Strongly Held Opinions, Gone Away

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Chris Coyier on

I received a really wonderful question from Bryan Braun the other day during a workshop I was giving at Sparkbox. He asked if, over the years, if there were opinions about web design and development I strongly held that I don’t anymore.

I really didn’t have a great answer at the time, even though surely if I could rewind my brain there would be some embarrassing ones in there.

At the risk of some heavy self-back-patting, this is exactly the reason I try and be pretty open-minded. If you aren’t, you end up eating crow. And for what? When you crap on an idea, you sound like a jerk at the time, and likely cause more harm than good. If you end up right, you were still a jerk. If you end up wrong, you were a jerk and a fool.

I like the sentiment the web is a big place. It’s a quick way of saying there are no hard and fast right answers in a playground this big with loose rules, diversity of everything, and economic overlords.

I don’t want to completely punt on this question though.

I’ve heard Trent Walton say a number of times that, despite him being all-in on Responsive Web Design now, at first it seemed like a very bad idea to him.

I remember feeling very late to the CSS preprocessing world, because I spent years rolling my eyes at it. I thought it the result of back end nerds sticking their noses into something and bringing programming somewhere that didn’t need it. Looking back, it was mostly me being afraid to learn the tools needed to bring it into a workflow.

It’s not to find industry-wide holy wars these days, where strongly held opinions duke it over time, and probably end up giving ground to each other in the end.

But what of those internal personal battles? I’d be very interested to hear people’s answers on this…

What strongly-help opinion did you used to have about web design and development, but not anymore?