From the course: Building a Resilient Web

Why resilience on the web matters

From the course: Building a Resilient Web

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Why resilience on the web matters

“

- [Narrator] The idea of the resilient web and resilient web design came to the forefront in 2017 when Jeremy Keith published the book Resilient Web Design. This book, by the way, is entirely web-based and you can either read it in your browser or download it in a myriad of different formats all entirely free. The core premise of the book is that the web is resilient by design and it's our jobs as the people who create content on and for the web to ensure that resilience is preserved. So, what is this resilience and why does it matter? It all comes back to the most basic purpose and principles of the web platform, to publish information over the internet using a robust markup language that can be parsed by whatever tool the user chooses. That markup language is HTML and the resilience built into the web platform can be experienced by simply opening any HTML document in a web browser. Even without a single line of CSS or JavaScript, the document loads in the browser and is formatted in a way we can understand. And if we introduce errors into the document, the browser will try everything it can to still process the document and make it readable all without ever triggering error messages or blocking the page from displaying to the user. The web is resilient because the core purpose of the web is information sharing, and the requirements to be able to create and access that shared information should be as low as possible. Why does this matter today though when powerful smartphones and high-speed mobile internet seems ubiquitous? Precisely because it seems ubiquitous, but we don't actually know anything about the person visiting our web creations. We don't know where they are, what their internet connection is like at the moment they're requesting our content, what device they're using, what software that device has, or what capabilities or limitations the user's environment or even the user's body is impulsing on that interaction. All we know is there's a person out there somewhere trying to get access to information over the internet and it's our job to make sure they are successful. To do that, we must build resilient solutions.

Contents