Thanks to Apple, the internet has become (literally and figuratively) square. The internet is fugly. There’s no creativity. It’s like the artists who got a degree, but have no actual skill have taken over. This is probably the first in a long series of how much I hate the square internet that is occuring at the moment.
It started when Apple came out with the iPhone, and then realized that there was a whole world outside of Apple HQ that didn’t use the internet the same way they did. They quickly realized that Adobe(then Macromedia) Flash was widely used and they couldn’t 1. Control it on their hardware and 2. Monetize it. SO… they banned it, claiming that it was not a secure platform.
SIDE NOTE: Fappening.
This then opened the floodgate for HTML5, the “Flash Killer”. It was suppose to replace the need for Actionscript and even animated gifs. “You don’t need any of that with an HTML5 canvas!”, they said back then. You’ll be able to do everything Flash does and not need a plugin AND code securely and compliantly. Fast forward to today… still waiting for any of the big promises to proliferate throughout the internet. You would think a world of web developers would have utilized all of HTML5’s magic so far, but no.
So what did we get out of the invention of the iPhone and the HTML5 bursting bubble? RESPONSIVE DESIGN. And that’s where square comes in. All designers hated Tables back then, but we had to use it in order to slice large images and shove it down the 56k pipe. When possible, we never used them. We’ve now replaced TR/TD with DIV and now we have thoroughly stepped in it.
It’s gotten so bad, people created services to make the internet square. Sites like Wix and Squarespace are systematically sucking the life out of something that could be so much better. Even WordPress. Every popular theme out there now is based on responsive squares.
We need to break out of this fucked-up loop and start getting creative again. Oh shit… I guess I better put my money where my mouth is and come up with examples and solutions.
I’ll tag this series with the category “square”.