Scale is important. Artists used to try and represent things, the invention of perspective was mind blowing, Skill up to hyperrealism stage. But the camera did away with a lot of that endeavour and artists began trying to explore emotion, sensation, paint for paint's sake, the ACT of painting and mark making itself. Jackson Pollock is a great example of a road marker along the way. The act of the brush, the removal of 'the artist', the canvas size growing. In 1970 the year this was started Robert Smithson created 'spiral jetty' - artists making statements more grandiose and more timeless. In some ways there's similarities with the more ancient works like the Nazca lines, but I think this work is best described by the term Magnus Opus in the article - The greatest single work of an artist, writer, or composer. It's an endeavour, a feat, and literally great in scale.
There have been misses (as well as obvious hits) all through his career. No one recalls the completely round puck mouse? It’s wishful to think of it as a recent decline. I hope there’s a return to being really functional. Thicker, longer lasting, quality over shiny OR bright plastic
This 'trap' is really old... namely treating design as some sort of lipstick on the pig. Design doesn't consist in producing attractive photoshop files. In web UX is an intricate part of the design process and vice versa.
I agree, my current employer spent the last five years building a product using mostly overseas developers with one developer over here coordinating and piecing together the code. They treated development as something that just needed to be done, as apposed to treating it like the core of their product (which it is). Now they have a big, slow, behemoth and they've finally brought more developers in house to try to help clean things up. I think that a lot of people tend to treat design and UX the same way, something that just needs to "get done", as apposed to something that (might) be a major piece of your product or service.
I tend to use minified libraries (JQuery, effects libraries, etc), but unminified application-specific code. Been burned too many times having to root out some obscure error on the live server, and not being able to do so because of minification.
However, I've never had a problem in the cases where I have indeed minified unsemicoloned code. Has anyone else, or is the problem just theoretical? If others have encountered an actual problem, I might have to rethink this strategy for larger codebases.
I've been burned several times by missing semicolons when minifying my code. Now I make sure they're always there. I'm also running everything through JSLint.
I think JSLint can be a big help, especially with semicolons so I made a quick jQuery plugin to run things through it on page load. So I know exactly when something may be wrong.
