Web truths that cause infinite loops

Every few months there is a drama happening in the blogging and social media scene. We seem to need that to keep ourselves occupied. It allows us to get distracted from the feeling that the people who pay us have no idea what we do. And keep praising us for things we are not proud of, cementing our impostor syndrome.

For an upcoming talk, I analysed the recurring themes that we get fired up about. I will post one on each of these over the next few weeks.

• CSS is not real programming and broken
• JavaScript can’t be trusted
• We need granular control over web APIs, not abstractions
• The web is better than any other platform as it is backwards compatible and fault tolerant
• The web is broken and backwards compatibility is holding us back
• Publishing on the web using web standards is easy and amazing
• The web is world-wide and needs to be more inclusive
• Mobile is the present and future

Each of these topics can spark thousands of reactions, dozens of blog posts. Many will get you a speaking slot at an event. They are all true, but they are also all not necessarily yielding the amazing insight we expect them to. I’ll try to explain why they are endless loops and what we could do to get past discussing these over and over again. Maybe it is a good time to concentrate on solving other, new, problems instead. And recognise that a new generation of makers and developers may not be as excited about them as we are.

Yes, these will be my opinions and they may spark some discourse. That’s fine. You can disagree with me, and I promise to keep this to the point and civil. I’ve done this for a very long time, I’ve heard many people talk and discuss these. Hopefully my insights will hit a mark with some of you and make us reconsider rehashing the same old discussions over and over again.