UPDATE (2012-06-05): Played one more round!
Let's play a game based on web development trends. This game is called:
Makes Sense / Doesn't Fucking Make Sense
This is great game, you'll see in a minute why it kicks so much ass. Ready? Let's get started:
Round 1
Makes Sense:
Speeding up your blog by making the articles pre-baked HTML so they won't have to be generated on-the-fly for each request.
Doesn't Fucking Make Sense:
Make the pre-baking optimization possible by switching from a server-based comment system to a JavaScript-driven one. Make sure this involves round-trips to at least one domain and server that's completely separate from your own. Don't forget to toss in twenty JS-driven social networking and link sharing widgets.
Verdict: I win.
Awesome game, isn't it? Let's have another round:
Round 2
Makes Sense:
Only reload the parts of a page that need to change.
Doesn't Fucking Make Sense:
Perform AJAX requests during, or immediately after, the initial page load. After all, why make your page retrievable in one HTTP request when you vomit out the same exact page with multiple round-tips?
Additionally, completely overlook the fact that the cost of transferring a few extra kilobytes of HTML is completely overshadowed by the cost of performing an HTTP request or interpreting JS, especially a giant JS library hosted externally. Hooray for pessimizing a non-fucking-bottleneck, dipshit!
During your quest to slow down your website, completely break things like bookmarking, forward/back buttons, and JS-disabled browsing. After all, nobody would ever want to disable their browser's "Make the web slower and more obnoxious" feature.
Verdict: I win again!
Maybe this isn't fair. Let's switch the theme away from speed...
Round 3
Makes Sense:
Include "Bold" and "Italicize" buttons on a text edit control.
Doesn't Fucking Make Sense:
Behind-the-scenes, replace user's explicit intent of "bold" and "italic" with the semantically superior "emphasis", so you can use CSS to change the vague <em> (or better yet, <span>) back into the user's original intent of "bold" or "italic" all over again.
Roundabout things like that are what we call "coder masturbation good design" and they enable you to do incredibly common and useful things like: Find the "emphasized" passages on a page in order to...uhhh...ummm...no, wait, I'll think of something...umm...errrr...change the style of "emphasized" text to accidentally make the bold/italic buttons result in something other than bold/italic.
Well, ok, we can prevent such an accident by using a CSS class named "bold" (or something else that effectively means "bold" so we can pretend we're not really calling it "bold"), which clearly doesn't amount to reinventing the <b> tag at all. After all, a passage bolded with <b> or italicized with <i> can never be assumed to imply...emphasis!
Verdict: Hot damn! I still win!
Alright, one more round. All or nothing...
Bonus Round!
Makes Sense:
Zip together a group of files for smaller, more convenient downloads.
Doesn't Fucking Make Sense:
Zip up one file that's already in a compressed format (mp3, avi, self-extracting installer, etc.), thus shaving an enormous 743 bytes off a 50MB file just so the user can have the fun of extracting the one already-compressed file from your useless archive.
Verdict: Well fuck me sideways with a sledgehammer! I'm on a winning streak!
As you can clearly see, this is nothing short of the greatest fucking game ever.
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