Web Development is Super-Villainy

Web developers tend to be very knowledgeable people. In order to be a web developer, you have to know a ton of crap; usually two languages, any pertinent browser-specific stupidity, a bit of networking, the unparalleled madness of web servers and the even bigger madness of how to work with designers.

Any one of these domains of knowledge, could make up a full-time job in and of themselves and a web developer must traverse them throughout his work-day. It evokes images of the comic book antagonist with the enlarged cranium that we can only assume houses active brain tissue.

Just like the super-villain, this tremendous knowledge and engineering prowess does little to bestow the character with much good sense. The argument between Dr. Evil and his son over whether to just shoot Austin Powers is amusing for two reasons: 1) the cliche abounds in much of our literature and cinema, 2) they let Seth Green out of the house for that.

Web developers very often engage in all kinds of acrobatics to make their material both accessible and secure, making the tangled web of design much like an overly-complex acid-dripping machine designed to torture a protagonist to death.

One example of practical ineptitude is the skill in picking henchmen or software minions to serve the web villain. The volume of Wordpress and Drupal installations out there is astonishing to anybody who understands good computing.

The web developer gives his fool of a JSP page very complex instructions that require the oafish beast to ponder quite a bit over how to go about his master's command. A casual glance at the SQL queries that most web applications make will convince anybody that these are indeed the mindless brutes that cause one to howl "you fail me again, Joomla!"

The world of good computing is a tender one. As more and more PHP goons take to the streets, this tenderness gets hammered rather ruthlessly. In the same way the people of Townsville identify a good day by whether they had to dig the remains of neighbors and loved-ones from two buildings or four, web developers rejoice over the greatness of a computing interface like REST; you start to lower your standards as to what constitutes good computing when you orient yourself around the web.

So we have broken SOAP implementations everywhere, data that you can only access by using the mouse, passwords and credit card information flying over the wire in clear text, heavy reliance on offensive DNS configurations, people cannibalizing aborted fetuses marinated in puppy brains, and worst of all, Flash Player.

With the advent of mobile being the new standard of end user computing, it seems like now's a great time to consider standardizing on a better interface; one that exploits the user's new tendency to look for "an app for that" rather than just go to the web site and have that be the final answer. It would make a lot of sense if we started using SSH more, and developed good key management software as an alternative to allowing users to feed their passwords to phishers.

Alas, there are very few super-heroes to save us from the squalor that web developers have put us in. It's a real pity, actually.

Anyway, here's what my current incompetent henchman looks like.