Original question text by @phantomwise@lemmy.ml

What are the modern design trends you hate most? Feel free to rant! Mine are:

  • Physical buttons are out of fashion, now EVERYTHING must have a touch screen instead! Especially if it makes the appliance more inconvenient to use. Like having to press a flimsy touch screen ten times to scroll through a washing machine’s programs instead of just turning a physical knob and pressing a physical start button.
  • Every website looks like it’s made for a phone and was vomited by the same app in slightly different flavors of vomit.
  • Actually EVERYTHING looks like it’s made for a phone… Like what’s the deal with all those hamburger menus on DESKTOP apps? Please just put a regular menu and same me some pointless clicking, it’s not like you’re lacking screen space. I especially hate that those menus can’t be opened from the keyboard like regular menus.
  • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
    1·
    13 hours ago

    I think that’s a small part of it, the lack of nuance from new coders, but the origins weren’t so cut and dry, IMO. It was really how poorly things were supported by browsers. Tables became used for styling because they were the only way to achieve some layouts that would have any hope of calculating correctly in the browser. JavaScript became used for active elements because html/css originally couldn’t do anything dynamic or responsive. Many things became divs simply because they were the only building block that didn’t come saddled with tons of preconditions and assumptions. etc, etc, etc.

    HTML5 and ECMA2015 are when it started to turn around. Browsers finally got their shit together and supported a proper, useful baseline set of features that could cover most use cases, and the resulting standardizations made a HUGE difference. If it stayed going the way it was pre-HTML5, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’d be wrestling with some popular framework trying to wedge a new standard in next to HTML in the browsers… Heck, that probably would’ve happened anyways if HTML weren’t just glorified XML (meaning it’s already nearly infinitely extensible)!