This essay, and really, most of the content on A List Apart, have been instrumental in championing accessibility, progressive enhancement, and separation of content from visual flourish, so that the web didn't become a pixel-pushing medium.
While their shoulders are giant, their message was often ignored, because many designers -- often instructed by their customers -- continued to think in terms of layout inseparable from their visual design.
Web users also valued consistent layouts, but it turns out, not enough websites actually cared! Marketing pressures for visuals and refreshes would frequently be at odds with the UI's UX. This is perhaps excusable for websites whose sole reason for being was to be a digital billboard, but this would be a point-of-contention for news sites, e-Commerce, social networks, and productivity sites too.
We know this is what happened, because when the Web 2.0 "age of mashups" came, most websites were caught by surprise. The coolness factor and emerging business cases finally pressured them to make available snippets of their content that can be surfaced independent of presentation -- but as a twist, instead of sending composed documents, they largely turned to shipping around context-free snippets of data. With content having been separated and spliced into pages using JS, the tight combination of HTML+CSS became a layout engine.
>because many designers -- often instructed by their customers -- continued to think in terms of layout inseparable from their visual design.
Because layout (space between elements) is inseparable from visual design, it's what has the biggest impact on visual perception right after contrast (visibility). Doesn't matter if web or analog design, it's a law of nature.
While their shoulders are giant, their message was often ignored, because many designers -- often instructed by their customers -- continued to think in terms of layout inseparable from their visual design.
Web users also valued consistent layouts, but it turns out, not enough websites actually cared! Marketing pressures for visuals and refreshes would frequently be at odds with the UI's UX. This is perhaps excusable for websites whose sole reason for being was to be a digital billboard, but this would be a point-of-contention for news sites, e-Commerce, social networks, and productivity sites too.
We know this is what happened, because when the Web 2.0 "age of mashups" came, most websites were caught by surprise. The coolness factor and emerging business cases finally pressured them to make available snippets of their content that can be surfaced independent of presentation -- but as a twist, instead of sending composed documents, they largely turned to shipping around context-free snippets of data. With content having been separated and spliced into pages using JS, the tight combination of HTML+CSS became a layout engine.