Simplify
October 11, 2025
Honestly, I feel like web developers are constantly being gaslit into thinking that complex over-engineered solutions are the only option. When the discourse is being dominated by people invested in frameworks and libraries, all our default thinking will involve frameworks and libraries. That’s not good for users, and I don’t think it’s good for us either.Of course, the trick is knowing that the simpler solution exists. The information probably isn’t going to fall in your lap—especially when the discourse is dominated by overly-complex JavaScript.
Source: Adactio: Journal—Simplify
As I observed in a recent essay, we’ve spent the last 15 to 20 years in web development building ever more complex and complicated approaches to developing for the web.
But what we often overlook is how far the web platform has come, and continues to evolve.
This enables us to embrace one of the principles I articulated in my recent Dao of CSS presentation at CSS Day (watch free with no login required), of simplicity, as Jeremy Keith observes here.
Jeremy looks at something that has traditionally often been implemented in very complex and complicated ways, carousels. He shows how they can be implemented with just two or three lines of CSS.
Time to re-implement the video carousels on our front page, I think.
