From the little experience in web design I have, my opinion is that what killed the joy of web design were smartphones. Before screen size fragmentation you cou

From the little experience in web design I have, my opinion is that what killed the joy of web design were smartphones. Before screen size fragmentation you could just have a sidebar because everyone had the screen width to see it. You could just put two drilling workmen gifs and a huge under construction gif in the middle and everyone would be able to see it the way you designed it. Now you can't count on that anymore, which would be a bit of a problem if we were talking about JUST having a desktop design and a mobile design, but that's not how it works these days. Fluid, responsive design is sheer insanity to me. In principle, it makes perfect sense, but HTML is EXTREMELY inadequate at supporting this paradigm. You literally can not have a design that is minimal for mobile devices and then unfolds into glorious fixed width sidebars, because you MUST include the HTML for the sidebar in the mobile version and hide it with CSS black magic if you want it to unfold on wide screens, which means now the mobile version which should be as slim as possible is bloated with HTML it won't use, or you'll have to dynamically load the sidebar with javascript for desktop, which means the desktop version can't work without javascript enabled even though you're only using it make the sidebar it should have by default appear. I feel like many problems could be solved if we just replaced HTML with something else.