CHAPTER 3 The Vanilla Web Diet
This is a world where connectivity is narrower than it is on the desk-
top. Let’s not clog up the pipes with things nobody will ever consume.analYzing effeCTS beaTS aDDing fX
If you want to add shiny things, make sure they can perform in a shiny fashion.
Nobody likes their browser to slow down for an effect that lags.
All in all, we seem to be far too focused on visual effects in our designs.
You can see this in the procession of design fads that come and go. The
current fascination with scroll-to-parallax websites will soon look as dated
and annoying as rainbow dividers or Flash tunnel pages look now.
The question we have to ask ourselves is how many effects we can add
to a certain environment before we overload our users. Are the drop-shad-
ow, rounded corners and gradient really necessary on everything, or does
it make sense to create them with CSS only for those environments which
support them, instead of simulating them with images and increasing load
times? Moving from skeuomorphic to flat design would mean just chang-
ing the CSS — no need to find and delete orphaned images on the server or,
more likely, abandon them there to add to the overall weight of the project.
Does it make sense to have two states of a widget fade into one another
if it means adding another JavaScript library and calculating the fade in
JavaScript? A CSS transition is done by the browser, and browser makers
can tweak and improve its behavior. The video hardware can calculate it,
rather than the main processor. If you do the transition by hand in JavaS-
cript it is up to you to make it behave smoothly everywhere and you cannot
rely on the browser to do the dirty work for you. Will users really love
the subtle drop-shadow when their battery empties much quicker than it
would without it?
Just because something works well in native apps doesn’t mean it will
be appropriate in Web apps or websites. We’d only be simulating an envi-
ronment we could never match in terms of performance, creating unhap-
py, disappointed users. Nobody wants to get a lovely piece of cake only