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Ask HN: what still sucks about web development?

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Re: Ask HN: what still sucks about web development?

#21
What is the standard framework for abstracting most of the browser-specific behaviors (like those IEx hacks) away? I'm not even talking about dynamic behaviors; just simple standard HTML / CSS jazz.

In 2011 I would hope there would be a simple way of expressing my desires that does not involve slogging through books and blogs to figure out how to hack a few small bits together so that some asinine browser can render a page in the same way as a newer version of said browser (I've seen this with IE, FF, and Chrome)

Re: Ask HN: what still sucks about web development?

#24

I'm pretty sure your question is squarely aimed at experienced developers, but I would like to offer a perspective from someone coming into web development from a completely different industry (film editing). I decided to abandon my career as a film editor because I found my interests and ambitions leaning more toward interactive media and web development. Having left editing at a time when video standards were all o…

Choosing something and digging in I think applies at all experience levels. The processing of choosing changes with experience.

I've noticed that. The more I get into web development and the more I learn, the better I am at recognizing the tools that apply to my needs. When you start fresh in any industry, the biggest challenge is trying to find the tools that best suit you. Sometimes those tools are not the ones that everyone is fawning over. I'm still new enough to not really know the subtle distinctions, but I agree that the more knowledgeable you become, the more critical you become of the tools you choose. I do feel that it's a difficult time for people coming into this industry with little background in programming, but at the same time I also recognize that the contributions of experienced programmers are making programming more assessable than it has ever been in the past. In some ways, that's a positive thing. At the same time it also means that so many people entering the field will never come to understand the core concepts that make programming an art.

Re: Ask HN: what still sucks about web development?

#25
I think Dreamweaver being pushed about as a leading web development tool is harmful. It's actually very bad for what needs to be done and almost always contributes to bad code. The best IDE for frontend web development should be a text editor with syntax highlighting, block-start/end matching and a few hotkeys to speed up the writing of HTML (ZEN Coding anyone?). The design view is very harmful and the code editor is not much better. No matter where ever you untick "Use tabs" or similar, Dreamweaver will still use tabs. It really ruins code.

Another thing is many web developers will use meaningless class/id names and fall back to generic terms such as "floatLeft", which is pretty bad.

Although there is SASS, this isn't often available in a lot of projects so you do often have to repeat yourself a lot in CSS... unless you resort to the above. Which is worse? That's left as an exercise.

Then there's people who still use HTML that went stale over ten years ago just to do a quick job. Yeah, you save time by writing by a) writing less characters and b) not having to define any potential CSS rules but then it loses all meaning. That is, unless, you give it meaning which then makes it redundant since a better alternative could have been used.

Another thing is how you're forced to use a lot of divs to come up with a good pure HTML/CSS solution to something. Although there is now HTML5, it's obviously not supported by the older browsers which a good percentage of the Internet still uses.

Rant over.

Re: Ask HN: what still sucks about web development?

#26
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ruby on Rails adding Jquery, Coffeescript, SASS, and SCSS" Eh? None of those things that you listed is for emulating state over HTTP. In any case, Rails is supposed to be a "tall" stack – it's supposed to be a highly opinionated framework. If you want to attack stateful apps in browsers, aren't Sproutcore/Cappuccino better targets?

Using Jquery to do ajax requests and updating part of a web page is emulatimg state over http. Coffeescript, SASS/SCSS are just examples of making the Rails stack even taller. I don't have any experience with Sproutcore or Cappuccino but both look like clientside-only frameworks and would only extend the state & stack problems that I already dislike.

"Using Jquery to do ajax requests and updating part of a web page is emulating state over http."

Only if you use it that way. Also, Sproutcore/Cappuccino are not add-ons to Rails. They're stand-alone client-side frameworks.

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