What If?

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Robin Rendle on

Harry Roberts writes about working on a project with a rather nasty design flaw. The website was entirely dependent on images loading before rendering any of the content. He digs into why this bad for accessibility and performance but goes further to describe how this can ripple into other problems:

While ever you build under the assumption that things will always work smoothly, you’re leaving yourself completely ill-equipped to handle the scenario that they don’t. Remember the fallacies; think about resilience.

Harry then suggests that we should always ask ourselves a key question when developing a website: what if this image doesn’t load? For example, if the user is on a low-end device, using a flakey network, using an obscure browser, looking at the site without a crucial API or feature available… you get the idea.

While we’re on this note, we asked what makes a good front-end developer a little while back and I think this is the best answer to that question after reading Harry’s post: a good front-end developer is constantly asking themselves, “What if?”

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