The View-Source Web

Being able to peak under the hood, tinker and figure out how it all worked was what got me started as a web developer. Come to think of it, it is still how I learn and work. I’m afraid we might be losing some of that, however.

Brent Simmons put it nicely when he said:

Lesson learned: the discoverable and understandable web is still do-able — it’s there waiting to be discovered. It just needs some commitment from the people who make websites [emphasis added].

I guess part of this over-complication and inadvertent obfuscation might come from the fact that we are pushing the web to—and maybe beyond—its limits. I say that like it is a bad thing, and maybe it is, but mostly I just don’t know.

I just hope that there are still websites out there with clean markup, sane stylesheets and intelligible JavaScript. My web development depends on it.