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When the percentage of users using IE6 was lower than a few percentile, we started to ignore those users and came to expect that the web would be somewhat broke

by lemiffe 11y ago

When the percentage of users using IE6 was lower than a few percentile, we started to ignore those users and came to expect that the web would be somewhat broken for them. Likewise, the web is becoming somewhat broken for users that have JavaScript turned off. The separation of back-end and front-end, via the exposure of APIs on the backend, has led us to a world where the front-end requires a bit more thought, on how to represent and transform the data to render the content and theme correctly. Why? Modularisation & de-coupling = greater maintainability + rule of single-responsibility is better applied. This will become more and more the case with the widespread adoption of microservices. In this specific case, we could argue against the few lines of JS that provide a nice effect upon entering the page, but you can't argue about de-coupling and breaking down the mammoth codebase.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
I'm not arguing about decoupling, exposure of APIs, etc. But decoupling doesn't mean you have to push all work onto the client. Have a backend server and a frontend server, the latter consuming APIs of the former and rendering content. You have to write that rendering code anyway, and opting to put it all in the browser is saving yourself a small electricity bill by passing it onto consumers, multiplying it millionfold on the way. (Once again, I'm writing about web pages, not web applications (and no, a blog is not a web application).) Modularization, decoupling, "rule of single-responsibility", etc. are meant to produce simpler, more maintainable code and better, slicker software. But instead, they're taken out of context and abused. Modern web codebases are getting more and more complicated, not less. What people are doing today is not good engineering. It's the architecture astronautics' equivalent of Kerbal Space Program.

by lemiffe 11y ago

TeMPOraL 11y ago

I'm not arguing about decoupling, exposure of APIs, etc. But decoupling doesn't mean you have to push all work onto the client. Have a backend server and a frontend server, the latter consuming APIs of the former and rendering content. You have to write that rendering code anyway, and opting to put it all in the browser is saving yourself a small electricity bill by passing it onto consumers, multiplying it millionfold on the way. (Once again, I'm writing about web pages, not web applications (and no, a blog is not a web application).) Modularization, decoupling, "rule of single-responsibility", etc. are meant to produce simpler, more maintainable code and better, slicker software. But instead, they're taken out of context and abused. Modern web codebases are getting more and more complicated, not less. What people are doing today is not good engineering. It's the architecture astronautics' equivalent of Kerbal Space Program.