Where Angels Fear
2 min readJun 14, 2021

--

The problem is a generation of web designers who aren't developers or information architects and have, therefore, not only no understanding of either but, more significantly, no experience of them: who needs to know about coding when they can simply drag stuff into NetObjects Fusion and let someone else restore the binary blob from backup, when it all goes titsup? ¹

Psychology? Ergonomics? Access Structures? User stories? UX?

What?

Never mind all that, just look at how lovely the UI is — the colourscheme is ever so tasteful, don't you think?

My own most recent run-in with this phenomenon came when a support representative tried to convince me that I need have no concern re privacy issues arising from their reliance upon Google’s reCAPTCHA, because it was sandboxed on their servers and no metadata delivered to Google. And this ignorance of tech is the crux of the problem: not only is there the issue of where to even begin explaining all the hideously fundamental flaws in that argument, but how did it ever reach the stage where allegedly technical people even need it explaining to them?

Before any project is signed off and the invoice paid, senior management should be obliged to sit down with uMarix and NoScript installed in Firefox (with the deafualt policies set to deny/block everything) and observe how many times they are required to go through the cycle of 'authorise an element and refresh the page, only to discover that they now have to repeat that process some twenty or more times over the course of five minutes before the page finally loads everything' and then assess just how much oversight their company actually has of what is going on when they allow the various elements to be referenced from all over the web by their own servers ... and whether the developers themselves have the least clue ... and just what risks they are taking by delivering it to customers who might subsequently take legal action in the event something untoward happens that might conceivably be attributed to (criminal) negligence when a web developer is called upon as an expert witness for the prosecution and explains it to the judge.


¹ If NetObjects Fusion isn’t the worst ‘HTML editor and site designer’ ever to befoul the World, it’s certainly where the rot set in, IMO.

--

--

Where Angels Fear
Where Angels Fear

Written by Where Angels Fear

There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live and too rare to die.

No responses yet