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> ...I'm going to evolve my CSS, starting with inline styling, moving out to an inline style node in HEAD, then dynamically loading it from JS as in the Google

> ...I'm going to evolve my CSS, starting with inline styling, moving out to an inline style node in HEAD, then dynamically loading it from JS as in the Google example, and then finally using a class/series of classes. I'm sure it will load spectacularly fast, but that sounds like a maintenance nightmare. I spent a lot of effort on my "brochure" sites making sure that non-JS users will have a good experience (that includes being able to navigate the site, a privilege an increasingly large number of sites don't extend to non-JS users)[1]. Loading even part of my CSS through JS would ruin that experience. 1. I do make web apps that require JS, but only for actual applications that work in a similar manner to desktop apps, not for informational sites like blogs.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago
Yes, that's the standard answer: good structure costs very little now but pays off greatly in maintenance and upkeep. And I believe it -- up until a point. After that point, too much structure becomes its own kind of hindrance, where you're looking at a UI and wondering "What the hell cascades do I have going on here to make that two pixels too far to the right?" (Or something like that) So I don't think we disagree. The only thing I'm adding is that to determine the right amount of structure, add it in only as needed. So I imagine by the time you got to a multi-page site you'd be using external stylesheets and common classes. You just wouldn't start there. Sure do like me some Bootstrap, though. And a good reset sheet is a no-brainer. Need to think about this some more. I think the key question is: how much of this do you really need? For instance, right now I'm writing a small personal app to take a movie script in native file format and display it as a web page. Where did I start? With the function to do the translation, of course. Now that it's working, I can always manually execute it if I need to. I may just stop here. I've done enough. If I really, really want something I can upload scripts to online, I'll write a page. Or two. Then I'll throw my uploaded file at my pre-existing function, return the file name, and I'm done. I may have spent 10 hours on this so far. By contrast, the "old" way of doing it was to start with setting up a site using all sorts of frameworks. Maybe decide on a color scheme. On the back-end side, I'd be creating a class graph and working through my persistence strategy. Maybe I could use Mongo! Wouldn't Ruby be awesome? I tend to easily get focused on tooling and technique instead of just doing the fucking work. (Apologies for the profanity, but this took me a long time to figure out). So I've discovered for my own work, I need to concentrate on making sure I grow only the needed complexity. Nothing more. Way too easy for me to screw up in this area. In the case of my little app, sure, I could start adding frameworks. Or I could just emit some HTML. Who knows? Maybe plain HTML with a few classes and some style information in the HEAD might be fine. That's a win.
jnmandal 11y ago
Who are these non-JS users. Can you point to some statistics here? Using developer time on it seems more wasteful than trying to support old versions of IE.
- kccqzy 11y ago
  See here for example: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missing-out-on-javascript-enhancement/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missi...
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    Interesting but that was over 2 years ago and frankly even if it is still 1.1% since I write web applications not sites I'm not devoting any time to supporting people without JS. Anything over 1% of the total dev time would be a poor RoI and frankly I'd sooner spend that time making things more accessible to screen readers and such (something that many web applications already do very poorly frankly).

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

Yes, that's the standard answer: good structure costs very little now but pays off greatly in maintenance and upkeep. And I believe it -- up until a point. After that point, too much structure becomes its own kind of hindrance, where you're looking at a UI and wondering "What the hell cascades do I have going on here to make that two pixels too far to the right?" (Or something like that) So I don't think we disagree. The only thing I'm adding is that to determine the right amount of structure, add it in only as needed. So I imagine by the time you got to a multi-page site you'd be using external stylesheets and common classes. You just wouldn't start there. Sure do like me some Bootstrap, though. And a good reset sheet is a no-brainer. Need to think about this some more. I think the key question is: how much of this do you really need? For instance, right now I'm writing a small personal app to take a movie script in native file format and display it as a web page. Where did I start? With the function to do the translation, of course. Now that it's working, I can always manually execute it if I need to. I may just stop here. I've done enough. If I really, really want something I can upload scripts to online, I'll write a page. Or two. Then I'll throw my uploaded file at my pre-existing function, return the file name, and I'm done. I may have spent 10 hours on this so far. By contrast, the "old" way of doing it was to start with setting up a site using all sorts of frameworks. Maybe decide on a color scheme. On the back-end side, I'd be creating a class graph and working through my persistence strategy. Maybe I could use Mongo! Wouldn't Ruby be awesome? I tend to easily get focused on tooling and technique instead of just doing the fucking work. (Apologies for the profanity, but this took me a long time to figure out). So I've discovered for my own work, I need to concentrate on making sure I grow only the needed complexity. Nothing more. Way too easy for me to screw up in this area. In the case of my little app, sure, I could start adding frameworks. Or I could just emit some HTML. Who knows? Maybe plain HTML with a few classes and some style information in the HEAD might be fine. That's a win.

jnmandal 11y ago

Who are these non-JS users. Can you point to some statistics here? Using developer time on it seems more wasteful than trying to support old versions of IE.

kccqzy 11y ago
See here for example: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missing-out-on-javascript-enhancement/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missi...
- noir_lord 11y ago
  Interesting but that was over 2 years ago and frankly even if it is still 1.1% since I write web applications not sites I'm not devoting any time to supporting people without JS. Anything over 1% of the total dev time would be a poor RoI and frankly I'd sooner spend that time making things more accessible to screen readers and such (something that many web applications already do very poorly frankly).