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Why is modern web development so complicated?

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Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#541

Post by jjcm »

triangleman wrote: post #518
jjcm wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Form registration for webcomponents is coming. Personally when trying to create a component system it's been the number one blocker I've had. Your work arounds were not great - either you'd have to mirror an input in the lightdom (not good if you're using a library that strictly enforces a vdom), or you have to use a forked form component (not good as few people will know to use it and will wonder why the x-input isn…

Can you link me to a page describing this new functionality in action?

Sure, here's the API proposal that's been approved: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JO8puctCSpW-ZYGU8lF-h4FW...

As well as the implementation status in chromium: https://www.chromestatus.com/features/4708990554472448

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#542

Post by pjmlp »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #407
thaumaturgy wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fundamentally because our industry is built on opinions, not standards. You talk to one software engineer, and they'll say, "that's built in PHP, so it sucks; it should have been built with npm, obviously." Then you talk to another and they say, "I can't believe they built that with npm, the package management system is just terrible and the whole mess is bloated and there have been a ton of security issues.…

Likely in that other industry the engineer built 100+ other basically identical items that are two or three orders of magnitude less complex and where all the costs and techniques are pretty well known. Also, those mature industries routinely overrun by millions of dollars and months or years, event though they are dealing with a fraction of the complexity and the costs and techniques are well known. Software is the…

90% of Web applications are database frontends.

What they do to the end user might be different, how the pieces come together, it is always the same, unless one is doing curriculum driven development.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#543

Post by robertoandred »

blhack wrote: post #114
goatinaboat wrote: post #63

Webdevs tend to suffer from an inferiority complex, that they are not considered “real” developers by the rest of the community. So they have responded by making the simple things they do monstrously complicated to try to prove something to the C++ guys, who simply don’t care, until they try to use the dumpster fire that is any modern website, that is. Then it has the opposite of the intended effect! Someone else men…

I think this is it more than anything. People wanted to make the web complicated because it made them feel cooler developing it. Some SPAs are cool. Easyeda.com is pretty cool. But also: storing information about a page in the URL is pretty cool too. It makes it possible to link to the page, for instance!

SPAs and useful URLs are in no way mutually exclusive.

I think people who don’t understand the web talk it down to make themselves feel superior.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#544

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

buboard wrote: post #458
ng12 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone else mentioned SPAs. I 100% guarantee that no user in the world ever wished for their “back” button not to work as they expected. This opinion invalidates the rest of your post. If you lack a fundamental understanding what people are building obviously it seems overcomplicated.

sorry, but if a front end interface is not easily understood, it is bad. its entire purpose is to have usability attributes, like predictability. SPAs break back buttons , new tab buttons, scrolling positions etc, the most basic stuff of web navigation

I think SPAss are much like special effects in movies: You only notice them when you bad.

I build SPAs as part of my job. Good SPAs do not break the back button. Insisting they do is silly.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#545

Post by goatinaboat »

Karawebnetwork wrote: post #264
goatinaboat wrote: post #63

Webdevs tend to suffer from an inferiority complex, that they are not considered “real” developers by the rest of the community. So they have responded by making the simple things they do monstrously complicated to try to prove something to the C++ guys, who simply don’t care, until they try to use the dumpster fire that is any modern website, that is. Then it has the opposite of the intended effect! Someone else men…

> Webdevs tend to suffer from an inferiority complex Well, that sure is an arrogant way to present stereotypes as fact. At first, I read this as satire. You can follow the history of web development and see exactly why the current stack is as it is. It's people building solutions to problems. For example, nobody thought "I should create a front-end build process to impress my peers!". What happened instead is that re…

You can follow the history of web development and see exactly why the current stack is as it is

I have lived this history of web development. I remember when CGI was new and exciting. Now I see modern sites using literally thousands of times the memory and CPU to struggle to do things that were trivial even back in the 90s on a 486 with 8Mb RAM.

A typical document, say a news story might be 2kb-5kb in size. Why does the page need 5Mb of JS to deliver and display it?

So I am 100% confident in my assertion that the web as it is today is massively and needlessly over complicated.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#546

Post by winrid »

dsego wrote: post #360
im3w1l wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he would model that as POSTing. Server side PHP would render document from scratch from the state.

It's silly to do a round trip to the server just to change some local UI state, right?

Depends on the app. In some cases it results in a much simpler and easier to maintain environment (ie, Larvel or Symphony will do this better than Angular...)

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#547

Post by robertoandred »

MadWombat wrote: post #324

So... let me get this straight. You are making a website. You do need to load some changing data into it, so just a static site will not cut it. But we want to keep things simple. All we really need are a few AJAX calls and some DOM updates. And just like the author mentioned we don't want to write old clunky JS, we want to write beautiful ES6 code. So we install babel for ES6. And we install jQuery to do our AJAX an…

What’s the issue with having a development environment?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#548

Post by winrid »

dsego wrote: post #217
wolco wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is just validation a js framework would be overkill. jQuery would fit well here.

You missed the multi-page forms part. As soon as you have state of some fields affect how other fields or parts of the page display it becomes complex really quickly. There is an explosion of possible states. If you've ever seen code like this, you know why more modern js frameworks were invented: onSomethingChanged() { $('#foo').prop('disabled', true); $('#spinner').removeClass('invisible'); $('#error-1').prop('hidd…

On a side note, all that complexity in the example could be managed with adding/removing a single CSS class :p

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#549

Post by proc0 »

The bar just keeps moving higher. Right now making a website that looked good a decade a go is very easy, but the cutting edge is about responsive, highly interactive applications. Additionally they are constructed by teams of people, increasing the level of complexity because of the need to share code while staying dependency-free. Client applications have become increasingly complex for anything that isn't a trivial website that mostly displays information. Complexity management on the client side I think is its own paradigm that is often not given enough credit and then people get surprised why their UI grows increasingly fragile while taking days to implement seemingly simple features.

Ironically some of the tools in the article will probably grow old which is part of the difficulty here. People learn the libraries, then it seems a new, better library comes along and makes things even better. Everything comes together once you learn it's about managing the algorithms, data, as well as rendering to the screen.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#550

Post by robertoandred »

jonnycoder wrote: post #287

Anyone take the reasonable approach lately? IMO, it involves taking the CDN version of a framework such as VueJS and slapping that bad boy as a script tag in your HTML file. No webpack, babel, sass, etc etc. I'm developing a dashboard, nothing fancy but nothing simple. I am also reasonable and think one can build off of all the well established UI components out there such as Vuetify. I now have a lot of free time to…

That’s only “reasonable” if you have a simple, cookie-cutter site.
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