In web design, everything easy is hard again

Post by rbanffy » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 11:58 PM UTC

peterangular wrote: post #245

jeremiep wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lost count of the number of web projects I had to work on that could be rewritten in a tenth of the code, for more performance, better maintainability and less entanglement between components. Both on the server side and on the client side. Its really, REALLY easy to build complex software; but that never scales or evolves well over time. You end up saving on initial development only to be constantly plagued with p…

> Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. IMO, it's also ultimately difficult to pull off.

Post by ktpsns » Mon, Feb 12, 2018, 12:19 AM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #124

ktpsns wrote: post #91

Did anybody notice that the 1997's Hello World example https://frankchimero.com/writing/everything-easy-is-hard-aga... still works? Open the most easy built-in text editor on your system (even on Android one should be able to do that, isn't it), save it, open it with your browser locally. In some aspects, the evolution of the web is similar to what the C language ecosystem experienced. It was dead simple in the begin…

The Hello World works. But if you wanted to build anything more complex, it probably looked a bit more like ... Virtually none of which is considered valid in HTML5, and which probably doesn't render properly in some modern browsers. Mostly this was less to do with "power" and more to do with a web standards turf war about forcing layout out of markup, despite the available CSS syntax and early 00s browsers strugglin…

Post by graycat » Mon, Feb 12, 2018, 1:56 AM UTC

james-skemp wrote: post #278

graycat wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 insig…

Post by bonesss » Mon, Feb 12, 2018, 7:35 AM UTC

wsy wrote: post #295

bonesss wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

I agree, but the opposite also happens: teams start by implementing something small themselves because the framework is so 'huge'. Over time, they end up with a semi-huge custom framework because they run into the same issues and feature requests the 'huge' open-source framework ran a few years before them.

Post by kthejoker2 » Mon, Feb 12, 2018, 8:52 AM UTC

sengork wrote: post #276

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.