The idiomatic website

We created the concept of idiomatic websites to better highlight our approach to website design and development. Idiomatic websites inherently adhere to all best practices, ensuring accessibility, inclusivity, and long-term viability.

To us, an idiomatic website is a seamless space where content flows freely for all users. These websites are intuitively interpreted and displayed by browsers, ensuring a natural and engaging user experience.

Guiding principles

To achieve idiomatic websites, we have carefully formulated the following guiding principles.

Beyond semantics

Semantic HTML is a good first step towards idiomatic websites and already helps to make a website better. But we go further and apply the same principles to every part that makes up a website.

Best fitting

For each feature, we aim to use the best-fitting technology and platform features. We value knowledge breadth and push ourselves continuously to learn more about the platform. We do not try to solve each problem with the same tech.

By using native platform features we minimise the amount of custom work and deliver a more natural and resilient result.

Modern

We strive to write modern code and use modern features. The platform is always evolving and providing newer and better ways to build websites. Keeping up with these changes means that we can deliver the same features faster and better with each new project we engage in.

Compatible

We always target broad browser version support for each project and are conservative with cutting-edge technology.

We strongly believe access to content should be universal. Anyone should be able to have access to web content, even if they are using an older device. We use automated tooling and manual testing to ensure our websites work for as many visitors as possible.

We build web pages so that even on the oldest browser versions content is still at least readable. Integration of modern features is carefully balanced against these goals of accessible content.

Resilient

We embrace that any visitor is free to use any technology to visit a web page and that they can mutate web content in any way or form.

The features we develop follow the same principles as any other native feature and have graceful degradation and error recovery built in.

Least powerful first

For both content and tech, we promote the least powerful feature. We choose text over images and images over video. We choose markup over scripting.

The structure of a web page resembles a pyramid, with the majority of its content comprising the least powerful elements, gradually giving way to fewer, more complex parts at the top. Each element must be weighed against the advantages and disadvantages it brings:

• Markup-only can feel like going back to basics but doing everything with scripting is slow and inaccessible.
• Text-only can be visually boring but only a video is inaccessible and has a high bandwidth cost.

Doing everything “not wrong”

Perfection does not exist on the web and striving for it in any specific area will always sacrifice something else. Instead, we focus on using the right tool for the job, not taking shortcuts and putting the user first.

The outcome

Idiomatic websites feel more natural to end users and are more accessible. They are faster and consume less resources, making them better for the environment. They are more resilient to change. They are easier to maintain and do not degrade over time. They can be extended and enhanced years after initial creation.