the sun also rises.

brianvan:

aurora replied to your post: Just figured out something that was previously perplexing

How so?

Remastered albums - and, to a greater extent, different media format reissues - offer value to consumers but not enough to justify paying full price for something multiple times. For example, I don’t think any Beatles album is worth $50. But I could very well pay that much to own any one of them on vinyl, cassette, and CD. (That’s not even counting the - nonexistent - digital media availability! Or the possibility that some sort of format improvement will trigger a higher-fidelity reissue in the future.)

“Responsive web design” is a new best-practice that makes more sense than the old one. Doesn’t really add value to most existing sites unless they’re completely borked in modern/upcoming web browsers. (I’m talking more the long tail here, not the top 1000 sites by traffic) But, cynically, I bet a lot of websites will be iterating designs to integrate responsive elements anyway. And that means… as a freelance web producer, I can convince someone to pay me again for something I did for them once already! I probably shouldn’t do that. But many designers will!

The improvement in web design that I was hoping for would be more along the lines of, “I want to think less about fucking around in HTML/CSS/Javascript”. But designers are all about the fucking around part.

EDIT: If it is unclear above - I think it isn’t, anyway - I think the “responsive” part should have been paired with the “less fucking around” part to justify new design and code iterations. It’s not technologically intractable. The barriers are almost entirely social. The fact that technologists would widely agree that there are few social barriers, if any at all, to improving technology is an indicator of how bad that problem has gotten.