Hey — I’m on the other end of this argument — usually trying to push pixelperfect designs forward :)

So here’s my few cents:

1. With design systems you can achieve precision without sacrificing features — you can keep on innovating and simply use a set library of components that already ARE pixel perfect.
2. The device problem all depends on code optimisation and an optional no-js version of everything. While it may complicate the code a little bit, delivering a visually better experience for MOST users shouldn’t be sacrificed to cater for a small group. They simply should get the experience that’s possible on their hardware.
3. The over-engineering argument I can somewhat agree on, but it’s dropdowns that are causing the most problems, the rest can be styled “nicely” with CSS alone in most cases.

As a designer I started with HTML and CSS many years ago, but I think learning JS is important because it gives you proper knowledge on “building” things so if a developer is HTML only it’s simply not enough — and it doesn’t matter if it’s about the actual UI or something else. They should learn to “code”, not to style hypertext.

However as a very “visually” oriented designer (I love pretty / precise UI’s) I also think that some of the late 90’s style websites had really great interfaces and the purity and simplicity of “just underlined links” is something that is slowly making a comeback.

The main difference? Better looking fonts that work well on hi-dpi displays. Better use of whitespace and guides. Better grids. There’s no need to overcomplicate, but while we’re doing something — however simple- we should do it as close to perfect as we can.

Thanks for this nice food for thought!

I love opposing perspectives :)