I honestly thought that Jakob Nielson earned his keep by having gotten the basics enough mind share to make the situation better than fond memories for turn of the century web designers.
Being surrounded by designers at the time, all who became developers soon after, the loss of elementary design and UI knowledge I believe is due to the vacuum left behind when the on ramp to get a Internet job became programmatic instead of visual arts.
However possibly the same effect can't happen in the same way again because early in the century coding for the web meant mainly fancy graphics and Flash, nothing related to let alone connected with the plumbing.
(ActionSctipt was good enough for a friend who was a novice but desiccated and earnest programmer to write a Flash demo of a insulin regulator device that was so good his simulation from the specifications was used as a reference through to certification of the C and assembly embedded implementation. A ESP8266 for ActionSctipt would be awesome. This guy lost windows for Linux the instant the penny dropped that the greatest most important barrier to this profession, for the majority, is voodoo FUD and a matter of self confidence and reading the right books. This most recent generation doesn't seem to have a equivalent reading culture similar to how we assembled libraries of O'Reilley titles in our offices and homes - everyone who I remember purchased additional titles in fields that they didn't know about, every single time they bought required references something additional got smuggled into patiently awaiting brains. I copied this at my office letting anyone add a extra title every ten references. This almost immediately became a proper budget for a library but suddenly the requests dried up unexpectedly. We realised the attraction was having snuck the expense onto the job budget people took them home to read only afterwards bringing them back into circulation out of unnecessary sensitivity. This is why I passionately hate hermetically sealed corporate systems. Creativity needs inspiration even from a little lisp (or whatever) learning larceny.
Being surrounded by designers at the time, all who became developers soon after, the loss of elementary design and UI knowledge I believe is due to the vacuum left behind when the on ramp to get a Internet job became programmatic instead of visual arts.
However possibly the same effect can't happen in the same way again because early in the century coding for the web meant mainly fancy graphics and Flash, nothing related to let alone connected with the plumbing.
(ActionSctipt was good enough for a friend who was a novice but desiccated and earnest programmer to write a Flash demo of a insulin regulator device that was so good his simulation from the specifications was used as a reference through to certification of the C and assembly embedded implementation. A ESP8266 for ActionSctipt would be awesome. This guy lost windows for Linux the instant the penny dropped that the greatest most important barrier to this profession, for the majority, is voodoo FUD and a matter of self confidence and reading the right books. This most recent generation doesn't seem to have a equivalent reading culture similar to how we assembled libraries of O'Reilley titles in our offices and homes - everyone who I remember purchased additional titles in fields that they didn't know about, every single time they bought required references something additional got smuggled into patiently awaiting brains. I copied this at my office letting anyone add a extra title every ten references. This almost immediately became a proper budget for a library but suddenly the requests dried up unexpectedly. We realised the attraction was having snuck the expense onto the job budget people took them home to read only afterwards bringing them back into circulation out of unnecessary sensitivity. This is why I passionately hate hermetically sealed corporate systems. Creativity needs inspiration even from a little lisp (or whatever) learning larceny.