I don't think it's entirely that people are stupid (maybe a little).
Cheers Handy. I expressed myself poorly. What I meant wasn't that end-users are stupid (though we all know a few that are), I was referring to the people who go to university doing some kind of IT course and wind up developing websites, or else develop the framework/design software that people who develop websites then use. Chewy's posts have made that point very well. The people developing the crappy software and especially the people writing 140 kilograms of Javascript to make a simple web page display half-decently (albeit at glacial speed), these guys
are stupid.
On your second theme, yes, web developers have been very slow to adapt to mobile-friendly design. They (we) must share a lot of the blame here. As a rule, it takes web designers something like 3 to 5 years to adapt to new things. I am an example myself. None of my sites are mobile-friendly, except by accident. Granted, the most important ones - the ones I spend any time maintaining and extending - are by their very nature only suitable for decent screens, so I've simply ignored phones. Hey, if you are daft enough to want to look at a collection of high-resolution pictures of wildlife using a screen the size of a cigarette pack, that's your problem. I'm not really interested; get a decent screen if you want to look at pictures. But tablets are getting half-decent now, and one of my Do-This-Soon projects is redesigning a few sites to be tablet-friendly. (Though I still won't care about phones.) But - and here is the point - it will probably be another few years before I get around to doing all that work on all those sites.
Have you looked into the
HTML5 Boilerplate framework? I've looked into it a bit and I find it to be a nice compromise of what we discussed. It's probably still to laden with Javascript (JQuery) for your liking but I think it handles it well.
No. I suppose I should, but I never use frameworks for anything. Well, not apart from stuff I've written myself. I try to write reusable, modular code so that I can just lift stuff out of an existing project and slap it into new things. Sometimes I even succeed without spending hours making changes.
Right now, I'm doing a new site for a customer and (at this early stage of the project) I only expect to be re-using the php back-end that handles logic for site navigation and customer-fills-in-the-form bits (I have a module that accepts a sort of quasi-BBcode, which is handy). Everything else I'm doing from scratch because I want to take advantage of the latest HTML 5 and CSS 3 stuff, because I no longer care about compatibility with IE (who does?), and most of all because I want this one to work well on phones and tablets. Given my client's needs, that last is important. Hell, I might even have to buy or borrow a smartphone for testing. (And someone under 30 to show me how to use it.)
Edit: actually, I did look at it a few years ago. When I followed your link it looked familiar. Didn't go anywhere with it though, just have a half-hearted lay around for an hour or so.
