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

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

#251

Post by olalonde »

> A lot of programmers may not know this, but frontend used to be a highly specialized skill, requiring knowledge of semantic HTML, CSS, the differences of various browsers, accessibility, progressive enhancement, network performance, interface design and user testing – to just name a few.

This would give the previous generation of frontend developers (aka C/C++ developers) a good chuckle. The web was viewed as a massive lowering of the barrier to entry and a "deskilling" of the craft. Assembly programmers probably thought the same of C/C++ developers.

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

#252

Post by mbgerring »

trjordan wrote: post #34
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'…

Totally. Every "we're losing our craft" article has the same gloomy shape. That's enough of a bummer, but they also argue against themselves halfway through. This one, for instance: > But exactly which details are deemed “unimportant” is a very consequential and sometimes subjective decision. And eventually, the details always leak through. Right, so you're saying this new technology will still reward deep technical…

> Websites are largely better, technically, than they were 10 years ago.

Holy shit, no, they are not. What world do you live in?

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

#253

Post by mbgerring »

troupo wrote: post #68
madeofpalk wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is largely accidental complexity. Is it? I know hating CSS is a fun pastime for folks around here, but maybe it’s just that building good, rich user interfaces that people can use is an inherently hard problem. Sure, the browser is slightly more difficult due to maintaining backwards compatibility and multiple implementations, but I’ve yet to see a better UI framework/language that has to deal with the other c…

> I know hating CSS is a fun pastime for folks around here, but maybe it’s just that building good, rich user interfaces that people can use is an inherently hard problem. That CSS and web never really addressed did they? There's almost nothing in the web platform to build rich user interfaces . You can barely do styled text. CSS and HTML are literally littered with accidental, ad-hoc, badly thought-out and badly des…

> That CSS and web never really addressed did they? There's almost nothing in the web platform to build rich user interfaces. You can barely do styled text.

Let me guess, you stopped reading web standards documents because Facebook told you it didn’t matter, since you could just ship 10MB of javascript with every request

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

#255

Post by yesimahuman »

I reject the core assertion that there was a "lost decade" at all. I was deep in the frontend industry during that time, and many "use the platform" purists completely missed the reality of what people were building with better abstractions: much more complicated and ambitious frontend apps. These apps heavily used new browser APIs and features, they just did a lot of it in frameworks like React, which these purists despised. I think the era we're in right now is fundamentally different.

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

#256

Post by ookblah »

"A lot of programmers may not know this, but frontend used to be a highly specialized skill, requiring knowledge of semantic HTML, CSS, the differences of various browsers, accessibility, progressive enhancement, network performance, interface design and user testing – to just name a few. To distinguish what they’re doing from what “frontend” has become, practitioners of this arcane art nowadays often refer to it as the “front of the frontend”."

that "knowledge" we held was to combat the absolute shit that was the browser ecosystem 20 years ago lol. you could argue it was a time of great experimentation and creativity, but no unified ui/ux patterns, adding in css hacks and doctypes blah blah to try to catch all these weird edge cases, if you're still reminiscing that time not sure what to say. today's tooling while also messy in it's own way is 1000x bettter. also i've never in my life referred to it as "front of the frontend".

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

#257

Post by mathisfun123 »

olalonde wrote: post #251

> A lot of programmers may not know this, but frontend used to be a highly specialized skill, requiring knowledge of semantic HTML, CSS, the differences of various browsers, accessibility, progressive enhancement, network performance, interface design and user testing – to just name a few. This would give the previous generation of frontend developers (aka C/C++ developers) a good chuckle. The web was viewed as a mas…

Every layer thinks they're the most important, most highly specialized, most highly skilled layer. Every layer is wrong because every layer is built on top of the abstractions of the layer beneath. Take it all the way down to the physics and the math and you'll notice that even the set theorists assume some axioms (no one knows what the logicians are doing...)

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

#258

Post by namuol »

> knowledge of semantic HTML, CSS, the differences of various browsers, accessibility, progressive enhancement, network performance, interface design and user testing

Sorry, but developers from 2012 didn’t have proficiency in most of these skills any more back then than they do today. I would argue frameworks introduced a lot of welcome debate and discussion of these things and actually helped disseminate these skills far beyond the “old guard”, not to mention the pressure put on browsers to normalize behavior and the huge improvements to the JS language born out of the induced demand of the huge rise of web apps that were all but unmaintainable in the before-times. Obviating the need to know about browser quirksmodes is a good thing and we have frameworks, in part, to thank for that.

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

#260

Post by ai_fry_ur_brain »

ElProlactin wrote: post #25

> And we’re saddened that the new process results in lower quality work, and that a lot of people just don’t seem to care. 1. Arguments like this seem to be based on the idea that, prior to AI, most of this type of work was being done by skilled artisans dedicated to quality work product. As I think anyone who actually worked in the industry and is being honest knows, this wasn't the case. There was a lot of mediocri…

You have terribly low standards for quality
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