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On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project

w3c.studio24.net

21–30 of 208 posts

Re: On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project

#21
post #10
post #2

Shameful. As someone that has worked with Craft it has a ton of awful edge cases once you get deep into a project. Craft absolutely does not scale.

such as?

https://craftcms.com/docs/3.x/matrix-fields.html

Get a few hundred of those on a site and see how much ram you need.

Re: On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project

#22
post #15

The 'eat your own dog food' principle would dictate that the W3C writes their site in plain html + css. The fact that this is not even considered proves the these languages are so incredibly non ergonomic. I know.... it is an often reiterated point, but when it is the site of the W3C it really is very hard not to notice this....

How so? W3C is also involved in standardizing the DOM interface to html. JS is equally their own dogfood (in the age of whatwg its debatable whether any of this other than maybe css is really their dogfood anymore)

Re: On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project

#23
> The use of React complicates front-end build. We have very talented front-end developers, however, they are not React experts - nor should they need to be. > I believe front-end should be built as standards-compliant HTML/CSS with JavaScript used to enrich functionality where necessary and appropriate.

This is what worries me about React (and with other front end frameworks in general). I'm writing this as someone who choose Vue for their latest project.

Web pages started off being documents - electronic versions of printed typeset pages - and could often look very beautiful. A lot of React pages seem, to me, to look like a collection of components - like modern versions of VB forms - facebook/twitter spring to mind etc.

There are a lot of very good HTML and CSS 'coders' that aren't developers, they come from more of a design background. Are they being disenfranchised by the modern frameworks? Will we end up making the web look less beautiful?

Re: On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project

#24
post #18
post #15

The 'eat your own dog food' principle would dictate that the W3C writes their site in plain html + css. The fact that this is not even considered proves the these languages are so incredibly non ergonomic. I know.... it is an often reiterated point, but when it is the site of the W3C it really is very hard not to notice this....

I don't see how the w3c establishing a rule set would mean they would code it by hand, can you provide more details as to why the should, and not use a CMS that produces compliant code?

Because they edited and published the HTML spec with lots of examples portraying HTML as an authoring language. If W3C actually does intend to publish further HTML specs based on WHATWG (which they haven't done since 2017), they should consider injecting their own navi/styles into the bikeshed-generated WHATWG material as part of their CMS setup (and they have tons of static HTML anyway).

Re: On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project

#25
post #8

Is wp still php? What if you want a cdn outcome which doesn't drive to an sql backend? I've yet to experience wp consciously without it making me wince. I know a lot of former print press is using it, so the for profit sector likes it. That does not axiomatically make it best of breed. Being php is also not axiomatically worst of breed. The questions are decoupled really. 1) is wp still php 2) is wp best of breed. 3)…

Changing from PHP wouldn't change WordPress, it's general engineering approach hasn't changed since it gained popularity a decade or more ago.

Except for Gutenberg, which could be characterized as an admin facing HTML editor powered by React components but with an interfacing layer between Gutenberg and React, so only some of your React knowledge applies. It gets saved as HTML. The actual served content is still served as PHP generated HTML. React isn't involved in the client workflow.

All of this javascript code is of course bootstrapped and defined by PHP hooks including dependencies, and redefined again in the JS, so you're constantly diving between PHP and JS just to set up the JS.

Now to work on WordPress idiomatically you need a whole new set of skills that introduce a whole new slew of problems. So it's not best practice or well engineered PHP, and it's not best practice or idiomatic React. The docs for Gutenberg are incomplete, so no luck there either.

Another platform that failed in this same way was Magento 2. They want to use the Cool Kids Tooling, but they want to do it their way, so there's all this Bullshit™ inbetween and you get a hamfisted barely documented Frankenstein's monster. The third party tooling docs can't help you because of the proprietary integration making much of it no longer apply, and all the novel domain knowledge to get it to work is floating around in Stackoverflow threads and github issue tickets.

Re: On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project

#26
post #6

So while talking during the entire article about being firm supporter of open source software, they choose a proprietary CMS. I'm disappointed by the W3C.

I have to say that I’m not sure why we would care about the license of their CMS. Their work is on standardization, whatever tool works well for them in their context is a good choice. What matters is their output, that standard documents are available publicly and are accessible by the majority.

Re: On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project

#27

> The use of React complicates front-end build. We have very talented front-end developers, however, they are not React experts - nor should they need to be. > I believe front-end should be built as standards-compliant HTML/CSS with JavaScript used to enrich functionality where necessary and appropriate. This is what worries me about React (and with other front end frameworks in general). I'm writing this as someone…

I use Wordpress extensively and I find the whole Gutenberg switch to be absolutely atrocious. From the design to the technical implementation.

And it is also received as such. The classic editor has been downloaded millions of times.

What worries me most is that the developers haven’t responded one bit to these issues (if I read the relevant issues) and it solves no problems. It feels a lot like the technology du jour was picked and molded in a preconceived idea of a page builder. Forgoing a lot of that professional page builder plugins do great and much better already.

So the absolutely silence on these criticisms is what worries me most.

And yes, using react feels like a bad fit, it creates another layer where none needs to be, like the article stresses.

Re: On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project

#28
post #8

Is wp still php? What if you want a cdn outcome which doesn't drive to an sql backend? I've yet to experience wp consciously without it making me wince. I know a lot of former print press is using it, so the for profit sector likes it. That does not axiomatically make it best of breed. Being php is also not axiomatically worst of breed. The questions are decoupled really. 1) is wp still php 2) is wp best of breed. 3)…

How can you comment so negatively on WP when you know so little about it?

Re: On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project

#29

Never mind - their contributing.md document makes clear it isn't a FOSS project. --------------- I wasn't familiar with Craft. Looking at it they seem to have their own license and it seems pretty restrictive. Can anyone point to any existing discussions about the implications of the license and if it is truly open source? I understand FOSS projects that have some kind of payment option, but I don't understand how th…

> Never mind - their contributing.md document makes clear it isn't a FOSS project.

Where did you end up finding this information? How did you not see the "pricing" link in the navigation at their website? Or did you not look at their website? If you're having to pay for the software, then you probably don't need to dig much further to see that it's not FOSS. You seem to be making this more complicated than it actually is.

Re: On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project

#30
post #19
post #15

The 'eat your own dog food' principle would dictate that the W3C writes their site in plain html + css. The fact that this is not even considered proves the these languages are so incredibly non ergonomic. I know.... it is an often reiterated point, but when it is the site of the W3C it really is very hard not to notice this....

They're still using HTML and CSS, all websites do. It's the dynamic and generated nature of web applications that makes static HTML and CSS not useful on it's own. You could argue the right choice then is a static site generator, but the difference between static site generation and dynamic site generation is really just when you do the generating work.

W3C, at least on their current site, have hardly any dynamic content beyond aggregated news/event snippets on the front page and maybe charter status pages and roadmaps published once every two years or so. Their collaboration workflow for spec text runs on github. They have gateways/integrations to external services (HTML validator) and a lot of static HTML.
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