New Old Tech

As progress continues to accelerate, sush kelly warns of the dangers of being seduced by every next big thing

- Ben Mounsey

Progress in web design techniques shows no signs of slowing up. As the proponents of the early web are staggering round with 1,000-yard stares, you can’t help but feel a little overawed by the plethora of techniques and frameworks available nowadays.

People are championing the new approaches that are about to change the way we work once again, for example Flexbox (already available) and CSS Grid. Rachel Andrew and Jen Simmons have been encouraging developers to look at these technologies now, in readiness for their arrival.

There have been murmurings and posts in recent months from some of the current web industry’s founders – such as Andy Clarke and Jeffrey Zeldman – asking if it really needs to be this complicated, and whether web it losing its soul or becoming reliant on a standard output (three-column layouts, hero blocks and the like). Have we all become enslaved to the frameworks and tools available to us?

Although they make a good argument, I don’t think there has been a time in my career where there has been more choice (or opinion) about how to build digital projects. We are long past ‘HTML, CSS and a little JavaScript’ – now there are CSS preprocessors and JS frameworks, and the components that make up a web project encompass a load of new elements – optimisation, CDN delivery and SEO to name a few.

I have been working in websites since the year 2000, which means I cut my teeth on long-forgotten techniques such as tables and shims, all against the backdrop of the ‘browser wars’ that make the current browser situation seem oh-so-compatible by contrast! As a digital director at a creative agency, it is on my shoulders to make sure we use the right technology on client work and invest our time wisely with regards to what we learn and (in due course) adapt into our processes.