In web design, everything easy is hard again
frankchimero.com
In web design, everything easy is hard again
1–10 of 335 posts
Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again
#2I've just tried to copy paste the title of the article ... but it's impossible ... it's an image.
If after 20 years of web design and development you still don't get it, then everything easy is hard again.
Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again
#3I've almost never touched web development, but as an active HN reader I have at least passing familiarity with almost all the terms used in the article.
So, honest question: can a person fully understand how modern HTML/CSS work without diving in the source code of one of the browser engines? Because as a developer, if I was forced to use such a complicated technology, grooming source would be my best guess at making any sense out of it.
Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again
#4I've just tried to copy paste the title of the article ... but it's impossible ... it's an image. If after 20 years of web design and development you still don't get it, then everything easy is hard again.
Why would yo want to triple (I guess even more) your work just to have a semantic title when you can use an alt-text?
Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again
#5I've almost never touched web development, but as an active HN reader I have at least passing familiarity with almost all the terms used in the article. So, honest question: can a person fully understand how modern HTML/CSS work without diving in the source code of one of the browser engines? Because as a developer, if I was forced to use such a complicated technology, grooming source would be my best guess at making…
No dive necessary if you don't get close to performance limits of browsers. Actually looking at how it's meant to be first is the only sane way, because browsers do whatever the fuck they want and you just have to see what happens.
Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again
#6I completely share the thoughts of the author of this article. However, I'm not sure if his proposed solution would work for most people. It's not that I want or like to use npm etc. - I'm forced to use them as it's the new default way of working with almost anything useful in today's web development work. An alternative would be to start from scratch - and then reinventing all these things again, making another full circle.
There could be another solution. A lot of today's complexity of the web stems from the fact that we're trying to design (web) apps using (HTML) documents. It's like building user interfaces in Word (without VBA). You can, but there are much better ways to do it. Why not to define a set of APIs for creating GUIs? Yes, I mean something like XUL which failed because nobody except Mozilla cared. Make it standard, make it easily themeable, and we can finally throw away this mess of ugly hacks used now to create intricate GUIs for which we have dedicated widgets on the desktop and which we have to reimplement on the web, with mixed results.
Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again
#7I completely share the thoughts of the author of this article. However, I'm not sure if his proposed solution would work for most people. It's not that I want or like to use npm etc. - I'm forced to use them as it's the new default way of working with almost anything useful in today's web development work. An alternative would be to start from scratch - and then reinventing all these things again, making another full…
Yeah, I agree with both you and the article. The biggest problem with website design seems to be that it's all layers on layers on a base that wasn't so great for design in the first place.
Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again
#8I completely share the thoughts of the author of this article. However, I'm not sure if his proposed solution would work for most people. It's not that I want or like to use npm etc. - I'm forced to use them as it's the new default way of working with almost anything useful in today's web development work. An alternative would be to start from scratch - and then reinventing all these things again, making another full…
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Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again
#9This is my experience of web development, every time I return to it.
I’m really not an expert in web dev, but it _feels_ like web dev has been badly engineered.
JavaScript is a very badly designed programming language (yes, even in its modern form), which I think has caused a lot of problems. Many JS developers don’t know much about programming language design, so they can’t see how bad it is, and they make matters worse by not trying to abstract or use JS in a way that reinforces good PL design methods.
If you recognise JS as a terribly designed language, then the last thing you would imagine doing is widening its use. But that is exactly what node.js does. You should instead isolate JS and minimise its use. So red flag - something has gone wrong here.
It also feels that many web ecosystems have an over-inflated sense of self-importance. This has led to many competing frameworks for the same tasks, that try to do everything. Things are not pythonic. There appear to be an excessive number of package managers involved. There were already plenty of package managers out there - inventing new versions of existing tech makes it harder for everyone and is usually a red flag that someone somewhere is making bad decisions.
I need to build a website soon and I’m dreading the front end. At the back end I can use range of solid and well designed languages and technologies, but at the front end I feel like I’ve got to choose the least poor of a bunch of crazy options. If anyone has advice on how someone who prefers rigour, simplicity, elegance, and decent PL design over the latest trend should approach web dev that would be massively helpful. “Sane web dev to minimise the impact of the Web Dev CSS/JS disaster on your life” would be my favourite O’Reilly of all time.
Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again
#10No it's not. You decided to make "easy" tasks complicated. Then rather than learning about new technology you wrote a blog moaning about it. Just stick the basics if that's what you want to do. No need for loaders or preprocessors if you don't want to use them.