What is the designer's role on the web?

In her video Why Is CSS So Weird, Miriam Suzanne explains that Tim Berners-Lee created the web with a set of ideals that prioritize accessibility of content across space, time, and ability. These gave rise to the cascade design structure, with its features of backwards compatibility, progressive enhancement, and graceful degradation.

In its ideal form, the web is democratised speed-of-light audio-visual mass communication. We've got three out of four of those adjectives covered, but we're still struggling with "democratised", as creating (non-social-media) web-based communication remains a technical process that powerful institutions have a greater capacity to engage in over those with less power. However, of the mass communication systems that have existed throughout human history, it is by far the most democratised.

Ste Grainer explains in The Wax and Wane of the Web that the development of the web has been an iterative process, figuring out what makes it the most democratic (for both audiences and creators) and changing what doesn't. In order to keep the development consistent, creators must be constantly willing to learn and adapt to new standards.

Ultimately, web creators are giving up control to be part of a community, but isn't that what we all do as humans? Part of what makes our species unique amongst life on Earth is our capacity to form social bonds between materially distant individuals because of our advanced multimodal communication abilities. Communication cannot exist without community agreement and compromise, and community agreement and compromise cannot exist without communication.

It is the designer's role to be aware of the communication landscape in which the audience exists and to be fluent in their languages — both "universal" and particular — so that they can effectively convey ideas to the audience.