This morning I published a post on the Telerik Developer Network that asks the question “What’s Wrong with the Web?”? If you read about web development at all (and apparently you do, since you are reading this), you can’t possibly have missed the long list of posts declaring that the web, as we know it, is in serious jeopardy. The main issues are:
- The web is losing the battle to native
- The web is too slow, largely due to the weight of advertising
- The web is too slow, largely due to the cruft of too many libraries and frameworks
- The web is trying to be something it isn’t (i.e. native) and adding too many unecessary features
There may be more, but these are the core debates.
The thing about all these debates is they are very technical - they are about how we build web apps or the underlying technology of the web. None of these debates seems concerned with what we are building. As I argue in the conclusion of my post, perhaps we’re worried about the wrong thing. Perhaps if we focused on building awesome and creative things on the web again, the answer to these problems would work itself out.
I worry that web developers have become like bureaucrats, too worried the procedure of building web apps, having lost sight of the point of building them in the first place.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Please comment on the post on the Telerik Developer Network.