By Mat Marquis CHAPTER 5with it, too. Those hulking, resource-hungry websites aren’t responsive
Web design’s fault any more than a few dozen bent nails could be blamed
on a faulty hammer. This trend is on us, and you don’t see any carpenters
writing blog posts about how hammers are a failed methodology because
of the times they dropped one on their feet. We can do better than blaming
our tools for our mistakes.
Presumptive Enhancement
We can’t be faulted too much. You and I probably have it pretty easy, from a
browsing perspective. We’re developers — we have fast computers and band-
width to spare. I’m not certain I can breathe air that doesn’t have Wi-Fi in it.
That’s our privileged context, though; that’s what we’re used to. It’s
comfortable. We assume high bandwidth and stable networks, because
that’s practically a given for us. We can safely assume that sending
out a request will result in something being sent back, outside of the
occasional subway tunnel. Those of us who build the Web have it the
easiest on the Web, and perhaps as a result the average Web page is now
roughly 1.4 MB^2.
If you’ve only ever experienced the Web by way of an unreliable mobile
connection, pages like these are more than just a minor inconvenience:
they’re pages you might not be able to use at all. These pages are a part of
the Web that isn’t for you. Pages like these are evidence that we’re building
from a place of privilege. While I’m certain it isn’t anyone’s intent, what
we’ve been doing lately is building a Web for us.
[...] in the interwoven space-time of the web, context is no longer just about
the here and now. Instead, context refers to the physical, digital, and social
structures that surround the point of use.
— Cennydd Bowles, “Designing with context^3 ”, Feb 16, 2013