notice it ballooning up in size to like 10 or 13 times that, and it’s in part because like we’re building these beautiful highways where people can sort of like interface with these networks of just like sewage, unfortunately. It’s like these display properties that are just sort of getting back filled in when something’s not available, and we don’t have any control over that. I think they’re gonna have to be some standards kind of put in place from the advertising industry, and you know the IAB has been sort of like trying to push this idea of like lean ads. This is their new thing. It’s kind of like a standard that’s still being kind of like established and defined, but it’s, you know, I think it’s gonna have to kind of come from that industry to sort of realize that the current way of business just isn’t working for anybody.
[John] One does wonder whether the horse hasn’t already bolted though.
[Ethan] That’s possible.
[John] People like using ad blockers, it doesn’t seem, you know I think if you go back to Napster, I think, for the most part, most users of Napster felt a little bit guilty. (laughing) I don’t think anybody feels guilty about ad blockers, right? Whereas, in some respects, you could argue. “Well I’m not reciprocating the deal. I’m getting all your content, the deal is I’m gonna kinda help you pay for it.” You know, I feel like whether things like Napster kind of prepared us for this or, but personally I think that publishers and advertisers together kind of really didn’t do themselves any great favors by that, you know, increasing bandwidth hogging, time wasting approach to advertising that we ended up with.
[Ethan] Yeah, no, I would agree in that broad sense, but, I mean, it also takes a lot of infrastructure and management to actually build up like an in-house ad sales team and ad ops team, and I think that a lot of publishers, you know, it’s hard to put that infrastructure in place. So you know you have things like AdSense, for example, or Double Click and where it’s this sort of like plugable solution into your websites, and we’re getting to the point now where I think a lot of publishers are starting to take that process in-house, and they’re building custom ad formats that are responsive by default, that are bandwidth friendly. So maybe we’re gonna just sort of see the pendulum shift away from centralized solutions more to individualized ones, but we might be seeing people jump on the Apple News bandwagon or Facebook Instant Articles in the interim. I think it’s gonna be a weird time for the next few years. So, I don’t know.
[John] Yeah, let’s —
[Ethan] I don’t want my news to go away.
[john] Right. Right.
[John] So, it seems to me, yourself and myself and some of the other people we’ll be speaking to over the next couple of days, you know we’ve been doing web stuff for a long time, and when we started it was probably not necessarily the most lucrative profession or certainly the most well-understood profession, but increasingly, I think, people with the skills to work in this field, certainly often can be the people of a similar cohort, do very well. They’re in demand. They’re very well paid. So to me that’s a privilege, and so I have a bit of an idea that privilege and responsibility kind of go hand in hand. Where if you have the privilege to be able to choose what work you do and how you do that work and who you do it for, you kind of have the responsibility to use that choice wisely. You know, established fields and professions tend to have codes of ethics, whether it’s the Hippocratic Oath or so on; whereas, in our field, even though it seems a lot of the people in our field, purely anecdotally based on what I read on Twitter and elsewhere, a lot of people seem to be very well-intentioned. Not exclusively, obviously, but are very often civic-minded, gravitate toward values that are socially-minded and so on. Yet, we still see a lot of the skills people use developed, whether it’s around a race to the bottom around advertising, as an example we just talked about, or in other areas, and how people are not necessarily choosing to use their skills in ways that align with those values. Where do you think we’re at in terms of emerging ethics and standards as a profession in the broader sense?
[Ethan] I mean, it feels like, I don’t know, I can only speak from my own perspective, but it feels like there’s been some exciting developments that I’m just sort of watching from the outside, and it feels like early days, I guess, like that code of conduct conversation that’s been happening over the last couple of years, I think, is an incredibly important one.
[John] That was a long and protracted conversation, and I think there were lots of strong voices and there were certainly some disingenuous voices, but I also think there were people who perhaps resisted these changes who certainly weren’t disingenuous and had very strong positions that I think, if nothing else, helped sharpen the understanding of what should happen. I think that was a very, to be quite honest, if you go back half a decade, you know I probably was on the fence about the value of codes of conduct and certainly that conversation helped me think more about the value, probably think more about my own privilege, and certainly something we’ve embraced very strongly over the last four or five years here. And what was very interesting about it, there was sort of response from people to the fact that we were putting front and center our code of conduct, at the front of it, rather than hiding it away or feeling a bit embarrassed about it, and people have been very, very positive around that.
[Ethan] Yeah, absolutely.
[John] So that’s certainly one area that I think those conversations have shaped our field for the better.
[Ethan] Yeah, no, I couldn’t agree more, and I think that you know there’s a lot of uncertainty I hear on Twitter about the like the future of Twitter as a product, but it’s been one of the best ways for me to connect with people that don’t share my background in so many different ways, and I think like even though there’s a lot of questions about Twitter, it’s like it’s become more valuable to me in like the last year and half where I can connect with people that are actually focusing on some of these social issues, but there’s this temptation I think to like participate in that discussion, to be vocal, and to be heard in that conversation, but there are people that are actually raising these issues, and I think it’s always more valuable to listen to them and just sort of hear about like what they need or what they feel they need to have like a safe place for some of these things to be resolved. So like the code of conduct, I think, is a great example of like here are people that have been sort of like marginalized for many ways, you know, just because of some systemic issues, and I think like if they’re asking for this thing to make it feel like a safe place and for these things to be put in place then who am I going to be to disagree with that.
[John] Right. Yes.
[Ethan] So it’s about acknowledging that privilege like you said, which is hard, but, yeah, important.
[John] So just to wrap up.
[Ethan] Yeah.
[John] You know, in January next year, it’s still nearly a year off, but it’ll be 10 years since the iPhone was first announced.
[Ethan] Right, wow, right.
[John] It’s a bit terrifying thought really.
[Ethan] Yeah it is terrifying.
[John] And the iPhone in a way, well I see it at any rate, is the progenitor of, ultimately, what became responsive web design, because you know for more than a decade, even up to that point, we’ve been talking about the future of the web on mobile devices, but to be quite honest, you know, it was mostly theoretical.
[Ethan] Yeah, sure.
[John] You know you could get some pretty crappy mobile experiences on some phones, but it really did change things.
[Ethan] It really did.
[John] And I think, most importantly, it put into the hands of decision makers, who didn’t necessarily understand the broader context of the web, a different way to experience, so that we weren’t suddenly optimizing for our boss’s browser, you know, and having to make things look the same on every device. It was rather, oh, hang on the boss kind of gets the fact that it can’t look the same, like trying to make that look the same on this little screen here and on my big screen in the office is kind of ridiculous, so it sort of brought about a change that we’d sort of seen coming and hoped would come for a decade. I guess looking out another decade, which is a bit of a terrifying thought.
[Ethan] It is.
[John] Because I’ll be almost 60 by then, and that is a pretty terrifying thought. What can you imagine? Firstly, will the web be here? I mean, you know, are native apps gonna take over the world? Are we gonna standardize in the same way Windows essentially dominated, kind of, computing for most people for many years? What are the sorts of things that you sort of see happening that might shape the next 10 years?
[Ethan] Yeah, I mean, hell I’m no futurist. I mean, I don’t know what I’m doing in 10 weeks, much less 10 years, but I mean I think like the stuff that’s most interesting me right now is really kind of like the discussion around like I think we’re still having that discussion that you kicked off back in the Dao of web design about like stepping away from some of our expectations about how the web is a design medium. You know, we’re building flexible responsive layouts, but we’re still treating them in a very. print-centric format. So the performance discussion is part of that. I think accessibility is starting to really come back to the floor, and I really kind of hope like we can keep looking beyond the layouts in front of us and start considering more contexts of use, and whether that’s IoT physical web stuff or whether it’s gonna be VR, everyone’s been saying VR’s gonna be a thing for the last like, you know, every year that I’ve been working on the web-
[John] It’s one of those things isn’t it? There’s a fundamental challenge with VR is it makes people nauseous, and whether or not that’s a phenomenon that, I’m not saying it makes every person nauseous, but it certainly does impact, interestingly it does seem to skew in genders toward female rather than male in terms of the impact on the brain and sense, potentially. I mean, it’s the early days in some of this research, but I had a long conversation earlier today with Russ Weekly and part of it centered around voice activation and voice computing, which I’ve long considered what I generally call jetpack futurism, which is a vision of the future that is always just around the corner, and it always demos well, but doesn’t necessarily accord with either physics, economics or, in many cases, human nature, for want of a better word, a laden term. I’m still for myself, VR, I’m interested to see whether or not it is a ubiquitous thing, whether it will have specialized uses, or whether, you know, we’ve sort of tried to get it to happen for a long time now, and I sometimes wonder whether things don’t take off, like voice computing and jetpacks, is there a fundamental reason why these aren’t taking off?
[Ethan] I think you’re right, but I think it’s that sweet spot around economics,that and ubiquity, that like gets it out of the jetpack phase and into something that’s a little bit more accessible. I mean, mobile had the same problem for a long time like Karen’s fond of talking about in her presentations about how touchscreens they’ve historically just been so terrible, until the point they just worked. Maybe some of these emerging contexts are going to have that moment at some point, but I think at least like right now I’m more interested in having a conversation about the principles that we use to talk about good digital design on the web. You know, something that’s lightweight, that’s accessible, that’s gonna be device agnostic, to borrow Trent’s term. Like I think getting the principles in place independent of the devices that we have in front of us is what’s ultimately gonna serve us for whatever does come next, whatever the hell that’s gonna be.
[John] Well, thanks very much for that.
[Ethan] Thank you, John, it was cool.
[John] We look forward to the next 10 years.
