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This arguman thing is really cool! It's such a neat idea in fact, that I'm willing to overlook the horizontal scrolling. That's saying a lot! With that out of

This arguman thing is really cool! It's such a neat idea in fact, that I'm willing to overlook the horizontal scrolling. That's saying a lot! With that out of the way... I'm firmly in the "but" camp here. I've been doing web programming for 17 years now. I remember the bad old days. Things were simple if all you wanted was HTML and images (CSS was still pretty iffy). But the moment you needed more than a static page? The complexity of getting up and running ballooned really quickly. And worst of all there were so few resources to really learn from. And it was expensive. Granted I was a teenager back then so anything more than a few dollars a month was pricey to me, but if you compare the kinds of hosting offerings of two decades ago to something like Digital Ocean or AWS today then the amount of possibilities is staggering (no more shared environment!) and for prices that are almost too cheap to believe. My recollection of getting anything up and running that used a database back then was that it was not for the faint of heart. Compare that to today and the process of getting everything set up and connected with Rails, Djano, Express, etc. Yes there's more stuff you "just have to know" in terms of code you write and yes you have a box you have to stay within because of the framework but I'll take that any day over gluing together some Perl scripts and hoping you've got CGI configured correctly. Maybe I'm conflating two separate things here: actual programming and operations. But I strongly contend that with web programming you can't disentangle those two things in any practical way. You will always be bound to the context of your environment. Anything that makes getting a sane environment easier leaves much more time to focus on the problem you actually care about. And it's not like you have to use all of the shiny new toys if you want to keep your code simple.

gkya 10y ago
The server code has way less problems than the UI part of websites (i.e. web pages). The complexity of putting up a webpage has made a very fast 0-60, where it now may involve several package managers, JS libraries, to-CSS compilers, multiple web browsers (multiple OS' if you want all of them), minifiers, uglifiers, build programs and whatnot. And most web pages from popular online publishers (news portals like the New York Times, blogs like the Huffington Post, etc.) the ratio of content to CSS, JS, and HTML tags goes towards 1/1000 and above. Most of the time features of browser are reimplemented (history, page loading, scrolling...) and standard behaviours hijacked (most often scrolling, clicks). Every website designs and imposes it's own UI paradigm so that clicking around becomes a frightening and challenging thing, as telling what is a link, what is a button, what is a drop-down, etc. is hard, as either these are heavily styled to the point of being unrecognisable or they are reimplemented in JS and the behaviour is unpredictable. This hurts especially when doing critical things like money transactions, various registrations that have become online recently, various rendez-vous, etc. Together with this trends, HTML, CSS, and JS get more and more complex in the specification level, which together with cancrous tooling, make entry to web development (i.e. writing webpages or writing programs that write webpages) harder and harder.

gkya 10y ago

The server code has way less problems than the UI part of websites (i.e. web pages). The complexity of putting up a webpage has made a very fast 0-60, where it now may involve several package managers, JS libraries, to-CSS compilers, multiple web browsers (multiple OS' if you want all of them), minifiers, uglifiers, build programs and whatnot. And most web pages from popular online publishers (news portals like the New York Times, blogs like the Huffington Post, etc.) the ratio of content to CSS, JS, and HTML tags goes towards 1/1000 and above. Most of the time features of browser are reimplemented (history, page loading, scrolling...) and standard behaviours hijacked (most often scrolling, clicks). Every website designs and imposes it's own UI paradigm so that clicking around becomes a frightening and challenging thing, as telling what is a link, what is a button, what is a drop-down, etc. is hard, as either these are heavily styled to the point of being unrecognisable or they are reimplemented in JS and the behaviour is unpredictable. This hurts especially when doing critical things like money transactions, various registrations that have become online recently, various rendez-vous, etc. Together with this trends, HTML, CSS, and JS get more and more complex in the specification level, which together with cancrous tooling, make entry to web development (i.e. writing webpages or writing programs that write webpages) harder and harder.