Oh, Matthias did it again: Publishing one of his thorough articles on the challenges of designing/working with "the web".
It is again one of those articles that I'd wished to have written myself, because it echoes my thoughts (and my frustration) about the unfitting ways I am forced to work in when I'm doing client or agency-work. This feeling of not using the medium to its full potential, because the people involved in "the job" are focussing on the superficial and visual aspects only. The frustration about always having to fight for lean and performant solutions, and the nagging feeling of 'this is all wrong', but noone involved wants to listen, because it forces a change of mindset and leaving the comfort zone, especially for 'visual' designers, who all to often still sit in the driver seat and 'just' need 'some programming'.

We are still drawing pictures of websites – although, as Paul Robert Lloyd noted, the true web aesthetic is hardly visual at all. We are still tackling a flexible medium with the static tools and linear waterfall processes of the past, that can’t represent the inherent nature of the Webs ingredients because we are always creating static abstractions of the final medium. This leads to tedious, inefficient, and highly ineffective tasks, wrong features being built, and most importantly: because we spend most of our time doing the wrong things, the quality of the experiences we offer our users suffers.

Usually I try to pick 'the' quote from the articles I link here, but this article is full of quoteworthy stuff, so hop over and read it for yourself :)