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In web design, everything easy is hard again

frankchimero.com

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Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#21

Post by BjoernKW »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #6

I 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…

I disagree with the often-heard premise that HTML is a somehow inferior tool for creating GUIs that we somehow ended up with despite better choices beings available.

Yes, native GUI frameworks and widget toolkits like Swing, Qt, Cocoa and MFC have their place but it's precisely the nature and features of HTML (most notably: The link) that enabled most of the innovation we've seen on the web.

If building web apps was just about recreating the desktop experience but on the web doing that with HTML indeed would be a fool's errand. However, web applications today are so much more than their desktop equivalents from the 80s and 90s both in terms of what's possible with them and as to how accessible they are to developers.

Sure, developing a web app today is not as easy anymore as "View source", edit and see what happens but it's still a lot more accessible than developing desktop-style applications.

In my opinion, instead of throwing the baby out with bathwater and replacing HTML with something else (which frankly and fortunately won't happen anyway because let's face it: HTML is here to stay for some time whether you like it or not) we should try and think about how to make web development easy and accessible again.

I think tools like StackBlitz ( https://stackblitz.com/ ) are good first steps in that direction because they allow you to quickly try out and prototype stuff without having to care about setup and tooling.

What I'd love to see is the web equivalent of the C64 BASIC prompt, which provided you with an empty canvas to create something with right away.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#22

Post by k__ »

randomsearch wrote: post #9

This 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 w…

I didn't find JS any worse than Java, PHP or Python.

They all have really ugly parts at least in JS they don't slow you down.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#23

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #6

I 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…

There aren't much better ways of doing it. At least with existing alternatives. Have you genuinely tried the alternatives? I think the web has a lot of shortcomings, but it's still pretty great.

We have a set of APIs for creating GUIs. It's called the web platform. It's all standardized with multiple independent implementations, and easily themeable.

You're forgetting the many different targets that the web platform has. How should different widgets look and behave when handling different input types and screen sizes? Trying to get vendors to agree on anything of this scale is like trying to herd cats.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#25

Post by Vinnl »

keldaris wrote: post #13
randomsearch wrote: post #9

This 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 w…

I'm in a similar position, and I've formed the same impression. Furthermore, even though browsers are stuck with JS, given the influx of languages able to compile to JS (or even WebAssembly now) it feels like there should be plenty of options for those of us who would rather stay away from the craziness. Perhaps someone with more frontend experience could comment on what (comparatively) sane, simple and JS-minimizing…

Compiling-to-JS brings in its own set of crazy, and really almost never is worth it. In fact, the only two that make any sense are Babel and TypeScript, and that is only because are (practically) Javascript and because they are stable and widely used projects. If those two wouldn't hold, you'll quickly be running into a whole host of problems w.r.t. interoperability with the rest of the ecosystem, and you'll end up reinventing the wheel again.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#26

Post by Vinnl »

ohazi wrote: post #16

Choice quotes: > Directness is best in my experience, so a great photo, memorable illustration, or pitch-perfect sentence does most of the work. Beyond that, fancy implementation has never moved the needle much for my clients. > Last month, I had to install a package manager to install a package manager. ... I sure as hell know about spaghetti workflows and spaghetti toolchains. It feels like we’re there now on the w…

If I want to install Pip, Maven or what-have-you, I'd be using apt.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#27

Post by danieltillett »

The whole thing is driven by all fields reaching the highest level of complexity their practitioners can understand.

Web design in not inherently complex, but it is filled with lots of talented and intelligent people because the pay is good and the conditions cushy compared to say gutting chickens in some factory. The only way to solve to the complexity treadmill is to drive out all the smart people.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#28

Post by factsaresacred »

Well written and beautifully presented but these are complaints about progress.

> 'my limited needs...Simple, responsive layout'

As we all know, limited/simple in the requirements doesn't mean simple to implement. "I want this page to look the same on any size screen, whether viewed horizontally or vertically". OK. It's surprising it's as simple as it is.

> 'I thought implementing webfonts was a relatively easy procedure, but I guess not!'

No, it is easy. If you want to read 90 pages of marketing-promo disguised as a guide to fonts, do so. But you don't have to. Go to google fonts, pick one, add the URL to the head of your webpage, done.

> We’re a long way from the CSS Zen Garden where I started.

That way is still there. It's just slow and messy. You can still inline your CSS, use external css files. Whatever you want.

> Before, the websites could explain themselves; now, someone needs to walk you through it.

Before, scrolling text and gifs were the cutting edge of web technology. Now we have Photoshop, online IDEs, real-time trading applications in the browser. This is magic. And magic isn't easy.

Furthermore, modern browser element inspectors provide an excellent explanation of what's happening on a webpage.

The web isn't static - as the browser advances we use new tools to handle the possibility as well as the complexity. But the old ways are still available. Although I'm not convinced that the 30 minutes of mental overhead getting to know npm and flexbox beats the mess of external resources, duplicate code and utter pain that was the web of the past.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#29

Post by merlincorey »

helenius wrote: post #24

Maybe somewhat related: can anybody guess what the idea behind the images in this article is? trans.gif is just a 1x1px invisible pixel.

Tracking scripts don't need to do anything but read the hit in the access log. That said, it's also trivially easy to output the bytes for a 1x1 invisible gif as the response from your tracking endpoint.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#30

Post by laythea »

BjoernKW wrote: post #21
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #6

I 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…

I disagree with the often-heard premise that HTML is a somehow inferior tool for creating GUIs that we somehow ended up with despite better choices beings available. Yes, native GUI frameworks and widget toolkits like Swing, Qt, Cocoa and MFC have their place but it's precisely the nature and features of HTML (most notably: The link) that enabled most of the innovation we've seen on the web. If building web apps was…

HTML is inferior than a technology that is purpose built. It was not originally designed to handle the job it does today. It is possible to create a much better user experience with eg. C# using some network code to talk to the server than trying to shoe horn an application over HTML just because it hides the low level complexities of E.g C#/C++ communicating with a server. This is a classic case of HTML/web apps are easier to produce (does that even make them inferior?) than custom built software, but it is more efficient to develop a web app, and therefore that is what business/industry has done.
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