Lowriders & websites

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

I think of ElonStan420 standing in that exhibit hall, eyeing those cars with disdain because all that time, energy, care, and expression “doesn’t really matter”. Those hand-painted pinstripes don’t make the car faster or cheaper. Chrome-plated everything doesn’t make it more efficient. No one is going to look under the hood anyway.

Don’t read the comments on HackerNews, Adam! (I say this, but I’ve yet to learn not to do so myself, when occasionally my writing escapes from my site and finds its way over there.)

But anyway, this is a fantastic piece about functionalism. Does it matter whether your website has redundant classes defined in the HTML? It renders the same anyway, and odds are good that nobody will ever notice! I’m with Adam: yes, of course it can matter. It doesn’t have to, but coding is both a science and an art, and art matters.

Should every website be the subject of maximal craft? No, of course not. But in a industry rife with KPI-obsessed, cookie-cutter, vibe-coded, careless slop, we could use more lowriders.

Well said, Adam.

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