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)
Ask HN: what still sucks about web development?
21–28 of 28 posts
Re: Ask HN: what still sucks about web development?
#22Re: Ask HN: what still sucks about web development?
#23Re: Ask HN: what still sucks about web development?
#24I'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.
Re: Ask HN: what still sucks about web development?
#25Another 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?
#26Earlier 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.
Only if you use it that way. Also, Sproutcore/Cappuccino are not add-ons to Rails. They're stand-alone client-side frameworks.