What about advertising on websites has failed us all?
Anyways, ViteJs and Tailwind jit recently are making development fun again. Too bad TypeScript still ruins the party.
I can only think that modern front end development has failed
81–90 of 521 posts
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#82It makes me really angry when a simple informative site is a bloated SPA app for no good reason.
In many of the cases I've seen the company would've been better off with server rendered markup and perhaps some light client side validation (vanilla JS or jQuery). I'm at a loss as to how they ended up with this instead.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Just like music, there was a LOT of trash web development back in the day as well. Sites built with tables in dreamweaver best viewed on netscape navigator at 800x600 with animated gifs bogging the download speed existed long ago. What we have today are the same problems with a new…
We had functional applications for forms and the like, in the 90s, running on machines with 8MB or 16MB of memory. They weren't as pretty, but they had simple development paradigms, VB and Delphi, easy to get started. HTML has been the wrong place to make creating UIs (as opposed to marked up text) for such a long time. Things are getting better from multiple angles, but it's still very uneven.
It's always easy to solve a problem by taking away a number of it's requirements. VB was good at forms but visually unacceptable for branding. It was difficult and unsafe to deliver over the internet. And again, there were a LOT of really bad VB applications that hurt usability and performance.
If all you're doing is building forms for an application then it's acceptable, but that's an easy problem solved with elegant solutions today as well. HTML can immediately deliver the styled application without installation to every device regardless of OS. It can propagate changes without reinstallation. It is accessible for every kind of user. And it does this while looking miles better than any VB application.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#84Regardless of my tweet, that is a personal opinion based on my feelings, background and experiences, the discussions in the replies are interesting from the POV of understanding what different people think in the programming community. Some will say that critiques are only from old people, in the style "when I was young we had only zeroes! You now have ones and zeroes". Others say that the web is slow because of ADs…
I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Just like music, there was a LOT of trash web development back in the day as well. Sites built with tables in dreamweaver best viewed on netscape navigator at 800x600 with animated gifs bogging the download speed existed long ago. What we have today are the same problems with a new…
I have a different opinion. When we moved from the old way to semantical HTML5 generated still server side but which the layout was defined by the finally mature CSS, with the dynamic parts handed by JavaScript and RPCs, everybody agreed it was better. Such web was faster, more compatible, simpler to parse, and so forth. I think that, if in the 20 years that followed, frontend development would progress in the same direction of improvements, everybody would agree again now.
And indeed everybody agrees that JavaScript itself is now better as it is the modern web APIs. If the rest is so controversial there must be a reason.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#85The tweet is too vague so I don’t really know what they are referring to.
Reddit is slow now because they made what should just be static HTML that is updated occasionally into a web app for whatever reason.
React is much better than any alternative. I tried using native js but you really need all of the things react brings. Now you could go back to server-side, but it isn’t suitable for web applications. There are just too many interactive elements that don’t work with a HTML push to client and reload on every change approach. Server side plus client side is a lot more work and hard to maintain.
Still, I really hate front end development.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#86I recently lost my internet provider, so while I wait for a new one I'm tethering from my phone. The Verizon unlimited data plan actually throttles me to modem speed, about 56k, so it's actually not unlimited. Anyway, it's been interesting to judge various websites by how fast they load at that speed. Hacker News comes right up. Twitter is acceptable. Facebook is terrible and often does not even load at all. The same…
After minification and compression, React is about 100kb and can be cached for a long time. With all the images, videos on social media etc. it seems rather small in terms of bandwidth.
I thought it was actually around 30kb, after being minified and gzipped?
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#87It's hard to argue with that short textual message after it took me 3 attempts to finally load it. The quote for those who still struggle to access it:
> I look at the web today. Not as a programmer, but as a user of broken sites that are unable to obey the most basic rules of navigation and usability, terribly slow despite the hardware progresses. And I can only think that modern frontend development has failed.
Though it's probably not exactly a failure if usability, accessibility, and/or speed are not primary objectives for most, and discussing just that once again probably won't be very useful for fixing it.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#88In my opinion, it's a question of what you want to optimize for, speed of execution/accessibility/responsiveness or speed of software development.
The modern web is a stack of abstractions that separates the code in what the site is written in from the underlying machine that renders it. This stack of abstractions makes it many orders of magnitude slower than it theoretically could be to render, but makes it many orders of magnitude easier to program. In other words, this seems like the age old debate of "interpreted vs. compiled" [0].
While the front end ecosystem is sprawling and modern web pages are slow and clunky, the barrier to entry, for most people, is at an all time low. It's easier now to create a web page that works consistently for the vast majority web browsers with minimum effort. The render speed and accessibility might suffer, but this is always the price of abstraction.
Jonathan Blow has a talk specifically lamenting this point [0].
[0] http://blog.gmarceau.qc.ca/2009/05/speed-size-and-dependabil...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ4GcZs7y6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvBySbGueww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URSOH4F3vbU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlIZ2Q3Rvc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpk9Q5gCyIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK6YZ3NFjuE
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Just like music, there was a LOT of trash web development back in the day as well. Sites built with tables in dreamweaver best viewed on netscape navigator at 800x600 with animated gifs bogging the download speed existed long ago. What we have today are the same problems with a new…
I definitely agree with the music survivor bias thing. This is also very noticeable in the “computer generated imagery in movies looks artificial” meme: you just didn’t notice all the extremely effective and convincing CGI. But I’m curious, what are the examples of great websites “back in the day” that have stood the test of time and would be considered good web development today?
You're on one right now. Although it'd benefit from some mobile compatibility...
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#90I am not an expert chef. I can cook pretty well, and my guests enjoy my food. But it doesn’t compare to what a professional chef can do. I am not an expert abdominal surgeon. If we are in Antarctica and your appendix becomes inflamed, I will try to save you by cutting it out. But you will probably die. I am not an expert front-end developer. I make sites for myself, for others, and have even been paid for it a few ti…
The measure of what is better in all these companies is determined internally and generally by the business. So it ultimately serves the business and only serves the user indirectly—-if at all. Obviously you optimize for different things—-performance, reliability, simplicity perhaps. And the business has more stakeholders who want different things, more metrics, more integrations with their third-party tools, etc. That’s not to say your measure of better is wrong. It’s probably not and I probably agree with you! But it’s coming from a different place I think.