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What's interesting is that in the past, all the Real web devs knew that frames suck because they break navigation. Anyone who showed their framed site in a community of cool web devs would be laughed at.

Now it's cool to break the back button (and links and everything) and make me watch spinners. It's as if the text and thumbnails they're serving today somehow take two orders of magnitude more bandwidth to load...

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Devs and designers are now (more so than ever) different sets of people, and designers are now calling the shots in most places.

I'm a web dev, I know that ajax loading sucks, that without enough budget to do it right (and we never have enough budget) UX ends up broken, messing with scrolling sucks, page-based is best, don't make an app if it should actually be a site, etc.

Do I get any say? Not really. What do I end up building? Magic-scrolling ajax-loading apps, and if I have any budget left at the end of the job it goes on tweaking typography (i.e. designer-visible stuff) rather than fixing back buttons.

Which is to say, devs still know that this stuff sucks, but we're no longer in charge of the relevant decisions.

Please don't make this about developers versus designers. Good web designers will not make those kinds of mistakes. Bad developers might.

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