Jens Oliver Meiert

Less Is Still More

Published on May 21, 2008 (updated Feb 5, 2024), filed under , (feed). (Share this on Mastodon or Bluesky?)

This and many other posts are also available as a pretty, well-behaved ebook: On Web Development.

Spending resources on making things worse is something I find absolutely fascinating.

Let me elaborate, beginning with HTML newsletters: Hours are spent writing supposed content, creating and decorating mockups, working around email client limitations, and finally sending mails that aren’t read at all, and, at the end of the day, hurt the sender.

Take designers decorators: Instead of communicating function, time is invested in creating distracting non-information that takes long to load and that violates every rule brought to us by century-old craftsmanship in information design. It’s then labeled “creativity” and “design.” Take the various ways standard user interface elements get redesigned, ending up making them undiscoverable and unusable.

Take web developers: Instead of gaining experience by developing and optimizing websites, “frameworks” are used that require training to do something that’s neither tailored nor well-written nor fast nor anything. Generally take the countless efforts to clutter markup by unnecessary elements, unnecessary attributes, unnecessarily long ID and class names, non-semantic or over-semantic ID and class names, pseudo-accessible techniques, and so on, winding up making the results slow and unmaintainable.

Yes, we all make mistakes. And we all learn. But, less is still more.

About Me

Jens Oliver Meiert, on November 9, 2024.

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a web developer, manager, and author. I’ve been working as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies you’ve never heard of and companies you use every day, I’m an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (I value you being critical, interpreting charitably, and giving feedback.)