Web ideals

Earlier this week, there was a bit of a kerfuffle over a talk from Alex Russell (whose work I love) that implied (outright said?) that RWD failed because we’re sending desktop sized assets to mobile devices and it’s killing the web.

There was a lot of discussion around the fact that RWD is not a performance strategy, but simply an approach to building dynamic interfaces that respond to viewport sizes.

You can build small sites or large sites with RWD. They can be performant or not. Performance is its own thing.

Born out of this discussion, a few folks started brainstorming a set of ideals for building things for the modern web. Scott Jehl (whose work I also love) nailed it with the acronym: ASPIRE.

He wrote about it on the Filament Group website.

Great websites should aspire to be:

• Accessible to folks with varying cognitive and physical abilities and disabilities
• Secure and reliable for storing, manipulating, and transferring information
• Performant on average devices and in constrained or unreliable network conditions
• Inclusive to diverse audiences and produced by diverse teams to create better experiences
• Responsive in adapting the user interface contextually to any screen
• Ethical in how users’ preferences and data are handled

I love it! What do you think? Check out the full article on Filament’s site.