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Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

mastrojs.github.io

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Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#121

Post by machiaweliczny »

kristianc wrote: post #10

I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. I understand that there's a good living to be made from knowing browser quirks, hand-rolling accessible components, mastering CSS specificity, but this is largely accidental complexity. More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that'…

Yes it's still bad there's no viable headless UI in browser one can really style and it has all the a11y etc. but need extra library for selects that work etc. Invented work for no good reason. The real complexity is in diversity of devices though nowadays in the frontend.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#122

Post by machiaweliczny »

wongarsu wrote: post #35

We already had a phase of "deskilled" frontend development: Adobe Flash. Any designer could open it and create interactive websites in it, no CSS or HTML knowledge required. Some slight JS knowledge (rebranded as ActionScript) you could get full interactivity, and animations were fully editable in UI. Sure, all of this came at a terrible price: no accessibility, no SEO discovery, huge loading times. But it also creat…

Good news is that HTML in canvas might bring back these cool days :)

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#123

Post by moron4hire »

kristianc wrote: post #10

I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. I understand that there's a good living to be made from knowing browser quirks, hand-rolling accessible components, mastering CSS specificity, but this is largely accidental complexity. More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that'…

Making UI less accessible is specifically not a trade off people are entitled to make. Accessibility is a legal requirement. This is like arguing it's ok to use robot construction workers who forget to install wheel chair ramps because "gotta go fast".

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#124

Post by coldtea »

kristianc wrote: post #10

I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. I understand that there's a good living to be made from knowing browser quirks, hand-rolling accessible components, mastering CSS specificity, but this is largely accidental complexity. More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that'…

>I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people.

And I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling that the convenience from ignoring the "deep expertise" and piling on hacks and lazy abstractions, all the way to modern multi-MB frameworks and Electron, is a regression.

Of course no one gives a shit about things like the user's computer/memory utilization. Or degraded experience. Or wasted bandwidth. Or the extra energy costs per 8 billion people - and the environmental impact.

>More people building things is straightforwardly good,

Is more people building public infrastructure "straightforwardly good"? If it means worse roads, worse bridges, systems that fail?

The same holds for software. And most things really.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#125

Post by CM30 »

Isn't a lot of this complexity going away for good reason? Browser compatibility was only an issue because browsers didn't stick to the standards closely enough. It's something that's not supposed to be noticeable at all.

And let's be honest, one of the best changes front-end development has seen is how previously complex problems now have built in, easy to use solutions. Yeah you could say it was harder to code layouts when flexbox and grid didn't exist and you had to deal with floated elements and absolute positioning, but the new setup is just better for everyone.

Customising select menus used to require lots of CSS and JavaScript to remake the element. Now browsers are implementing features to let you customise default select boxes the same way. Having an element expand to auto height use to involve JavaScript. Now it's something you can do in CSS alone. Creating modals used to involve writing CSS and JavaScript. Now an accessible and efficient version can be done with built in tech.

Meanwhile JavaScript frameworks are really just continuing the pattern started by previous tools, like WYSIWYG editors, Content Management Systems, jQuery, etc.

At the end of the day, any tech that gets more advanced will lower the skill floor and reduce the need to care about those minor intricacies. Most people don't need a particularly advanced solution to their problems, so whatever system can automate away most of the work will get used for that. It's not unique to web development or software engineering.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#126

Post by culebron21 »

lqet wrote: post #71

This is something that recently also crossed my mind. I haven't really done frontend developing for at least 10 years know, but I am already old enough to remember the time in the late 2000s when suddenly everyone stopped developing web GUIs by hand and used frameworks, and anyone still writing HTML, CSS, JS and database queries by hand was ridiculed. Job offers suddenly stopped asking for PHP / HTML / CSS / SQL / JS…

I must say that already in the early 2000s web developers were tired of hand-coding everything, and many sought some sort of automation -- a framework, a CMS. Already in 2004 I made a site with barebone approach -- put a txt in a diretory tree and let PHP simply add tags instead of linebreaks and insert it into HTML. The alternative those days was a heavy content management systems. And I came to Django after two awful PHP frameworks, written by lead developers at the workplaces. So, frameworks like Django were a more gradual transition, and they were much more pleasant to work with.

Sure, as you pushed it further, like add versioning to objects, things got very tricky and not guaranteed to work, and no way to fix.

But otherwise, yes, the attitudes look similar.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#127

Post by Aurornis »

kristianc wrote: post #10

I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. I understand that there's a good living to be made from knowing browser quirks, hand-rolling accessible components, mastering CSS specificity, but this is largely accidental complexity. More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that'…

> the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people

This reminds me of the Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

LLMs feel threatening to anyone who had an edge by knowing how to navigate domains with a lot of weird and complex behavior. It’s nice to feel like businesses need you if they want to solve a problem. It’s scary when a cheaper solution arrives that does 70% of that deep knowledge navigation at 1% of the cost.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#128

Post by kalcode »

ActionHank wrote: post #108
kangalioo wrote: post #46

The "frontend skills" whose growing irrelevance are bemoaned in this article consist largely of navigating a minefield of unintuitive edge cases, browser incompatibilities, historic baggage, exceptions to exceptions to exceptions. Modern frontend, or the "tower of leaky abstractions", is finally a common-sense mental model for web development. Supplanted by force on top of an exploding bag of eccentricities that is w…

I think your ignorance is showing. There is far more to it than all that. I've interviewed far too many nextjs experts who couldn't do anything else. That's not a skill, that's just knowledge, which at this point is freely available.

That being entirely unfair. It is still a skill. They still learning stuff. It does not help them to be trapped in a bubble. But nothing is not transferrable. Things we learn, even if they are only a React can't write vanilla JS, it's still unfair to say they have no skill.

Just not a correct interpretation. Many skills start that way and even some people make a whole career mastering one thing and one thing only.

Not saying being trapped in React land unable to break out is good. But being able to create something, even if it's just with Nextjs is still a good thing.

We should hate on the businesses that force us to take shortcuts, value quantity over quality. They wanted boot camps with code monkeys.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#129

Post by WarmWash »

emodendroket wrote: post #85
fny wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Frontend's Lost Decade" has nothing to do with a11y or semantic HTML. The original talk argues performance went to hell because of React and friends, which is why we have electron CRUD apps that consume 2GB+ RAM.

You could argue that most users do not notice or care about this at all so it's a completely reasonable sacrifice to make to have rich applications.

People think they are upset about new technology, but what they are actually upset about is the general consensus being that the new technology has a better value prop.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#130

Post by PaulHoule »

emodendroket wrote: post #85
fny wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Frontend's Lost Decade" has nothing to do with a11y or semantic HTML. The original talk argues performance went to hell because of React and friends, which is why we have electron CRUD apps that consume 2GB+ RAM.

You could argue that most users do not notice or care about this at all so it's a completely reasonable sacrifice to make to have rich applications.

The bit that goes unsaid about Electron is... why?

If the goal is a legitimate app that has the lifecycle of an app that you start up and then shut down today the answer is "just write a web application" and then it "just works" on Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android, Meta Quest, etc.

Mostly people get pissed about Electron because they have 15 Electron apps running in the tray burning up resources all the time and popping up stuff that covers the tray and other tray applications in those (very rare) cases that you want to interact with something in the tray.

It's a tray problem, not an Electron problem. That is, people use Electron specifically because they want to made rude applications which march all over your desktop in muddy boots: Electron is not a framework for writing well-behaved, polite, x-platform applications; you don't need that, you have the web! Electron is a framework for making rude applications that inhabit your tray, pop-up distracting notifications, etc.

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