I can only think that modern front end development has failed • Hacker News Board

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#91

Post by leephillips » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

rantwasp wrote: post #55

leephillips wrote: post #40

I am not an expert chef. I can cook pretty well, and my guests enjoy my food. But it doesn’t compare to what a professional chef can do. I am not an expert abdominal surgeon. If we are in Antarctica and your appendix becomes inflamed, I will try to save you by cutting it out. But you will probably die. I am not an expert front-end developer. I make sites for myself, for others, and have even been paid for it a few ti…

not saying that you’re wrong, but do you have the same constraints as the “crappy” websites? there is definitely an explosion of tooling, frameworks, etc, but past some obvious things, IMHO most websites are crippled by business people (that will likely not be using the website) make all sorts of technical decisions what must go in and how it’s supposed to work (ads and tracking crap is one of the things that jumps u…

No, I don’t have all the same constraints. For example, I would walk away if any of the organizations that I work with insisted on tracking visitors. I stopped taking paying customers years ago for this and similar reasons. But if a site is bad for the reader, it’s bad. The developer has failed, even if the customer got what it wanted.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#92

Post by notjustanymike » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

throwawayfire wrote: post #45

notjustanymike wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Just like music, there was a LOT of trash web development back in the day as well. Sites built with tables in dreamweaver best viewed on netscape navigator at 800x600 with animated gifs bogging the download speed existed long ago. What we have today are the same problems with a new…

> Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Not "just" survival bias. I think it's quite reasonable to take a position that there was more innovation and creativity in pop music in 1950-2000. As the genre has matured, popular/commercially successful music has depended more and more on fewer and fewer producers. Indeed, there are fewer commercially successful artists: the US Billboard Hot…

Good, and commercially successful, don't always go together.

Amazon is commercially successful but few would argue their UX is good.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#93

Post by napsterbr » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

minitech wrote: post #53

watwut wrote: post #17

In what way are current websites not usable?

A lot of websites: - reimplement browser features and do a bad job of it - are unnecessarily slow - try to stop being slow by breaking even more stuff Some examples I’ve come across within the last week: - Twitter pages randomly failing to load until the next hard refresh, probably because of service workers somehow (which are unnecessary for user experience improvement since HTTP cache exists and I don’t have notifi…

> Reddit’s redesign is so unusably sluggish that I don’t stay on it long enough to run into any other problems

I agree with everything you said, but allow me to reiterate this point. Reddit's redesign is the most hostile thing I've ever seen. It explicitly blocks me from reading the discussion. What's the point, then? It's absolutely unusable. If they ever remove old.reddit.com, I'm not following a Reddit link ever again.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#94

Post by throwawayfire » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

brayhite wrote: post #73

throwawayfire wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Not "just" survival bias. I think it's quite reasonable to take a position that there was more innovation and creativity in pop music in 1950-2000. As the genre has matured, popular/commercially successful music has depended more and more on fewer and fewer producers. Indeed, there are fewer commercially successful artists: the US Billboard Hot…

> Indeed, there are fewer commercially successful artists Source? I reckon every decade had a handful of artists dominate the charts, so it wasn’t unheard of at all to see multiple chart toppers by the same artists at any given time. In fact, given the gatekeepers of popular music largely were concentrated around radio DJs and the “industry machine” of record labels, I’d hypothesize there’s a larger on average number…

>Source?

https://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100

You can change the week yourself.

If you pick a few random weeks before 2000, you likely won't find this pattern that I identified, with the same artist in the Top 20 multiple times.

If that's not enough evidence then there is a Python web scraper: https://github.com/jocelyn-ong/data-science-projects/blob/ma...

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#95

Post by guscost » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

dxdm wrote: post #59

guscost wrote: post #6

Counterexample: Figma.

Could you elaborate? I don't like Figma very much, but I think that's because I prefer typing code into text files. So, probably not for reasons pertinent to this discussions. Anyway, I'm interested in why you would consider it good.

It is efficient enough to make you rethink the limitations of JS apps, it is basically glitch-free, and it works remarkably well as a full-featured tool for designing screens collaboratively and/or working with SVG.

That said, Figma sort of exists in an “app-like” vertical when it comes to web frontends. The other big vertical, and the one probably being alluded to in this tweet, is “magazine-like”. Those frontends have a much different goal, one that prioritizes responsive design, accessibility, progressive enhancement, and so forth. NY Times has been among the best in that vertical for a long time.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#96

Post by leephillips » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

ickelbawd wrote: post #90

leephillips wrote: post #40

I am not an expert chef. I can cook pretty well, and my guests enjoy my food. But it doesn’t compare to what a professional chef can do. I am not an expert abdominal surgeon. If we are in Antarctica and your appendix becomes inflamed, I will try to save you by cutting it out. But you will probably die. I am not an expert front-end developer. I make sites for myself, for others, and have even been paid for it a few ti…

The measure of what is better in all these companies is determined internally and generally by the business. So it ultimately serves the business and only serves the user indirectly—-if at all. Obviously you optimize for different things—-performance, reliability, simplicity perhaps. And the business has more stakeholders who want different things, more metrics, more integrations with their third-party tools, etc. Th…

I appreciate your comment. But isn’t my conception of quality the only one that matters? If a doctor saves money for her employer by skipping some expensive test, and my health outcome is worse, her employer may be happy, but we don’t say that she is a good doctor.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#97

Post by avl999 » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 4:19 PM UTC

Hacker News and the old reddit is the pinnacle of user experience for a site of its "genre". The new reddit perfectly exemplifies what @antirez is saying. It's amazing to me that hundreds (thousands?) of people who work at Reddit thought that that user experience was an "improvement" over the old reddit.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#98

Post by root_axis » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 4:19 PM UTC

I don't find the argument convincing. I've used the web all day for decades, it's fine. Some sites are slow, some sites are buggy, some sites don't meet contemporary design standards... this is nothing new, it's the same as it ever was.

The one quality that truly differentiates the new web from the old web is the Cambrian explosion of ad tech, but this isn't a "front-end" problem, it's a cultural problem rooted in the shifting expectation that everything on the web should be monetized. There isn't really a solution to this, ads are the opposite side of the coin for people producing goods and services that are ostensibly providing value to the economy in the abstract sense... this is the web we all wanted.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#99

Post by runawaybottle » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

root_axis wrote: post #98

I don't find the argument convincing. I've used the web all day for decades, it's fine. Some sites are slow, some sites are buggy, some sites don't meet contemporary design standards... this is nothing new, it's the same as it ever was. The one quality that truly differentiates the new web from the old web is the Cambrian explosion of ad tech, but this isn't a "front-end" problem, it's a cultural problem rooted in th…

There are good examples of ad integration and bad examples. People spend a whole lot more time talking about app architecture versus how to elegantly load, render/position and refresh ads.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#100

Post by mrkramer » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

"I can only think that modern front end development has failed"

I think web devs have no real incentive to improve their front end since search engines don't stimulate and reward them to do so.

Ranking algorithms are blackbox but you can notice that popularity is more important than quality of content so eventually web gets bloated and you end up in information overload.