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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

#271

Post by bonesss »

dboreham wrote: post #182
victor106 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The most baffling part is the strange sense of entitlement as if people releasing their work for free on the internet is a burden to some because now they have to decide if they should use this free option.” Agree with this 100%. I keep hearing coworkers trash a particular open source project/framework with no understanding of what kind of problems it solves.

>I keep hearing coworkers trash a particular open source project/framework with no understanding of what kind of problems it solves. Also I often think: I keep hearing coworkers adopt particular open source project/framework with no understanding of what kind of problems it solves.

For me it's "premature optimization is the root of all evil".

Very often teams will use ages getting up on new frameworks to avoid a little hard programming, only to end up with hard programming wrapped in a huge framework they don't really grok and lots of incidental complexity.

Wordpress or whatever will make an email widget easy to source, but if that's only 1% of your project, why impact the other 99% without considering its impact? It's so easy for intuitive maps of the "hard parts" to dictate insanity across the whole development process.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#272

Post by bonesss »

skrebbel wrote: post #72
grndn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here to say the same thing. :) The fundamental problem is that you want one piece of (semantic) content to be presented on many different platforms with very different design approaches. The current approach uses if-then-else conditions in CSS, and when that fails, if-then-else conditions in JS, and when that fails, complex JS to transform the DOM. The XML/XSLT approach, although clunky, might actually be bett…

You can't honestly propose XSLT as a programming language in a thread where half the comments are about how shitty JavaScript is. I mean, JavaScript isn't God's gift to mankind, but XSLT? I have a very hard time coming up with a worse programming language than XSLT, across all dimensions. INTERCAL, maybe? If XSLT had been proposed as a satirical esoteric programming language, people would've laughed and believed it.…

> I mean, JavaScript isn't God's gift to mankind, but XSLT?

Well... for just about any scenario where I would use XSLT, and demand the validation capabilities it provides, I can imagine the same functionality being delivered in javascript... I can also imagine trying to do QA on it when provided by a third party... thanks, but no thanks.

XSLT solves some serious problems in a way that satisfies some serious Enterprise demands. For any given issue a pure code solution will be better, but in aggregate you don't want your systems open to third party incompetence.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#273

Post by gjvc »

This is an excellent piece of writing. The aphorism "Go slow and fix things." is brilliant. I'm stealing that.

I implore people reading this thread to watch this Alan Kay video from 1997, where he rather predicts (albeit perhaps implicitly, if not explicitly) that we will reach the situation we are in today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY

There is a quote from the talk which rings true with many of the comments here "HTML on the internet has gone back to the dark ages, because it presupposes that there should be a browser which understands its formats"

I have found the odd nit with the article:

"In one way, it is easier to be inexperienced: you don’t have to learn what is no longer relevant."

I think he might mean unlearn, but it's a bit ambiguous. :-)

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#275

Post by lozenge »

graycat wrote: post #265
collinmanderson wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why can't I use tables? I think it's harder to make design changes to the page. You also end up doing crazy rowspan and colspan things. You end up with more html tags (though probably less css). It's probably fine. Though it's probably hard to make mobile-friendly. A lot of html emails use tables for layout because they can't trust the layout will work with divs+css.

Okay. So far I haven't had to use the span thingys. For mobile, I'm just assuming that the users smartphone has a Web browser. For fitting on the smartphone screen, each page is just 800 pixels wide, and smartphone screens are that wide? But even if not, my pages are still usable with only 300 pixels wide. My most complicated page sends for just 400,000 bits which seems small enough. There are just two files, HTML an…

The same font size on an 800 pixel wide smartphone as on an 800 pixel wide desktop screen will not be readable at all.

Go watch the original iPhone unveiling - https://thenextweb.com/apple/2015/09/09/genius-annotated-wit... - at 01:00:00 or so he shows the New York Times website front page. It's in three columns, like on desktop, meaning you can read nothing until double-tapping to zoom in. 10 years ago, because nobody owned a mobile, this was considered acceptable UX.

Now visit it today - https://mobile.nytimes.com - with a narrow window. The layout changes and the first headline is immediately visible. That can't be done in table layouts. If somebody visited a news website on a mobile today and saw a desktop-optimized layout, they would likely immediately leave.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#276

Post by sengork »

codingdave wrote: post #125

There is a difference between web design and web application development. If you are a designer making brochure sites for small business, you don't need the modern frameworks and toolkits, and you are over-engineering it if you use them. Everyone needs to take a step back and ask why they are building a web site in the first place. My local hair salon really just needs a brochure, and maybe a scheduling widget. A doc…

For small local business, a Facebook page can serve the purpose of a business website quite well. It provides convenient means to contact the business (via messenger or listed phone number) and from what i know costs nothing to setup and maintain.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#277

Post by mmargerum »

Donzo wrote: post #74
Falkon1313 wrote: post #31

>simply npm your webpack via grunt with vue babel or bower to react asdfjkl;lkdhgxdlciuhw >[...] >I had to install a package manager to install a package manager. And that's coming from a designer, not a programmer. A few years ago I had to take over a project that required installing something like 6 different package managers, 2 build systems, and a dozen different languages (counting things like jade and coffeescr…

One of the best things about working for myself is that I write all my web stuff in vanilla JS. While I occasionally make errors, they are easy to identify, understand, and debug because the native features of JS are well-understood by modern browsers. Sometime in the last decade, modern web development moved on without me. I can no longer recognize what people are doing with all of these package managers and why the…

I guess it depends on how complex the app is, but pulling vue into a page is trivial and gives you a lot of functionality without having to use vue files , es6, or a bundler. After building things with vue and the reactivity it gives you, writing traditional js code to turn knobs manually seems tedious. Vue (or react) eliminates ui state bugs which was probably the biggest source of bugs for me. I fail to see how, under any circumstances, jquery is a better option for handling the dynamic portions of your page .

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#278

Post by james-skemp »

graycat wrote: post #240
jccooper wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to do responsive design, and yes, that's a big change (and a big PITA) but that doesn't require flex or grid or React or whatever. You can't go all the way back to tables, but good ol' div-based design with appropriate CSS works just fine. The new stuff may make some things easier (or not), but if you don't feel like shifting paradigms, you certainly don't have to.

My Web pages are based on tables and have not even one DIV element! Why do I have to use DIV? Actually, I never saw any good explanation on what DIV did. What the heck is DIV good for? Why use DIV? Why can't I use tables?

Having lived/worked through that period of time, it was due to rendering. The entire table had to be loaded before it could be rendered to the browser.

If your entire site was wrapped inside a table, nothing would load until it all did. If I remember correctly.

I'm not sure if that's still an issue with modern browsers, and our faster connection speeds, it if increased processing and network speeds have made it insignificant now.

Edit: SE answer with more: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/6037/3403

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#279

Post by mmargerum »

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…

JS isn’t really terrible, I’ve done 25 years of c, c++, go, pascal, swift and I found js lack of typing refreshing. I built a fairly complex app in 4000 LOC. This would surely have been 10x bigger in any of the languages mentioned above. If you use es6, you get rid of the most common js issues (var hoisting, this scoping, etc)

At some point 10x less LOC has to be factored in as a significant benefit

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#280

Post by mmargerum »

bitL wrote: post #103
pka wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Sounds like Elm [0] (pure, functional, very very easy to start with but lacks abstractions), Purescript [1] (pure, functional, powerful, the best language for the web right now, imo) or ReasonML [2] (functional but impure, familiar syntax, f…

And for non-functional languages? Not everybody wants to spend next 5 years learning thinking bottom-up, mastering category theory, monads and all that for such a task like writing a silly webpage you wouldn't rather be doing. [rant] Frankly, I am not sure why is functional paradigm considered a savior and better approach for inherently non-concurrent web frontend technology. I program in Haskell/Scala but pushing fu…

Immutable dats structures in CLJS pairs well with react type frameworks. Trying to make js pretend it supports immutable structures is what turned me off the most about react/js

I ended up going with vue which uses mutations instead of having to return structure copied from functions.

Just made more sense to me. Maybe MobX does this for react? Idk

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