In the world of web development, there are many choices that are commonly presented as true or false, black and white, Boolean, binary values, when in fact they exist in a grey goo of quantum uncertainty.

What prompted my thoughts on the subject (at least recently) was a post on Simply Accessible entitled Speed vs. Accessibility. In the post, Derek Featherstone tells a story of someone who went so far as to change their markup, in a manner that made it significantly less semantic, in order to save a few bytes in file size and therefore improve performance. The result? They saved about 50 bytes, but lost contextual meaning and reduced accessibility. This lead Derek to ask if it had to be speed or accessibility (by the way, the answer is no—they can coexist).

The truth of the matter is, web development is a series of trade-offs. Sure, some best practices overlap between say, performance and accessibility. Many, however, do not. To make an educated decision requires a healthy level of knowledge both of the project being worked on, and of these concerns (semanticity, accessibility, performance, etc.) and their implications. Knowing what is most important to a project will give you a roadmap to follow when you inevitably have to decide which trade-offs to make.

It’s for this reason that I give little credence to the many one-sided argumentative posts you will see online. The goal should always be to be as semantic as possible, but you should also strive to be as performant, as accessibile and as well designed as possible. For example, anyone who reads my blog knows how seriously I take performance. In my opinion however, I would never be willing to adjust my markup as the person in Derek’s story did in order to shave a few bytes of my HTML. I may be a performance zealot, but to me, having a well structured page is the base from which I prefer to build off of. I believe a well marked up document provides the ideal starting point for optimal semantics, accessibility, performance and maintainability. This means that my sites will never be quite as peformant as they could be and I’m ok with that. I’ll do my best to optimize my site in ways that I think maximize my gains and have a minimal negative impact on my markup. There are many far more effective ways to optimize my site without having to pay such a steep price.

So by all means, find something you feel strongly about—learn about it, share your knowledge with others, become a strong advocate for it, but always remember that web development requires a balance. Find a solid base to build from, determine the considerations most important to the project and always keep those in mind as you make your decisions about what trade-offs to make.

Our online tools do a great job at breadth (hundreds of friends, thousands of tweets), but a bad job at depth. We live increasingly superficial lives, reducing our relationships to caricatures and our personalities to billboards, as we speed along at 1,000 miles an hour. We trade self-reflection for busyness, gorging ourselves on it and drowning in it, without recognizing the violence of that busyness, which we perpetrate against ourselves and at our peril.— Our Digital Crisis

…when we seek happiness as the ultimate state, we’re destined to be disappointed. Absent unhappiness, how would we even recognize it? If we’re fortunate, happiness is a place we visit from time to time rather than inhabit permanently. As a steady state, it has the limits of any steady state: it’s not especially interesting or dynamic.

He goes on to talk about how our desire for happiness is derived from our impulses to avoid pain and to seek gratification, and the problem with taking those impulses too far:

But it also turns out that pain and discomfort are critical to growth, and that achieving excellence depends on the capacity to delay gratification.

When we’re living fully, what we feel is engaged and immersed, challenged and focused, curious and passionate. Happiness — or more specifically, satisfaction — is something we mostly feel retrospectively, as a payoff on our investment. And then, before very long, we move on to the next challenge.

What this boils down to is that we need to be willing to push ourselves outside of our comfort zones if we want to continue to grow and expand our skills. The problem is not being happy, the problem is believing that we should always be happy and never feel discomfort.

This doesn’t mean you should walk around looking for reasons to feel upset and depressed and it’s not a stand against having a generally positive outlook; there is a lot of power in a positive attitude. What you should instead take away from Tony’s article (or at least it’s what I took away) is that you need to be willing to experience the highs and lows, to push yourself out of your comfort zone, and to never be content with what you’ve accomplished. As he eloquently puts it:

Express your joy, savor your good fortune and enjoy your life, but also feel your disappointments, acknowledge your shortcomings, and never settle for happiness.

Enough said.

My point is that responsive web design isn’t something that can be tacked on to the end of an existing workflow. It requires a different mindset, one that considers the medium from the outset. If you’re currently thinking in proportions rather than pixels, the transition to responsive web design will be relatively painless. But if you’re stuck in the world of converting PSDs into web pages, you’re going to have a tough time.— Responsive Enhancement

To never follow a dream because you don’t think you’re good enough or don’t have the skills, or knowledge, or experience is a waste. In fact, these projects where there is doubt are the ones to pursue. They offer the greatest challenge and the greatest rewards. Why bother doing something you already have done a hundred times, where there is nothing left to learn? — The first step is to start

It’s a very simple concept, but it is one that, if adhered to, would fundamentally alter the priorities of a project. If the user comes first, SEO takes a backseat to content strategy. Accessibility and performance cease being afterthoughts and become crucial components of a site. More time is given to user research to determine what users expect to find on your site, and where they expect to find it.

The irony is that by putting the users first, the success of the project would greatly be improved. Build something that users care about and want to use and they’ll reward you with their loyalty.

Imagine if every company took the time to ask, and more importantly to answer, this question before launching their projects. Wouldn’t that be refreshing?

A perfect implementation of the wrong specification is worthless. By the same principle a beautifully crafted library with no documentation is also damn near worthless. If your software solves the wrong problem or nobody can figure out how to use it, there’s something very bad going on.— Readme Driven Development

Like any valuable relationship, the ones we have in business hinge on trust. And trust depends on openness, respect and humanity. Yet we often resist taking that approach in our professional lives, even though we know it would be absurd to do anything else in our personal lives.— My Challenge to You: Only Speak Like a Human at Work

If you don’t research and vet your potential client before asking them to sign your contract, stop being stupid. If you bid on projects even though the potential client doesn’t know much about you or why you’d be a good (or bad) choice for them (they “just need a web designer”), stop being stupid.

He continues by analyzing how web designers can continue to lay the groundwork for “stupid” clients by failing to have a proper workflow in place:

If you aren’t the one defining the project process, stop being stupid. If you don’t define, police, and unfailingly adhere to specific milestone requirements and deadlines for both yourself and your clients, stop being stupid. If you’re producing design artefacts before completing a comprehensive discovery process, stop being stupid.

Too often, we rush blindly forward into new projects and new relationships with clients. This process is not at all conducive to high quality work. Quality work requires an investment of time and a devotion of resources. To craft a site of true quality, you need to take a step back and slow the process down — making sure you understand the problem you are trying to solve and ensuring that the solution you are proposing is the right solution for that particular problem.

While the stupid tag may feel a bit confrontational it does not detract from the argument that Rutledge is making: not all failed relationships are the fault of the client. By failing to invest the proper amount of time and attention into planning, research, and careful consideration of requirements, firms and freelancers often set themselves up for failed client relationships.

Comfort, however, is not often equal to progress. When it comes to expanding your mind to new possibilities and advancing your knowledge and skills, a little dissonance goes a long way.

One popular phrase you hear thrown around is the “wisdom of crowds” – the many are smarter than the few. However, it is important to note that the wisdom of crowds does not equal crowd psychology (the power of people acting collectively). Instead, the wisdom of crowds is only true when the crowd consists of a variety of people with different viewpoints, opinions and backgrounds.

Why is it that we need this diversity to excel and grow? It’s because as we become certain that something is true, our mind locks onto that idea. We have a tendency to filter out any information that may conflict with our firmly held opinions, and only focus on those that support them. This behavior, of course, strengthens our existing opinions and sheds no light on alternate solutions and beliefs that may be superior to the ones we have chosen to latch onto.

As Jonah Lehrer says in How We Decide, “The only way to counteract the bias for certainty is to encourage some inner dissonance. We must force ourselves to think about the information we don’t want to think about, to pay attention to the data that disturbs our entrenched beliefs.”

The way to overcome our certainties, and to challenge ourselves to new heights of accomplishments and knowledge is to consider other perspectives than our own, to surround ourselves with people who will challenge our beliefs. And then we must listen. We must not filter out their commentary, we need to consider it and view our problems with a fresh perspective. That’s how we develop our skills and that’s how we create new, innovative solutions.