"It has never been easier to sweep things under the carpet."
There's never been a better time to build websites
131–140 of 337 posts
Re: There's never been a better time to build websites
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Oh, and RSS is not dead. Not at all (thanks WordPress, for putting a feed on every instance). RSS is the only workable way to make the web social again. What we need, IMO, is more experimental protocols to enrich the web, which maverick developers can use to good effect, the same way we did originally with RSS. More browsers forking Chromium or Servo to add support for these new features. Hell, maybe even something…
I agree with your sentiment, but RSS and the likes are not 'the same old weapon but better'. It was never 'weaponized' in the first place. It never really came to fruition for the masses. To me, RSS is like two sticks and a string, and it needs some people who can see that they can make a bow and arrow out of it (to stay in the realm of 'weapons'). I don't like talking about tech and business in a sense of 'weapons',…
Interesting point! What would you say the full realisation of RSS would look like?
Also, the weapons metaphor was mostly just responding in the frame of the original language about 'pushing back on big tech', 'shattered by big tech', etc. And I do agree with that framing: I think there is a tussle over the direction of the internet – tussle, battle, tug of war, whatever you want to call it – and I'm not sure it helps to avoid the martial metaphor out of distaste when you are in a battle.
Re: There's never been a better time to build websites
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tailwind kind of makes specificity and the cascade a non issue, though. Sounds like it might be just the thing for these developers.
Yes, and I would argue that many people using frameworks like these never learn those fundamental concepts.
I'd argue that never learning is the primary reason those frameworks exist.
Re: There's never been a better time to build websites
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course you need experience as an engineer. But knowing which Javascript libraries to pick is the easy part. I was not saying that you don't need experience, but you don't need much Javascript / Typescript experience. This can be done in a few months.
It will take a few months just to bring yourself up to speed on mouse/keyboard event bindings and how they interact in one specific browser and one operating system let alone all browsers and operating systems and mobile and that's without even thinking about rendering, templating, network operation wrappers, local storage, camera and sound APIs. The list goes on. I've been doing this since literally IE 5.5 and I'm s…
I already learnt most of what I need in one week. I was being pessimistic with 3 months.
If I need to know a particular event, I look it up in the documentation. The stuff you cite is just APIs, I can look that up too. I've used APIs before, you know. Right now I am piping data from Swift to Apple Metal and back, and write GPU code to estimate measurements from the FaceID camera in realtime.
Real programmers are coming to the Web, babe.
Re: There's never been a better time to build websites
#135It's definitely a great time to build websites, but saying they _NEVER_ have been easier to make... I'm not 100% sure about that. Yes, tailwind might make css a lot easier, and github copilot might make coding a lot faster... but is this really easier than in the early 90ies, when you could just type into notepad and make a website that didn't require any CSS or images or JS or even more than just the most basic html…
I understand the point you are making but is HN really the best example of modern web app? For better or worse web apps have replaced desktop apps. Not everything on the web is a simple list of articles and comments. Some things require extremely complex interactions and workflows. I don't think minimalism is the cure for everything, sometimes you need _some_ complexity and yes sometimes things are easier to use with a little bit of interaction instead of just text, forms, and plain html.
Re: There's never been a better time to build websites
#136As somebody who's only dabbled in creating a personal website in the late 90s, using FrontPage and hosting on a free hoster, the current web seems like a completely, and way more complex beast to build websites for. Back then all I needed was get a bit familiar with FrontPage and html scripting, some Photoshop to create/edit image elements, and I already had a functional website. I knew if I wanted to "really" do it,…
I started in the 90s and have dipped in and out of web dev ever since, but my impression is that a lot of the complexity stems from organizations and teams getting bigger and needing to work with one another. Frameworks and tools proliferate in order to make it easier to spread the work out across devs, communicate with one another, deal with version control, etc. The other main reason is to deal with the fact that a lot of web 'pages' are actually apps now and have to talk to the server/there's a bunch of backend stuff going on, so there has to be reconciliation between front-end and back-end.
If you're working on your own and don't need a back-end, there are options for putting up a personal site. Webflow[0] and Squarespace[1] come to mind. They'd be taken seriously semi-professionally in non-tech spaces. Can't speak to tech ones.
Re: There's never been a better time to build websites
#137Beautiful how I can't read the article on a slightly outdated browser (the state-of-the-art SPA crashes), because in the best of all times to build websites with the internet-of-javascript-bs, actually reading them is a nightmare lol.
Re: There's never been a better time to build websites
#138It's definitely a great time to build websites, but saying they _NEVER_ have been easier to make... I'm not 100% sure about that. Yes, tailwind might make css a lot easier, and github copilot might make coding a lot faster... but is this really easier than in the early 90ies, when you could just type into notepad and make a website that didn't require any CSS or images or JS or even more than just the most basic html…
> is this really easier than in the early 90ies, when you could just type into notepad and make a website that didn't require any CSS or images or JS or even more than just the most basic html tags?
Nothing is stopping someone from doing that today, but that's no longer the only option, thus it seems accurate that it is easier today than ever before.
Re: There's never been a better time to build websites
#139Is the "exciting" part that these new meta-frameworks save you from actually having to learn and implement proper front-end development concepts? Remix is an "inflection point" because now you don't have to learn how a server-side rendered website works. Tailwind is an "inflection point" because now you don't have to learn how a design system works, let alone how to implement one. Copilot is an "inflection point" bec…
I’m fine with that. Programmers these days don’t have to understand how a linker works either, and I don’t blame them.
Re: There's never been a better time to build websites
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not OP, but Linode. Used to be on their $10 a month VPS, downgraded when they added the $5 a month one. I think they have some fancy Kube stuff now but I just have a makefile that rsyncs a directory to my VPS and nginx picks it up. Honestly even the $5 VPS is more power than I need for static files, but it's nice to have the option to throw up a flask app or run some web-scraping scripts overnight or something. Admit…
But personal-website-tier static file hosting is free these days!
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