Don’t Offend the Coding Gods

There are many tales—both ancient and modern—of mere mortals who offended the gods by ‘rising above their station’, so to speak. I often think of novelist Thomas Hardy’s main characters, who are regularly beaten down by fate for trying to aim for a better lot than fate has handed them.

It seems to me this motif applies equally to the web design realm. Web developers face many trials trying to get their code to work across a multitude of quirk-ridden devices. But in a way, these trials are a punishment for aiming too high—for trying to be too ambitious, if you will.

Simple, straightforward HTML content with a touch of style is—arguably—what the web was designed for. It gets the information to the intended audience quickly, efficiently and accessibly. The desire to get fancy—to create ‘cool’ layouts with complex styling and trendy effects like slide out menus and so on—is unnecessary. It’s also dangerous, given how much difficulty some devices have in rendering these designs.

I regularly see forum posts where people are struggling to get outlandishly complex layouts to work in various devices. Almost always, these are problems they don’t need to have—problems of their own making, borne of a desire for something unnecessary.

So if you feel yourself being punished by the coding gods, ask if you really need to be playing with fire in your layouts. And remember that the punishment you endure is shared by all those who have to use your layouts on those struggling devices.