People who were fired for being flash developers came back and designed the same stuff with Ajax/JavaScript.
We're still stuck with badly designed sites. At times you can just use a simple hyperlink to open a document and don't need a JavaScripted window that breaks apart on mobile browsers with small screen size.
The "funny" thing is that restaurants are among the worst offenders for some reason for sticking all sorts of gratuitous pop-ups and weird sliding animations etc. And this for sites that, probably more than most, are going to be accessed by someone on a phone who just wants an address or to take a look at a menu.
Well, restaurants and small businesses in general usually have websites that come about through the joining of customers who have no understanding of ux or the trade-offs that come with going for the showiest thing possible, and creators who are offsetting their low prices by pushing through jobs as quickly as possible and don't have time to go through the delicate dance of telling the customer that their desires are unreasonable and awful.
Just looked at Nokia maps around my work in Central London. The business listings are all wrong and the icons are placed on top of the road names making it very hard to use.
In my opinion, just like politicians are worthy of public scrutiny, the people in power should be too. If a person's actions and views affect population, they should be known to the people who it effects.
Having said that, it becomes difficult to draw the line. Stuff like this does have potential to create anarchy, which doesn't benefit anyone.
Here is another market. Pakistan, India's neighbor did similar thing three months back. Good to see that as internet penetrates this region it is with a good capable browser.
It is difficult to develop when rendering on all browsers is different.
I do agree with him, one platform that did what we told it to. All hacks were documented.
However I don't miss it. Plenty of capable platforms out there that can help build browser compatible sites quickly. Besides if you have to resort to bold inside an option tag, your design has some other flaws.
My favorite is still web kit. I hope it gets more share.
Edit: try putting image tags inside option. I believe only FF renders it. I could be wrong though. It's been a while I've worked this deep with HTML. The DTD never allowed yet FF renders it.
We're still stuck with badly designed sites. At times you can just use a simple hyperlink to open a document and don't need a JavaScripted window that breaks apart on mobile browsers with small screen size.