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Dear Developer, the Web Isn't About You

220 points by colinprince 8y ago

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NikolaeVarius 8y ago
I'm mildly annoyed that images won't load properly with JS disabled due to lazy-load.js not running.
- lostgame 8y ago
  You'd think she would've thought of that on such a post. :P EDIT: Isn't there also a way to pre-cache images with just CSS? o.o
lostgame 8y ago
This is a great article, even though the irony of the layout seeming to waste a lot of space/have a lot of whitespace/doesn't look/feel right on my mobile isn't lost on me, the content makes up for it. :)
chiefalchemist 8y ago
> We’re back to building sites that are not for everyone - huge, bloated sites, running fragile imperative code on the users local device. We have started to explicitly say "I think you should have this level of tech, processing power, and bandwidth before I think you're eligible to use my site". This isn't in and of itself the problem, per se. Sometimes a more powerful and robust UI / UX / application is necessary. The problem is when said "solution" is applied to __every__ need. The problem is, when screwdrivers are being used to pund nails. Much "like publish of perish" there's no (ego) glory in saying "Yeah. It's relatively lo-tech but that's the solution that best fit the business need." Rare is praise and/or hiring based on good analysis, appropriate tools and smart solutions. Nah. Size is all that matters. How people who can't do what you do it more important than doing the right thing(s).
- taurath 8y ago
  It’s a lot more about how fast we can get stuff done. Wordpress exists for a reason and lots of apps are build with redux - getting what you need done at a cheap cost, not bikeshedding new processes when the old works fine.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  We have started to explicitly say "I think you should have this level of tech, processing power, and bandwidth before I think you're eligible to use my site". I actually worked with a pair of developers who believed this wholeheartedly. It seemed to be part of some kind of design philosophy they picked up where it was the responsibility of developers to build complex web sites and apps in order to "further" technology and encourage people to upgrade for the good of... something. I'm not sure. They picked some baseline iPhone level (two generations removed from what was current, IIRC) and decided that anyone who wasn't "smart" enough to own that model, or better, shouldn't be allowed to use the product. Then when they were ready to deploy, it turned out that the product only worked on their phones, which happened to be the latest/greatest available at the time. So they built in a bunch of kludges and trimmed features to make it load on an older phone, and that was "good enough." Not surprisingly, the company went out of business.
  - lostgame 8y ago
    I have seen this...so many times. I've been an iOS developer since the App Store became a thing 8 or whatever years ago, and the amount of people I've seen willing to only test applications on devices only 1-2 generations behind, if that, is shocking. What's more offensive, shocking, and actually confusing is that, yes, management is usually the one saying this kind of thing. The reason that confuses me, is that you'd think, I mean, if I was in a management position at a mobile-related startup, one of the first things I'd do is have someone on my team do some market research to provide statistics on the current state of iOS device and version usage, and buy a freaking heapload of test devices, in all the different resolutions and variants. Dismissing your users because they're not 'smart' enough to have a newer model is, as mentioned in the article, essentially blaming these people for the circumstances in their lives that leave them unable to, or is simply insulting their intelligence. I still use an iPhone 6S. Why? I need a headphone jack. I run an independent music label and rely on GarageBand on a multiple-a-day basis. Bluetooth audio's latency is too awful to be usable when playing instruments or mixing/EQ'ing tracks, and furthermore, I'm not about to replace my $300 studio-quality headphones for some shitty bluetooth alternative, or drag some tiny dongle around I'll need to adapt the headphones. Does this make me 'not smart'? I think the exact opposite. I couldn't use a new iPhone the way I have for the previous 6-8 generations before it. There are dozens of reasons why people prefer to keep older models of devices. My 2011 MacBook Pro is still my daily Logic Pro driver, and I even still do a bunch of iOS development on it, because, gasp, I was able to open it up and upgrade the RAM to 16GB, remove the original hard drive, put in a 512GB SSD, remove the optical drive, and replace it with a 2TB HDD...which, if I'd bought a 2017/2018 and felt like the 8 or 16GB that came with it wasn't enough, I might as well throw out the window for all it's upgradeability. Then let's talk about software - most of the people I know actively avoid software updates on their devices because they either don't know if it will hurt their device, or they simply actively like it the way it is already, and don't want to be forced into whatever changes the devs and managers felt like this time around. People like what works for them. And they don't like change. tl;dr - Highly intelligent people have highly intelligent reasons to stick with their older devices and software. Hipster managers who think they're 'too cool' to see this piss me right off.
falcolas 8y ago
This starts off a bit get-of-my-lawn, but is a fantastic article with some very important points. Do yourself the favor of finishing it.
ChrisSD 8y ago
I think it's true that many sites are over engineered for what they are. Does a site that's primarily for reading articles really need to be an SPA? Why can't your sign in fallback to being a simple form? Etc. Then again it can actually be pretty easy to over engineer nowadays. Once you have your node/npm environment set up with webpack and all the rest you can quickly iterate a new site based on an earlier project. And if you hear of something new and cool it's only an npm command and a few hooks away.
- weegee101 8y ago
  You're right, it is easy to over engineer sites these days. It boils down to tooling for SPAs vs traditional static sites. The tooling for making static sites, even the most modern tooling such as Hugo or Jekyll, simply pales in comparison to libraries such as React, Vue, or others. The author is absolutely right that developers are attracted to shiny new objects, and the interest of the greater community is focused on SPA libraries when we should be equally (or arguably, more) focused on static site generation libraries as well.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  An npm command that leads to dependency hell because jsland has to have a thousand packages. A complicated python codebase can be less than 20-50.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- toss1 8y ago
  Aaaaaannnd right there's the problem -- easier for the one or few developers, harder for the thousands or millions of users. Where are the tools for making streamlined sites easier to build? What happened to the old contest for teh best site in 5kb [1]? We need those brought back -- seriously. [1] https://the5k.org/ https://the5k.org/
- komali2 8y ago
  What I've been thinking about ever since I learned about web brutalism is - how can I make simple, HTML focused websites, static? That is to say, not requiring a backend I build to generate the necessary HTML and serve it as a document to a given url? So index.html is easy, but is there a way to make it such that I can go to my website/articles/my-happy-day, and have that page be generated, rather than a separate handwritten my-happy-day.html file? I typically "deploy" simple shit by uploading it directly to my bluehost filesystem, or Amazon s3. The only thing I can think of is a precompile thing, and then uploading the build.
enlyth 8y ago
Very negative and condescending article in my view. Why would you spend time and money optimizing for a tiny percentage of users? Also they always underestimate the amount of power you gain by using frameworks like React and the amount of features and interactivity required when building modern web applications. I'm not going to spend weeks hand coding some progressive enhancement in vanilla JS so some angry blogger can view my stuff in a console based browser with no JS. It's like these people think that developer time is an infinite resource. Old woman yells at cloud indeed.
- rlucas 8y ago
  The article doesn't propose "optimizing" for users with some form of limitation (connectivity, device, personal disability). It proposes not excluding them by optimizing only for the maximal case. Your point about hand coding progressive enhancement is well taken. What we need are tooling and frameworks that make such an approach feasible. The author laments that the frameworks du jour tend to start with (and incentivize building) the resource-heavy, complex, fragile version of a site / app.
- lostgame 8y ago
  I think her point is that it's negative, dismissive, and ignorant of statistics to claim that we should ignore these things. She brought up some extremely valid and common real-life cases for this: • being in a foreign country • being at a place with a shitty wi-fi connection • that 30% of rural America is still dealing with 500kbps or lower internet Basically, the ignorance to say 'I can't be bothered to take the time to optimize my web site' is literally basically what she's calling people out on. She's, from what I can see, stating that especially in a large organization - (she uses the example of an airline ticket site), the statistics behind this seem significant enough that depending on your number of users, their locations, and their activities, you could be looking at a significant number of users who could simply just ignore your web site or services because you couldn't be arsed to try to optimize your web images, or simply make the site work without having to display them. (Certainly not text-in-images, at the very least!) I work as a senior iOS dev at one of the big banks in Canada on their iOS app. We won't stop supporting iOS 9 until that number falls under 2%. That still represents more than 10,000 active users for us. These 10k+ users rely on us for mobile banking, and we could lose them as customers if we don't support their devices, because some other bank will be happy enough to keep supporting it if we don't, and it just means more for clients for them. The author clearly gave another example of this in the anecdote she presented about the individual who could not even log in to the airline's website at the airport itself, and ended up having to schedule a flight with a different company. They lost at least one customer there, and who knows how many more, all because they can't be arsed to check to see how the page behaves on a crummy connection, and optimize it thusly. I remember living on a farm in rural Illinois, and the best internet we could get at the time was satellite. Which (or, worse, dial-up) is the only option for a lot of Americans, apparently. Satellite internet, in particular, causes these poorly-optimized web sites with hundreds of tiny JS files and images to take forever to load on this type of connection, because Satellite internet works by pinging the satellite for every connection, meaning downloading a large file can be fast, but opening Facebook can take up to 3-4 minutes. (My ex-partner who still lives on that farm confirmed this for me today.) In absolutely no way is this woman claiming 'developer time is an infinite resource.' In fact, I think she's saying 'dear developer, the web isn't about you.' It's about the users. Plan your development for these kinds of cases to start, and you won't be spending 'infinite resources' on it, because it was always considered.
d357r0y3r 8y ago
> But the cultural focus is on developer happiness, on developer fun and ramping up of code-related skillsets. "How does this benefit users?" has suddenly gone missing from our vocabulary. No, it hasn't. It's still 100% about how to benefit users for most teams. That is quite literally the only thing that matters and everything else is a means to an end. I'm not going to deny the fact that there are some shoddy websites out there. There are some sites that are using the latest and greatest JS stuff when really, they should just be using HTML and CSS. Fine. The majority of the work that gets talked about here, by software and tech startups, will not be effectively built using HTML/CSS or server-side rendering. Since we're on the topic of users, users have come to expect a certain level of interactivity. They expect that if you right click on a row, you get a drop-down menu and you can delete it. They expect that you can do inline editing of an item without being redirected elsewhere. They expect that you can create a new thing on the page without reloading and redirecting. Let's forget about that part, though. Most software features are, at the end of the day, experimental. We don't know exactly what is going to be a hit and what isn't. If new tools allow us to iterate at 2x or 5x or 10x the rate of old tools, this is a net positive for users. No one would denigrate a carpenter for using an electric screwdriver over a manual one. No one would complain that the carpenter only cares about their "carpenter experience". At the end of the day, the "user" wants their cabinets finished.
- ebullientocelot 8y ago
  I largely agree with the points you are making, however I think there's a fundamental difference in the carpenter analogy: regardless of the type of screwdriver used there is no material difference in the UX of the cabinet, whereas that does not hold for web development decisions.
- forrestbaer 8y ago
  Your correlation between iteration cost to net positive for users is completely false. It might be a net positive for developers but certainly not users. You sound like the kind of developer who has only ever worked with an electric screwdriver. Loading 2 megs of javascript so you don't have to redirect and open a dropdown is NOT a benefit to the user. Relevant: http://suckless.org/philosophy/ http://suckless.org/philosophy/
androidgirl 8y ago
I really like this article but I struggle with implementing it now. I've learned a lot of React recently for creating sites. I test all pages that can be static with javscript disabled, (I use gatsby or next for html ssr), but some parts can't be static, or worse there's still the "webpack inlines from hell" problem. I would LOVE to replace my javascript powered pages with a templating language, and offer feature parity. But using a template language like Jinja2 for building component-based sites just doesn't work as well, unless I'm missing some magical secret sauce. This is mostly for B2B web applications. I work on a lot of analytics dashboards that are pretty data dense. Even with react though, my sites never go over 400kb on load. Okay, essentially my question is: what templating language/server framework can replace react, jsx, and graphql for webapps? I really want something like that.
- yorwba 8y ago
  I'm not sure I understand your requirements, but couldn't you just use JSX as your templating language and render React server-side? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25777931/server-rendering-react-js-on-a-static-website https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25777931/server-renderin...
kobrad 8y ago
Excellent talk, and we need more of this. Look at downloading and image instead of installing something on a raspberry pi. Next thing I expect is needing docker to install a calculator.
crimsonalucard 8y ago
>It is this flirty declarative nature makes HTML so incredibly robust. Just look at this video. It shows me pulling chunks out of the Amazon homepage as I browse it, while the page continues to run. This is actually really really bad. HTML renderers should have been designed to immediately fail when incorrect. This allows developers to more easily write correct and robust code rather than making the browser be robust. If the web were designed this way, you'd have a world where only correct html is written. Also its not like we are not engineering a war machine here. Machines like the warthog are designed to keep functioning when components are destroyed. This is not necessary for html as we are not sending our html into a war zone. Sections of your html are not actively being removed/destroyed by users. The author later compares html to javascript. Seriously. Javascript is a whole different ballgame. Javascript is bad because there are many hidden states of failure that aren't apparent. In HTML there are only two states, failure or success. If HTML failed as soon as it's incorrect, you will know immediately. Nothing is hidden. In javascript, incorrect logic can lay buried until a specific use case is hit. That being said, he mentions stuff about the pyramid model for the web which is fine. I can agree with having javascript as the tip of that pyramid.
- lostgame 8y ago
  >> If the web were designed this way, you'd have a world where only correct html is written. You'd also potentially be looking at a web that is far more unstable and crash-prone if you essentially treated a browser like a compiler or the like.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    I believe the point was that if we had made stricter browsers, the web would be much more correct and standards-compliant.
  - crimsonalucard 8y ago
    The creator of the html page will typically look at the website before he publishes it, so unlikely that someone will publish incorrect html code. It's not like html has branching logic so there's no hidden crashes, everything is explicit similar to the safety you get with type checking. javascript is actually bad for the same reasons. It tries to correct your mistakes by doing type coercion making a null + 1 + 'blah'= "null1blah"
lostctown 8y ago
Here's the real problem. The JS tools got really powerful and the majority of users now experience faster dev cycles and richer features. Now users cannot go back. If we started serving smaller sites with less js people would complain about all the little features they liked that don't exist anymore. A developer now has a choice: use the big framework where you can satisfy those now entitled users or give up some success and make a tiny site with limited use of js. I'm all for the free web but I know which choice I would make when running a for-profit company.
- pnloyd 8y ago
  Ya this kinda sumarizes the Crux of the problem pretty well. I'm getting a bit worn with seeing anti JavaScript what nots on HN. It's here to stay guys for better or worse (and will proceed to consume UI development _everywhere_)
- UweSchmidt 8y ago
  Has anyone tried? Gone back to a simpler interface, fewer "little features"? I think I would like that, and others would, too.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    Yes, I do that for my own websites. If it has hurt the popularity of the sites, it hasn't been so severe that I've noticed.
  - asdff 8y ago
    HN seems to be doing fine
Konnstann 8y ago
I generally agree with the author's statements, but the analogies to cars and doorknobs to me were just inaccurate. There are a number of reasons why you want round doorknobs instead of levers, one of which is security, as levered doorknobs are trivial to turn from the outside of the door. Secondly, just because everyone has access to every website on the internet does not mean you need to build your website for everyone. If someone says their website is targeted at a specific group, they build it for that specific group. You wouldn't tell a formula 1 engineer to raise the suspension on the car he's building so it can clear speedbumps in the parking lot. Again, The core concepts of the article are common-sense, but the tone and specifics don't resonate with me.
- SilasX 8y ago
  >I generally agree with the author's statements, but the analogies to cars and doorknobs to me were just inaccurate. There are a number of reasons why you want round doorknobs instead of levers, one of which is security, as levered doorknobs are trivial to turn from the outside of the door. Wait, what? I can't find anything about door levers having this kind of security risk. This kind of sounds like voodoo security where "worse UI = better security, because fewer thieves know how to use it". >Secondly, just because everyone has access to every website on the internet does not mean you need to build your website for everyone. If someone says their website is targeted at a specific group, they build it for that specific group. You wouldn't tell a formula 1 engineer to raise the suspension on the car he's building so it can clear speedbumps in the parking lot. Sure, but most sites aren't narrowly targeting people who can see and who have the latest hardware as part of their core reason-for-existence. News sites certainly aren't, and yet their mobile and screenreader experience is cancer.
  - Konnstann 8y ago
    >Wait, what? I can't find anything about door levers having this kind of security risk. I specifically remember this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnmcRTnTNC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnmcRTnTNC8 at around 18 minutes in he shows one of his employees(?) use a long bit of wire to pull the lever and open the door in a matter of seconds.
hawski 8y ago
Ha! That's in line with an idea I'm considering - a modern HTML-only browser. A bit like one of those terminal browsers, but with nice proportional fonts, images and other basic things. Customizable entirely up to likings of a user. A user agent, not a webdev agent. It could also support Gopher protocol. CSS got out of control, so sorry no more position:fixed bars that are more and more in fashion. Ech. But first I need to get back to work on a search engine that would _not_ index ad serving pages with possible option of filtering out JS serving pages.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  > Ech. But first I need to get back to work on a search engine that would _not_ index ad serving pages with possible option of filtering out JS serving pages. Please do, I would be all over that :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18708325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18708325 I already use duckduckgo and fall back to !g, I'd love to try an ad/bloat-filtering search engine first, and fall back to ddg and google from there. As for filtering JS, I guess the main point for me whether it uses JS to render anything in the first place, or just to enhance. E.g. even HN has some Javascript, but it's fully usable without.
- 51lver 8y ago
  Build it on links. It supports advanced terminal functionality like graphics already.
- iicc 8y ago
  Dillo? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dillo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dillo
TagAsDelusion 8y ago
Wrong.
gedy 8y ago
And this server-side website takes 20 seconds to load. Imagine every interaction with a web app taking this long. At this point the web is documents and also an application platform. Conflating the two causes trouble - sure, simple documents don't need JS, but non-trivial webapps really benefit from dynamic UIs/data vs old-school form post interactions.
- mnw21cam 8y ago
  And if you disable Javascript, all the images are really blurry. This can't be for page loading speed, as they are all small images that would be not more than a few kB.
yorwba 8y ago
Previous discussion (8 months ago, 88 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16773398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16773398
- SilasX 8y ago
  That doesn't seem like a good reason for it to be marked as [dupe]...
  - yellowapple 8y ago
    Indeed. Is there some other more active discussion somewhere?
nickdandakis 8y ago
This article makes the assumption that every decision you make as a web developer is unaffected by co-workers. I'm all for progressive enhancement. However, if the expectation is a web _application_ that has a certain level of interactivity designed for, with a real world deadline, and a targeted demographic of "people with supercomputers in their pockets", I can guarantee you'll make some compromises. Bringing up Springer Nature and the BBC as examples of the Web Built Right™ is short-sighted when they are web _sites_ that serve static content. Of course you should send HTML from the server that represents the entire content of the page, apply some CSS, and sprinkle in JS. And of course, there are a lot of developers out there that would reach for the latest trending JS library + framework combo to pull it off, and they'll implement it poorly. There's very little point in bashing "npm install exciting-tech", when I can npm install gatsby-cli, and do everything the article is crying out for in a "modern" stack. Oh, also, the BBC example? They use Node, and React, and server-side render React[0]. You can bet they're npm installing exciting-tech. However, the web is not just static sites anymore. People expect a lot more functionality, you work with people that design and promise a lot more interactivity, and there's a lot more people coding without enough experience to reach for the tech that is the most efficient solution to a problem. I don't think a condescending article like this is beneficial for our community. Maybe we should try educating (nicely?) on how to pick the right tech for the problem[1]. Maybe we should ditch "user" for "person" (or "surfers" lol), when talking about the consumers of our output. And finally, maybe we should have more empathy of the people that work with our trade and work together towards a better internet. [0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/47a96d23-ae04-444e-808f-678e6809765d http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/47a96d23-ae04-44... [1] http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  I think the observation necessary for appreciating this article is that most sites that are built as SPAs these days aren't really web apps, they're still web pages. They're more similar to BBC and Springer Nature than to Google Sheets or LucidCharts. That's a property of the problem they're trying to solve. Building a web app where a web page would do shows total lack of interest about providing value to the user.
MentallyRetired 8y ago
Careful. This is our world. The rest of you just play in it.
joshstrange 8y ago
> people turning off JS (Yes people do this. Yes it's totally valid, and their right as a user). Fine, and they can go somewhere else. I'm sorry but I'm not about to consider this TINY percentage of users the same way I don't consider the TINY percentage of people accessing sites I work on from horribly outdated browsers. The next sentence applies to web APPS, not blogs/news sites/etc. People that say websites should gracefully fallback to non-JS web app when a user accesses the website with JS disabled are crazy. FULL STOP. PERIOD. You either end up dumbing down the entire experience for everyone OR maintaining 2 websites. Neither of which is financially sound for the vast majority of companies/developers given the percentage of people who don't use JS.
- eponeponepon 8y ago
  A similarly tiny percentage of your users are blind. Another tiny percentage are dyslexic. How many different tiny percentages can you justifiably invite to "go somewhere else"?
  - mortivore 8y ago
    A lot. Many developers don't even develop with blind people in mind at all. There are standards for sites that want to cater to those people, but most sites don't follow those standards.
  - d357r0y3r 8y ago
    For a business, at least in the United States, this is basically a financial projection problem. Unlike brick and mortar stores, there is no requirement to make web content accessible to handicapped people.
    - dotcode 8y ago
      >there is no requirement to make web content accessible to handicapped people. Yes there is: the Americans with Disabilities Act. Many private businesses in the States have been - and are currently being - litigated against under said act. The mandate of the ADA is to provide "full and equal enjoyment" of a public accommodation’s goods, services, facilities, and privileges. Places of public accommodation include, "place[s] of exhibition and entertainment", "places[s] of recreation", and "service establishments". The vast majority of websites are therefore "place[s] of public accommodation", are bound by the requirements of Section 508, and - since roughly this time last year - are required to meet WCAG 2.0 AA (https://www.access-board.gov/guidelines-and-standards/communications-and-it/about-the-ict-refresh/final-rule/i-executive-summary https://www.access-board.gov/guidelines-and-standards/commun...). In the States businesses are also required to meet the requirements of various human and civil rights laws enacted by states and cities. And if your company has an international presence, it's also covered under whatever legislation exists in those jurisdictions. Basically: hell yeah there are requirements to make web content accessible to disabled people. Almost whatever you do, wherever you do it, will be covered to some degree by legislation designed to prevent discrimination. Of course the existence of financial/technical incentives are good reasons for businesses to make sites accessible, regardless of any legal requirements.
throwaway_98554 8y ago
Dear old lady shouting at clouds, The web is not about me. But the websites I create are not for everyone. They are for my users. My users are professionals, on desktop, with a mouse and keyboard. Knowing who are my users allows me to do better design. I make the best experience for THEM. Not for you, nor for all your friends using different hardware. It doesn't mean I don't care about loading time or how things are displayed on the screen. It means I do so knowing in which environments it will happen. And yes, it might means you will be excluded.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  As the article mentions, what you’re really saying here is that “my website is not for poor people, or disabled people, or even people who are trying to kill some time before their bus arrives”. Is discriminating against these people ok with you?
  - lostgame 8y ago
    >> My users are professionals, on desktop, with a mouse and keyboard. >> Knowing who are my users allows me to do better design. >> I do so knowing in which environments it will happen. And yes, it might means you will be excluded. Obviously the poster here is more than okay with this. They're explicitly stating it will happen, and it's part of the plan. The problem is when it's not part of the plan. Imagine the author is writing an internal web tool for a corporate enterprise environment. Imagine all of those computers and devices are standardized, and the software will only run on these devices on an intranet. The previous poster's point is valid here. We know the users, the users are professionals, we know who they are, and we know what environments we'll be deploying in. Therefore, of course, beyond accessibility, of course the poster wouldn't care about people trying to kill time before the bus.
    - IggleSniggle 8y ago
      Exactly this. I would even hazard that the majority of developers are working on things for intranets in a narrow corporate context where, if it can run on non-standard gear, that’s an added liability with no significant business benefit. Businesses are only moving away from their decade old Flash and “IE only” web apps because the marginal security risk combined with maintenance burden has begun to outweigh the costs of new development.
lostgame 8y ago
The '30% of rural Americans still not on broadband' point is, understatedly, one of the most important points of the article by far. It is so, so easy, to be living and working in big cities like Toronto (me), SF (a bunch of you), NY, Chicago, et cetera, and truly forget the context of the absolutely awful experience a lot of people have online outside of these urban epicentres. I remember living on a farm in rural Illinois (Marengo), and the best internet we could get at the time was satellite. Which (or, worse, dial-up) is the only option for a lot of Americans, apparently. Satellite internet, in particular, causes these poorly-optimized web sites with hundreds of tiny JS files and images to take forever to load on this type of connection, because Satellite internet works by pinging the satellite for every connection, meaning downloading a large file can be fast, but opening Facebook can take up to 3-4 minutes. (My ex-partner who still lives on that farm confirmed this for me today.) The author, then, brings up the next, most important point: 'Your website had better be amazing for it to justify that length of download time.' For those making the audacious claim here that this isn't considering the dev's time put into it, I'd argue immediately back that the devs need to be considering the actual users. People living in the country aren't 'edge cases'. They're usually extremely hardworking people who simply don't have access to the luxury of broadband like we do. Just because we don't necessarily see these people, or travel to other countries with shitty connections, doesn't mean they don't exist, doesn't mean they're not actually a potentially significant number of people, and doesn't mean we should not be arsed to trim 1MB-2MB off our bloated image-and-video-wieldy sites, or even that it would necessarily take a lot of time in most instances. I agree. The web isn't about us. It's about who uses it.
- mortivore 8y ago
  With 30% having bad internet you'd think there would be a push in those communities to get better internet. Then again, the lack of internet usability may create an image of the internet as not being worth it. If you have no access to the better things on the internet, then you may think that there is nothing of real value on it so you won't push for better internet.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    "the lack of internet usability may create an image of the internet as not being worth it." People having slower internet speeds is a serious problem with the web (because of modern web design), not with most of the other things the internet is used for. Personally, as websites have become more dangerous and less usable, I've been finding the web to be a smaller and smaller space as the years go by. For the first time in my life, I can see that it's entirely possible that I will largely stop using the web. However, that in no way means I'll stop using the internet.
revskill 8y ago
Most of projects are shitty. Because devs are failed at reusing abstractions, which lead to increasing complexity as project grows. Reusing abstraction into useful libraries is what devs should do, not features implementation.
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jeklj 8y ago
I don’t know how you look at sites today festooned with crappy ads, modals that ask for your email, and pleas to download their stupid app; and decide the problem is JavaScript or developers.
PaulHoule 8y ago
(1) That's a clickbait headline (2) I think "management" deserves some criticism here too. I think the average developer doesn't want to stick 15 different third-party trackers in a page, but they don't get much empathy when they bring it up with the "business" people.
rocky1138 8y ago
Clickbait title, but I'll support anything that encourages empathy toward users.
phponpcp 8y ago
Sheesh the format of this article is dreadful.
amelius 8y ago
Regarding the invention of the internet, they should have mentioned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
JohnFen 8y ago
Hear, hear!
techopoly 8y ago
Why do developers always get blamed for the state of everything? Developers love creating efficient, optimized solutions. Developer happiness is rooted in a feeling of fulfillment that comes from creating a good product. There are many parties involved in designing the web, and developers aren't typically viewed as the subject-matter experts on how the UI of the web should work -- just on how to implement what's already been decided.
- lexicality 8y ago
  Do they? I know several developers that love crafting incredibly intricate and clever solutions that show off how good they are at functional programming/algorithm design etc. One place I worked at had an API with an "unfixable" 120ms delay on every request that persisted until someone ripped out the beautiful ORM system and replaced it with 3 SQL queries.
  - techopoly 8y ago
    You're absolutely right, many developers seem only to want to pigeon-hole a particular use case into the newest framework or technology they want to learn. I guess it depends on the developer.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  Your point is well-taken. I think it depends on who you count as a "developer". In my view, while too many actual developers (as in those who write code) are very keen on using tools and techniques in an inappropriate way that results in a worse user experience, they aren't the biggest offenders. I think the UX and marketing people tend to be the biggest offenders. People outside the industry don't know or care what the division of work actually is, though. To them, the group of people who collectively create the sites are "the developers". That isn't wrong, it's just not precise.
- scarface74 8y ago
  Why do developers always get blamed for the state of everything? Developers love creating efficient, optimized solutions. Developer happiness is rooted in a feeling of fulfillment that comes from creating a good product. You give way too much credit to the motivation of developers. Developers are just like anyone else working for a living....our primary motivation is to make money.
bobajeff 8y ago
Seeing the responses to this post just further adds to my conviction that the web is dead. You can't rely on websites being futureproof or adaptable to different situations. You can't rely on content being accessable to everyone. Nor can you count on content being available forever anymore. Sites are blocked or throttled by ISPs and governments. Sites are expected to censore they're content. Even search results are being censored. You can't trust in even the most basic assumption of privacy or anonymity. Everything you do is being tracked and sold. So many social networks require your phone number. So many sites need you to login or need your email. It's all one big get rich quick market.
vinceguidry 8y ago
The end result of this line of thinking is software guilds. Professionals being more accountable to their guild than to their boss. And the guild deciding who can and can't be a programmer. It gets worse. In order to deliver on those promises, the guild now has to decide what framework to use, which UI elements are worthwhile. We're politicizing our jobs, and the only way to solve political problems is with government. Enter the web programming guild.
- brianjcohen 8y ago
  The flip side of this is: currently, most engineering fields require you to have some kind of professional certification (eg. a PE) from an industry "guild", eg. the ASCE. Software engineers don't really have a functional equivalent. We demand that professional engineers build our bridges, but we'll pretty much let anyone build our software. At some point, changing that may be the responsible thing to do.
  - vinceguidry 8y ago
    I'll be the first one to get my guild card, but I really hope we think this thing through.
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potatoman2 8y ago
"orangefuckface@whitehouse.gov" - that's really not necessary now is it?
PavlovsCat 8y ago
from http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5025417&cid=46736661 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5025417&cid=46736661 > The internet was our garden. And a beautiful garden it was. Sure, some fed agency created it, but let's face it, they used a fraction of the lot and we didn't really care for their supersecret bases they had littered about. There was so much empty space in between! And that lot we cultivated. We built a few nice trees and in their shadows we relaxed, we planted beautiful roses and yes, a few fruits and vegetables because, hey, it's always better if you grow it yourself. And ... heh, well, yeah, we had a few corners here or there where we grew that "special weed", ya know, but nobody really gave a shit, it was just us. > We were pretty good gardeners. Well, you pretty much had to be in those days, if you didn't know your way 'round with rake and shovel, you didn't really get much out of it. Still, we were quite happy with it. So happy actually that we thought we should share that. I mean, there's so many people out there who don't even know just how great the garden is! And we invited them in. They looked around and, well, most of them didn't quite "get" it. Sure, it was nice, here or there, well, if you're into botany, that is, but it's kinda hard to get around and find your way through the jungle, and using a machete wherever you go, phew, hard work! But a few of them stayed. They didn't quite know what they do, but we handed them a few saplings and some seed and some actually managed to learn a thing or two about gardening. Sure, of course a few smartasses tried to steal our stuff, but we usually didn't have much of a problem to whack them with our shovel and get our stuff back. And, heh, yeah, we, too, went into each other's yards and played some pranks on each other, painted their roses black and the like, but it was all in good fun! And hey, they sure liked our ... ya know, "special stuff". They still had no idea how to grow it, but they were quite willing to help us share everything with everyone, as long as they got their share, too. And, well, why not, pass the blunt! > That was about when the corporations noticed that, hey, where did all the people go? They took a look at the garden and they went batshit crazy. I mean, sure, we knew that it's great, but we never saw anyone go so insane about it. They saw it as the next big thing to make money with, and we laughed. Money? With this? Dude, you can't make money out of a system based on freedom and sharing! Everything in here is free. Yeah, in both ways. > True. You can't make money in such a system. Unless of course you change the rules. And changing the rules, they could. > I can't help but think that this must be how the natives of the US felt after they were "discovered". Because we had to face that there are suddenly areas in what we considered OUR garden where we couldn't go anymore. Worse, something that was the staple of our culture, going to a guy who did something great and asking him for a sapling of his wonderful tree. Became anathema. Instead of you SHOULD imitate and build on top of mine, the new creed was you MUST NOT. This rule, of course, did only surface after they themselves took from our gardens what they could possible rake together quickly. You might understand our utter disbelief and of course outrage when we noticed that turnabout is not fair game. > Well, we have had our share of trolls and nuisances before. Long before we already had to deal with people who trampled through our gardens or were a general pest. Our solution was simple, we took our superior gardening skills and whacked them from here to next week with our shovels 'til they either learned to play nice or left for good. This didn't work out so well this time. No, not because they had the better gardeners. But they didn't need to. They had a much more powerful weapon in their arsenal: The law. First, they ensured that the laws would benefit them, and then they used it against us. And despite how despicable it may be, we have to admit that it is quite efficient to have others take care of your battles, especially when you know that you cannot win a conventional war. > And now we're sitting here in what's left of our once beautiful garden. The once mighty jungle has been tamed and civilized, what used to be interesting and a land for explorers is now divided into lots that you may buy instead of simply use. You can get there easier now... well, if you prefer using long winding roads to a direct route, but the long winding roads are necessary so you pass by all the billboards that block your view to what's really interesting. Of course you may not step anywhere, only where you're allowed to, and don't even think about taking anything, rest assured it's for sale, not free. > So we're sitting here now, at the edge of something we once knew as beautiful and free. We're looking at it and we wonder what we did wrong. Where did we fail? And I can only come up with one solution for when we try something like this again: Don't invite the masses in. Keep it to yourself. It's the only way how you can really keep it. And the only way you can do without a camo net over your herb garden.
purple_ducks 8y ago
> Despite what Tim Berners-Lee claims, the Web wasn't a single invention 1. Yes, we know that one man says that he invented it (grudging thanks to Tim), but he did so on the back of a thousand other technologies He got that right.. Wish the media would do the same
lioeters 8y ago
While it's a bit long and I don't agree with everything, the article raises important reminders for web development with empathy and accessibility. This part felt especially relevant: "[Progressive enhancement] won't work with something like React though, and I don’t cry about that. This is a distinct robust design pattern, which we feel is durable and doesn't lock us into a limited-life framework that will get replaced by something else in a year or two." (emphasis mine) I imagine this last line gets some people reacting emotionally. I've spent the last few years in React-land (in addition to a soon-to-be-legacy stack slowly transitioning), and benefited much from the paradigm shift. It has moved the web (and web dev) forward in many ways, especially conceptually. At the same time, I can't deny that it will eventually get replaced, just like the rise and fall of jQuery. That means we must keep in mind not to be locked-in, to emphasize the core concepts which will outlive any framework du jour. Progressive enhancement is certainly doable with server-rendered React, but it does seem like the recent trends have favored developer experience at the cost of user experience.
EastSmith 8y ago
Dear writer, I am forwarding this to my product lead, and going back to Jira.
CM30 8y ago
This is something I've wanted to mention for ages. A lot of modern web development seems to be about what's 'fun' for the developers rather than what works best for the company or user, and you can see it in the framework/tech obsession present in many companies and organisations. A lot of the time they don't need all React/Angular/Vue/Docker/Serverless/blockchain/whatever, they just need a simple CRUD system that lets them input content and have it shown to the user in plain HTML/CSS. But that's not 'fun', it doesn't get them respect on Twitter or at conferences (or on Hacker News) and makes it hard to hire programmers for, so hey, let's overengineer everything and pretend our blog is freaking Google. Still, over engineering sites and products because you want work to be 'fun' isn't exactly exclusive to web developers. Quite a few game designers have similar issues in that field, and I suspect there's a bit of a clash in ideals between creators and audiences overall. It's rare you find a creator of any kind who just wants to do the same thing over and over and works solely for the money, and that's the cause behind all these issues.
guscost 8y ago
This whole conversation baffles me. The web is a sloppily-evolved designed-by-committee sofa-bed, nobody will ever feel completely happy with it, and it shouldn't be any other way. Most of the time I work on "web applications", where the difficult part is managing the necessary complexity of the domain model and the user interfaces. JS and framework-happy architecture isn't perfect (not even close), but adding constraints like "the application must weigh less than a megabyte" or "the application must provide basic functions (?!) without JavaScript" turns what can be a fairly serious project into a clown-car pileup. There's a faction of web people who want web applications to compete feature-for-feature with native apps. I'm closer to that camp for historical reasons, but I also understand that compromise on application features is completely worth it if the benefit is an (even partially) "open" platform for applications to build on. But then there's this other faction of HTML purists who see the "true" web as necessarily document-based, declared with markup, typeset with CSS, and compatible with absolutely every computer system of the past 30 years. This makes perfect sense if you work for a magazine and see the web as a platform for open (and often static) content, and I'm sure some of them do understand the difficulty and the value of compromise, but I never hear that. So now it's 2018, the "beat native apps" camp and the "documents for all" camp talk past each other through the years and nothing really changes. Maybe some people are in both camps and suffering from cognitive dissonance, who knows. But there are good reasons why web applications don't do what Photoshop does, and good reasons why Photoshop doesn't even try to provide copy-and-pasteable URLs for every unique application state. There are good reasons why "serious" declarative application frameworks (like XAML) are a terrifying mess, and good reasons why building a CMS from scratch in C++ would be insane.
arkades 8y ago
The last time this went up, someone made a comment about disabilities being relatively rare. I wanted to add a point here: In the United States in 2015, 11 percent of noninstitutionalized adults reported having a disability (National Council on Disability (NCD). The Current State of Health Care for People with Disabilities). Disability in mobility and in cognition were most frequently reported (5 percent). Data from the 2009 to 2012 National Health Interview Survey found that 11.6 percent of United States adults 18 to 64 years of age reported a disability (defined as serious difficulty with hearing, vision, cognitive ability, or mobility [walking or climbing stairs]).(MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2014 May;63(18):407-13.) That makes disability more than 5x more common than being a natural blonde.

220 points by colinprince 8y ago

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NikolaeVarius 8y ago

I'm mildly annoyed that images won't load properly with JS disabled due to lazy-load.js not running.

lostgame 8y ago
You'd think she would've thought of that on such a post. :P EDIT: Isn't there also a way to pre-cache images with just CSS? o.o

lostgame 8y ago

This is a great article, even though the irony of the layout seeming to waste a lot of space/have a lot of whitespace/doesn't look/feel right on my mobile isn't lost on me, the content makes up for it. :)

chiefalchemist 8y ago

> We’re back to building sites that are not for everyone - huge, bloated sites, running fragile imperative code on the users local device. We have started to explicitly say "I think you should have this level of tech, processing power, and bandwidth before I think you're eligible to use my site". This isn't in and of itself the problem, per se. Sometimes a more powerful and robust UI / UX / application is necessary. The problem is when said "solution" is applied to __every__ need. The problem is, when screwdrivers are being used to pund nails. Much "like publish of perish" there's no (ego) glory in saying "Yeah. It's relatively lo-tech but that's the solution that best fit the business need." Rare is praise and/or hiring based on good analysis, appropriate tools and smart solutions. Nah. Size is all that matters. How people who can't do what you do it more important than doing the right thing(s).

taurath 8y ago
It’s a lot more about how fast we can get stuff done. Wordpress exists for a reason and lots of apps are build with redux - getting what you need done at a cheap cost, not bikeshedding new processes when the old works fine.
reaperducer 8y ago
We have started to explicitly say "I think you should have this level of tech, processing power, and bandwidth before I think you're eligible to use my site". I actually worked with a pair of developers who believed this wholeheartedly. It seemed to be part of some kind of design philosophy they picked up where it was the responsibility of developers to build complex web sites and apps in order to "further" technology and encourage people to upgrade for the good of... something. I'm not sure. They picked some baseline iPhone level (two generations removed from what was current, IIRC) and decided that anyone who wasn't "smart" enough to own that model, or better, shouldn't be allowed to use the product. Then when they were ready to deploy, it turned out that the product only worked on their phones, which happened to be the latest/greatest available at the time. So they built in a bunch of kludges and trimmed features to make it load on an older phone, and that was "good enough." Not surprisingly, the company went out of business.
- lostgame 8y ago
  I have seen this...so many times. I've been an iOS developer since the App Store became a thing 8 or whatever years ago, and the amount of people I've seen willing to only test applications on devices only 1-2 generations behind, if that, is shocking. What's more offensive, shocking, and actually confusing is that, yes, management is usually the one saying this kind of thing. The reason that confuses me, is that you'd think, I mean, if I was in a management position at a mobile-related startup, one of the first things I'd do is have someone on my team do some market research to provide statistics on the current state of iOS device and version usage, and buy a freaking heapload of test devices, in all the different resolutions and variants. Dismissing your users because they're not 'smart' enough to have a newer model is, as mentioned in the article, essentially blaming these people for the circumstances in their lives that leave them unable to, or is simply insulting their intelligence. I still use an iPhone 6S. Why? I need a headphone jack. I run an independent music label and rely on GarageBand on a multiple-a-day basis. Bluetooth audio's latency is too awful to be usable when playing instruments or mixing/EQ'ing tracks, and furthermore, I'm not about to replace my $300 studio-quality headphones for some shitty bluetooth alternative, or drag some tiny dongle around I'll need to adapt the headphones. Does this make me 'not smart'? I think the exact opposite. I couldn't use a new iPhone the way I have for the previous 6-8 generations before it. There are dozens of reasons why people prefer to keep older models of devices. My 2011 MacBook Pro is still my daily Logic Pro driver, and I even still do a bunch of iOS development on it, because, gasp, I was able to open it up and upgrade the RAM to 16GB, remove the original hard drive, put in a 512GB SSD, remove the optical drive, and replace it with a 2TB HDD...which, if I'd bought a 2017/2018 and felt like the 8 or 16GB that came with it wasn't enough, I might as well throw out the window for all it's upgradeability. Then let's talk about software - most of the people I know actively avoid software updates on their devices because they either don't know if it will hurt their device, or they simply actively like it the way it is already, and don't want to be forced into whatever changes the devs and managers felt like this time around. People like what works for them. And they don't like change. tl;dr - Highly intelligent people have highly intelligent reasons to stick with their older devices and software. Hipster managers who think they're 'too cool' to see this piss me right off.

falcolas 8y ago

This starts off a bit get-of-my-lawn, but is a fantastic article with some very important points. Do yourself the favor of finishing it.

ChrisSD 8y ago

I think it's true that many sites are over engineered for what they are. Does a site that's primarily for reading articles really need to be an SPA? Why can't your sign in fallback to being a simple form? Etc. Then again it can actually be pretty easy to over engineer nowadays. Once you have your node/npm environment set up with webpack and all the rest you can quickly iterate a new site based on an earlier project. And if you hear of something new and cool it's only an npm command and a few hooks away.

weegee101 8y ago
You're right, it is easy to over engineer sites these days. It boils down to tooling for SPAs vs traditional static sites. The tooling for making static sites, even the most modern tooling such as Hugo or Jekyll, simply pales in comparison to libraries such as React, Vue, or others. The author is absolutely right that developers are attracted to shiny new objects, and the interest of the greater community is focused on SPA libraries when we should be equally (or arguably, more) focused on static site generation libraries as well.
paulie_a 8y ago
An npm command that leads to dependency hell because jsland has to have a thousand packages. A complicated python codebase can be less than 20-50.
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toss1 8y ago
Aaaaaannnd right there's the problem -- easier for the one or few developers, harder for the thousands or millions of users. Where are the tools for making streamlined sites easier to build? What happened to the old contest for teh best site in 5kb [1]? We need those brought back -- seriously. [1] https://the5k.org/ https://the5k.org/
komali2 8y ago
What I've been thinking about ever since I learned about web brutalism is - how can I make simple, HTML focused websites, static? That is to say, not requiring a backend I build to generate the necessary HTML and serve it as a document to a given url? So index.html is easy, but is there a way to make it such that I can go to my website/articles/my-happy-day, and have that page be generated, rather than a separate handwritten my-happy-day.html file? I typically "deploy" simple shit by uploading it directly to my bluehost filesystem, or Amazon s3. The only thing I can think of is a precompile thing, and then uploading the build.

enlyth 8y ago

Very negative and condescending article in my view. Why would you spend time and money optimizing for a tiny percentage of users? Also they always underestimate the amount of power you gain by using frameworks like React and the amount of features and interactivity required when building modern web applications. I'm not going to spend weeks hand coding some progressive enhancement in vanilla JS so some angry blogger can view my stuff in a console based browser with no JS. It's like these people think that developer time is an infinite resource. Old woman yells at cloud indeed.

rlucas 8y ago
The article doesn't propose "optimizing" for users with some form of limitation (connectivity, device, personal disability). It proposes not excluding them by optimizing only for the maximal case. Your point about hand coding progressive enhancement is well taken. What we need are tooling and frameworks that make such an approach feasible. The author laments that the frameworks du jour tend to start with (and incentivize building) the resource-heavy, complex, fragile version of a site / app.
lostgame 8y ago
I think her point is that it's negative, dismissive, and ignorant of statistics to claim that we should ignore these things. She brought up some extremely valid and common real-life cases for this: • being in a foreign country • being at a place with a shitty wi-fi connection • that 30% of rural America is still dealing with 500kbps or lower internet Basically, the ignorance to say 'I can't be bothered to take the time to optimize my web site' is literally basically what she's calling people out on. She's, from what I can see, stating that especially in a large organization - (she uses the example of an airline ticket site), the statistics behind this seem significant enough that depending on your number of users, their locations, and their activities, you could be looking at a significant number of users who could simply just ignore your web site or services because you couldn't be arsed to try to optimize your web images, or simply make the site work without having to display them. (Certainly not text-in-images, at the very least!) I work as a senior iOS dev at one of the big banks in Canada on their iOS app. We won't stop supporting iOS 9 until that number falls under 2%. That still represents more than 10,000 active users for us. These 10k+ users rely on us for mobile banking, and we could lose them as customers if we don't support their devices, because some other bank will be happy enough to keep supporting it if we don't, and it just means more for clients for them. The author clearly gave another example of this in the anecdote she presented about the individual who could not even log in to the airline's website at the airport itself, and ended up having to schedule a flight with a different company. They lost at least one customer there, and who knows how many more, all because they can't be arsed to check to see how the page behaves on a crummy connection, and optimize it thusly. I remember living on a farm in rural Illinois, and the best internet we could get at the time was satellite. Which (or, worse, dial-up) is the only option for a lot of Americans, apparently. Satellite internet, in particular, causes these poorly-optimized web sites with hundreds of tiny JS files and images to take forever to load on this type of connection, because Satellite internet works by pinging the satellite for every connection, meaning downloading a large file can be fast, but opening Facebook can take up to 3-4 minutes. (My ex-partner who still lives on that farm confirmed this for me today.) In absolutely no way is this woman claiming 'developer time is an infinite resource.' In fact, I think she's saying 'dear developer, the web isn't about you.' It's about the users. Plan your development for these kinds of cases to start, and you won't be spending 'infinite resources' on it, because it was always considered.

d357r0y3r 8y ago

> But the cultural focus is on developer happiness, on developer fun and ramping up of code-related skillsets. "How does this benefit users?" has suddenly gone missing from our vocabulary. No, it hasn't. It's still 100% about how to benefit users for most teams. That is quite literally the only thing that matters and everything else is a means to an end. I'm not going to deny the fact that there are some shoddy websites out there. There are some sites that are using the latest and greatest JS stuff when really, they should just be using HTML and CSS. Fine. The majority of the work that gets talked about here, by software and tech startups, will not be effectively built using HTML/CSS or server-side rendering. Since we're on the topic of users, users have come to expect a certain level of interactivity. They expect that if you right click on a row, you get a drop-down menu and you can delete it. They expect that you can do inline editing of an item without being redirected elsewhere. They expect that you can create a new thing on the page without reloading and redirecting. Let's forget about that part, though. Most software features are, at the end of the day, experimental. We don't know exactly what is going to be a hit and what isn't. If new tools allow us to iterate at 2x or 5x or 10x the rate of old tools, this is a net positive for users. No one would denigrate a carpenter for using an electric screwdriver over a manual one. No one would complain that the carpenter only cares about their "carpenter experience". At the end of the day, the "user" wants their cabinets finished.

ebullientocelot 8y ago
I largely agree with the points you are making, however I think there's a fundamental difference in the carpenter analogy: regardless of the type of screwdriver used there is no material difference in the UX of the cabinet, whereas that does not hold for web development decisions.
forrestbaer 8y ago
Your correlation between iteration cost to net positive for users is completely false. It might be a net positive for developers but certainly not users. You sound like the kind of developer who has only ever worked with an electric screwdriver. Loading 2 megs of javascript so you don't have to redirect and open a dropdown is NOT a benefit to the user. Relevant: http://suckless.org/philosophy/ http://suckless.org/philosophy/

androidgirl 8y ago

I really like this article but I struggle with implementing it now. I've learned a lot of React recently for creating sites. I test all pages that can be static with javscript disabled, (I use gatsby or next for html ssr), but some parts can't be static, or worse there's still the "webpack inlines from hell" problem. I would LOVE to replace my javascript powered pages with a templating language, and offer feature parity. But using a template language like Jinja2 for building component-based sites just doesn't work as well, unless I'm missing some magical secret sauce. This is mostly for B2B web applications. I work on a lot of analytics dashboards that are pretty data dense. Even with react though, my sites never go over 400kb on load. Okay, essentially my question is: what templating language/server framework can replace react, jsx, and graphql for webapps? I really want something like that.

yorwba 8y ago
I'm not sure I understand your requirements, but couldn't you just use JSX as your templating language and render React server-side? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25777931/server-rendering-react-js-on-a-static-website https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25777931/server-renderin...

kobrad 8y ago

Excellent talk, and we need more of this. Look at downloading and image instead of installing something on a raspberry pi. Next thing I expect is needing docker to install a calculator.

crimsonalucard 8y ago

>It is this flirty declarative nature makes HTML so incredibly robust. Just look at this video. It shows me pulling chunks out of the Amazon homepage as I browse it, while the page continues to run. This is actually really really bad. HTML renderers should have been designed to immediately fail when incorrect. This allows developers to more easily write correct and robust code rather than making the browser be robust. If the web were designed this way, you'd have a world where only correct html is written. Also its not like we are not engineering a war machine here. Machines like the warthog are designed to keep functioning when components are destroyed. This is not necessary for html as we are not sending our html into a war zone. Sections of your html are not actively being removed/destroyed by users. The author later compares html to javascript. Seriously. Javascript is a whole different ballgame. Javascript is bad because there are many hidden states of failure that aren't apparent. In HTML there are only two states, failure or success. If HTML failed as soon as it's incorrect, you will know immediately. Nothing is hidden. In javascript, incorrect logic can lay buried until a specific use case is hit. That being said, he mentions stuff about the pyramid model for the web which is fine. I can agree with having javascript as the tip of that pyramid.

lostgame 8y ago
>> If the web were designed this way, you'd have a world where only correct html is written. You'd also potentially be looking at a web that is far more unstable and crash-prone if you essentially treated a browser like a compiler or the like.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  I believe the point was that if we had made stricter browsers, the web would be much more correct and standards-compliant.
- crimsonalucard 8y ago
  The creator of the html page will typically look at the website before he publishes it, so unlikely that someone will publish incorrect html code. It's not like html has branching logic so there's no hidden crashes, everything is explicit similar to the safety you get with type checking. javascript is actually bad for the same reasons. It tries to correct your mistakes by doing type coercion making a null + 1 + 'blah'= "null1blah"

lostctown 8y ago

Here's the real problem. The JS tools got really powerful and the majority of users now experience faster dev cycles and richer features. Now users cannot go back. If we started serving smaller sites with less js people would complain about all the little features they liked that don't exist anymore. A developer now has a choice: use the big framework where you can satisfy those now entitled users or give up some success and make a tiny site with limited use of js. I'm all for the free web but I know which choice I would make when running a for-profit company.

pnloyd 8y ago
Ya this kinda sumarizes the Crux of the problem pretty well. I'm getting a bit worn with seeing anti JavaScript what nots on HN. It's here to stay guys for better or worse (and will proceed to consume UI development _everywhere_)
UweSchmidt 8y ago
Has anyone tried? Gone back to a simpler interface, fewer "little features"? I think I would like that, and others would, too.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  Yes, I do that for my own websites. If it has hurt the popularity of the sites, it hasn't been so severe that I've noticed.
- asdff 8y ago
  HN seems to be doing fine

Konnstann 8y ago

I generally agree with the author's statements, but the analogies to cars and doorknobs to me were just inaccurate. There are a number of reasons why you want round doorknobs instead of levers, one of which is security, as levered doorknobs are trivial to turn from the outside of the door. Secondly, just because everyone has access to every website on the internet does not mean you need to build your website for everyone. If someone says their website is targeted at a specific group, they build it for that specific group. You wouldn't tell a formula 1 engineer to raise the suspension on the car he's building so it can clear speedbumps in the parking lot. Again, The core concepts of the article are common-sense, but the tone and specifics don't resonate with me.

SilasX 8y ago
>I generally agree with the author's statements, but the analogies to cars and doorknobs to me were just inaccurate. There are a number of reasons why you want round doorknobs instead of levers, one of which is security, as levered doorknobs are trivial to turn from the outside of the door. Wait, what? I can't find anything about door levers having this kind of security risk. This kind of sounds like voodoo security where "worse UI = better security, because fewer thieves know how to use it". >Secondly, just because everyone has access to every website on the internet does not mean you need to build your website for everyone. If someone says their website is targeted at a specific group, they build it for that specific group. You wouldn't tell a formula 1 engineer to raise the suspension on the car he's building so it can clear speedbumps in the parking lot. Sure, but most sites aren't narrowly targeting people who can see and who have the latest hardware as part of their core reason-for-existence. News sites certainly aren't, and yet their mobile and screenreader experience is cancer.
- Konnstann 8y ago
  >Wait, what? I can't find anything about door levers having this kind of security risk. I specifically remember this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnmcRTnTNC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnmcRTnTNC8 at around 18 minutes in he shows one of his employees(?) use a long bit of wire to pull the lever and open the door in a matter of seconds.

hawski 8y ago

Ha! That's in line with an idea I'm considering - a modern HTML-only browser. A bit like one of those terminal browsers, but with nice proportional fonts, images and other basic things. Customizable entirely up to likings of a user. A user agent, not a webdev agent. It could also support Gopher protocol. CSS got out of control, so sorry no more position:fixed bars that are more and more in fashion. Ech. But first I need to get back to work on a search engine that would _not_ index ad serving pages with possible option of filtering out JS serving pages.

PavlovsCat 8y ago
> Ech. But first I need to get back to work on a search engine that would _not_ index ad serving pages with possible option of filtering out JS serving pages. Please do, I would be all over that :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18708325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18708325 I already use duckduckgo and fall back to !g, I'd love to try an ad/bloat-filtering search engine first, and fall back to ddg and google from there. As for filtering JS, I guess the main point for me whether it uses JS to render anything in the first place, or just to enhance. E.g. even HN has some Javascript, but it's fully usable without.
51lver 8y ago
Build it on links. It supports advanced terminal functionality like graphics already.
iicc 8y ago
Dillo? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dillo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dillo

TagAsDelusion 8y ago

Wrong.

gedy 8y ago

And this server-side website takes 20 seconds to load. Imagine every interaction with a web app taking this long. At this point the web is documents and also an application platform. Conflating the two causes trouble - sure, simple documents don't need JS, but non-trivial webapps really benefit from dynamic UIs/data vs old-school form post interactions.

mnw21cam 8y ago
And if you disable Javascript, all the images are really blurry. This can't be for page loading speed, as they are all small images that would be not more than a few kB.

yorwba 8y ago

Previous discussion (8 months ago, 88 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16773398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16773398

SilasX 8y ago
That doesn't seem like a good reason for it to be marked as [dupe]...
- yellowapple 8y ago
  Indeed. Is there some other more active discussion somewhere?

nickdandakis 8y ago

This article makes the assumption that every decision you make as a web developer is unaffected by co-workers. I'm all for progressive enhancement. However, if the expectation is a web _application_ that has a certain level of interactivity designed for, with a real world deadline, and a targeted demographic of "people with supercomputers in their pockets", I can guarantee you'll make some compromises. Bringing up Springer Nature and the BBC as examples of the Web Built Right™ is short-sighted when they are web _sites_ that serve static content. Of course you should send HTML from the server that represents the entire content of the page, apply some CSS, and sprinkle in JS. And of course, there are a lot of developers out there that would reach for the latest trending JS library + framework combo to pull it off, and they'll implement it poorly. There's very little point in bashing "npm install exciting-tech", when I can npm install gatsby-cli, and do everything the article is crying out for in a "modern" stack. Oh, also, the BBC example? They use Node, and React, and server-side render React[0]. You can bet they're npm installing exciting-tech. However, the web is not just static sites anymore. People expect a lot more functionality, you work with people that design and promise a lot more interactivity, and there's a lot more people coding without enough experience to reach for the tech that is the most efficient solution to a problem. I don't think a condescending article like this is beneficial for our community. Maybe we should try educating (nicely?) on how to pick the right tech for the problem[1]. Maybe we should ditch "user" for "person" (or "surfers" lol), when talking about the consumers of our output. And finally, maybe we should have more empathy of the people that work with our trade and work together towards a better internet. [0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/47a96d23-ae04-444e-808f-678e6809765d http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/47a96d23-ae04-44... [1] http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

TeMPOraL 8y ago
I think the observation necessary for appreciating this article is that most sites that are built as SPAs these days aren't really web apps, they're still web pages. They're more similar to BBC and Springer Nature than to Google Sheets or LucidCharts. That's a property of the problem they're trying to solve. Building a web app where a web page would do shows total lack of interest about providing value to the user.

MentallyRetired 8y ago

Careful. This is our world. The rest of you just play in it.

joshstrange 8y ago

> people turning off JS (Yes people do this. Yes it's totally valid, and their right as a user). Fine, and they can go somewhere else. I'm sorry but I'm not about to consider this TINY percentage of users the same way I don't consider the TINY percentage of people accessing sites I work on from horribly outdated browsers. The next sentence applies to web APPS, not blogs/news sites/etc. People that say websites should gracefully fallback to non-JS web app when a user accesses the website with JS disabled are crazy. FULL STOP. PERIOD. You either end up dumbing down the entire experience for everyone OR maintaining 2 websites. Neither of which is financially sound for the vast majority of companies/developers given the percentage of people who don't use JS.

eponeponepon 8y ago
A similarly tiny percentage of your users are blind. Another tiny percentage are dyslexic. How many different tiny percentages can you justifiably invite to "go somewhere else"?
- mortivore 8y ago
  A lot. Many developers don't even develop with blind people in mind at all. There are standards for sites that want to cater to those people, but most sites don't follow those standards.
- d357r0y3r 8y ago
  For a business, at least in the United States, this is basically a financial projection problem. Unlike brick and mortar stores, there is no requirement to make web content accessible to handicapped people.
  - dotcode 8y ago
    >there is no requirement to make web content accessible to handicapped people. Yes there is: the Americans with Disabilities Act. Many private businesses in the States have been - and are currently being - litigated against under said act. The mandate of the ADA is to provide "full and equal enjoyment" of a public accommodation’s goods, services, facilities, and privileges. Places of public accommodation include, "place[s] of exhibition and entertainment", "places[s] of recreation", and "service establishments". The vast majority of websites are therefore "place[s] of public accommodation", are bound by the requirements of Section 508, and - since roughly this time last year - are required to meet WCAG 2.0 AA (https://www.access-board.gov/guidelines-and-standards/communications-and-it/about-the-ict-refresh/final-rule/i-executive-summary https://www.access-board.gov/guidelines-and-standards/commun...). In the States businesses are also required to meet the requirements of various human and civil rights laws enacted by states and cities. And if your company has an international presence, it's also covered under whatever legislation exists in those jurisdictions. Basically: hell yeah there are requirements to make web content accessible to disabled people. Almost whatever you do, wherever you do it, will be covered to some degree by legislation designed to prevent discrimination. Of course the existence of financial/technical incentives are good reasons for businesses to make sites accessible, regardless of any legal requirements.

throwaway_98554 8y ago

Dear old lady shouting at clouds, The web is not about me. But the websites I create are not for everyone. They are for my users. My users are professionals, on desktop, with a mouse and keyboard. Knowing who are my users allows me to do better design. I make the best experience for THEM. Not for you, nor for all your friends using different hardware. It doesn't mean I don't care about loading time or how things are displayed on the screen. It means I do so knowing in which environments it will happen. And yes, it might means you will be excluded.

saagarjha 8y ago
As the article mentions, what you’re really saying here is that “my website is not for poor people, or disabled people, or even people who are trying to kill some time before their bus arrives”. Is discriminating against these people ok with you?
- lostgame 8y ago
  >> My users are professionals, on desktop, with a mouse and keyboard. >> Knowing who are my users allows me to do better design. >> I do so knowing in which environments it will happen. And yes, it might means you will be excluded. Obviously the poster here is more than okay with this. They're explicitly stating it will happen, and it's part of the plan. The problem is when it's not part of the plan. Imagine the author is writing an internal web tool for a corporate enterprise environment. Imagine all of those computers and devices are standardized, and the software will only run on these devices on an intranet. The previous poster's point is valid here. We know the users, the users are professionals, we know who they are, and we know what environments we'll be deploying in. Therefore, of course, beyond accessibility, of course the poster wouldn't care about people trying to kill time before the bus.
  - IggleSniggle 8y ago
    Exactly this. I would even hazard that the majority of developers are working on things for intranets in a narrow corporate context where, if it can run on non-standard gear, that’s an added liability with no significant business benefit. Businesses are only moving away from their decade old Flash and “IE only” web apps because the marginal security risk combined with maintenance burden has begun to outweigh the costs of new development.

lostgame 8y ago

The '30% of rural Americans still not on broadband' point is, understatedly, one of the most important points of the article by far. It is so, so easy, to be living and working in big cities like Toronto (me), SF (a bunch of you), NY, Chicago, et cetera, and truly forget the context of the absolutely awful experience a lot of people have online outside of these urban epicentres. I remember living on a farm in rural Illinois (Marengo), and the best internet we could get at the time was satellite. Which (or, worse, dial-up) is the only option for a lot of Americans, apparently. Satellite internet, in particular, causes these poorly-optimized web sites with hundreds of tiny JS files and images to take forever to load on this type of connection, because Satellite internet works by pinging the satellite for every connection, meaning downloading a large file can be fast, but opening Facebook can take up to 3-4 minutes. (My ex-partner who still lives on that farm confirmed this for me today.) The author, then, brings up the next, most important point: 'Your website had better be amazing for it to justify that length of download time.' For those making the audacious claim here that this isn't considering the dev's time put into it, I'd argue immediately back that the devs need to be considering the actual users. People living in the country aren't 'edge cases'. They're usually extremely hardworking people who simply don't have access to the luxury of broadband like we do. Just because we don't necessarily see these people, or travel to other countries with shitty connections, doesn't mean they don't exist, doesn't mean they're not actually a potentially significant number of people, and doesn't mean we should not be arsed to trim 1MB-2MB off our bloated image-and-video-wieldy sites, or even that it would necessarily take a lot of time in most instances. I agree. The web isn't about us. It's about who uses it.

mortivore 8y ago
With 30% having bad internet you'd think there would be a push in those communities to get better internet. Then again, the lack of internet usability may create an image of the internet as not being worth it. If you have no access to the better things on the internet, then you may think that there is nothing of real value on it so you won't push for better internet.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  "the lack of internet usability may create an image of the internet as not being worth it." People having slower internet speeds is a serious problem with the web (because of modern web design), not with most of the other things the internet is used for. Personally, as websites have become more dangerous and less usable, I've been finding the web to be a smaller and smaller space as the years go by. For the first time in my life, I can see that it's entirely possible that I will largely stop using the web. However, that in no way means I'll stop using the internet.

revskill 8y ago

Most of projects are shitty. Because devs are failed at reusing abstractions, which lead to increasing complexity as project grows. Reusing abstraction into useful libraries is what devs should do, not features implementation.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jeklj 8y ago

I don’t know how you look at sites today festooned with crappy ads, modals that ask for your email, and pleas to download their stupid app; and decide the problem is JavaScript or developers.

PaulHoule 8y ago

(1) That's a clickbait headline (2) I think "management" deserves some criticism here too. I think the average developer doesn't want to stick 15 different third-party trackers in a page, but they don't get much empathy when they bring it up with the "business" people.

rocky1138 8y ago

Clickbait title, but I'll support anything that encourages empathy toward users.

phponpcp 8y ago

Sheesh the format of this article is dreadful.

amelius 8y ago

Regarding the invention of the internet, they should have mentioned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

JohnFen 8y ago

Hear, hear!

techopoly 8y ago

Why do developers always get blamed for the state of everything? Developers love creating efficient, optimized solutions. Developer happiness is rooted in a feeling of fulfillment that comes from creating a good product. There are many parties involved in designing the web, and developers aren't typically viewed as the subject-matter experts on how the UI of the web should work -- just on how to implement what's already been decided.

lexicality 8y ago
Do they? I know several developers that love crafting incredibly intricate and clever solutions that show off how good they are at functional programming/algorithm design etc. One place I worked at had an API with an "unfixable" 120ms delay on every request that persisted until someone ripped out the beautiful ORM system and replaced it with 3 SQL queries.
- techopoly 8y ago
  You're absolutely right, many developers seem only to want to pigeon-hole a particular use case into the newest framework or technology they want to learn. I guess it depends on the developer.
JohnFen 8y ago
Your point is well-taken. I think it depends on who you count as a "developer". In my view, while too many actual developers (as in those who write code) are very keen on using tools and techniques in an inappropriate way that results in a worse user experience, they aren't the biggest offenders. I think the UX and marketing people tend to be the biggest offenders. People outside the industry don't know or care what the division of work actually is, though. To them, the group of people who collectively create the sites are "the developers". That isn't wrong, it's just not precise.
scarface74 8y ago
Why do developers always get blamed for the state of everything? Developers love creating efficient, optimized solutions. Developer happiness is rooted in a feeling of fulfillment that comes from creating a good product. You give way too much credit to the motivation of developers. Developers are just like anyone else working for a living....our primary motivation is to make money.

bobajeff 8y ago

Seeing the responses to this post just further adds to my conviction that the web is dead. You can't rely on websites being futureproof or adaptable to different situations. You can't rely on content being accessable to everyone. Nor can you count on content being available forever anymore. Sites are blocked or throttled by ISPs and governments. Sites are expected to censore they're content. Even search results are being censored. You can't trust in even the most basic assumption of privacy or anonymity. Everything you do is being tracked and sold. So many social networks require your phone number. So many sites need you to login or need your email. It's all one big get rich quick market.

vinceguidry 8y ago

The end result of this line of thinking is software guilds. Professionals being more accountable to their guild than to their boss. And the guild deciding who can and can't be a programmer. It gets worse. In order to deliver on those promises, the guild now has to decide what framework to use, which UI elements are worthwhile. We're politicizing our jobs, and the only way to solve political problems is with government. Enter the web programming guild.

brianjcohen 8y ago
The flip side of this is: currently, most engineering fields require you to have some kind of professional certification (eg. a PE) from an industry "guild", eg. the ASCE. Software engineers don't really have a functional equivalent. We demand that professional engineers build our bridges, but we'll pretty much let anyone build our software. At some point, changing that may be the responsible thing to do.
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  I'll be the first one to get my guild card, but I really hope we think this thing through.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

potatoman2 8y ago

"orangefuckface@whitehouse.gov" - that's really not necessary now is it?

PavlovsCat 8y ago

from http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5025417&cid=46736661 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5025417&cid=46736661 > The internet was our garden. And a beautiful garden it was. Sure, some fed agency created it, but let's face it, they used a fraction of the lot and we didn't really care for their supersecret bases they had littered about. There was so much empty space in between! And that lot we cultivated. We built a few nice trees and in their shadows we relaxed, we planted beautiful roses and yes, a few fruits and vegetables because, hey, it's always better if you grow it yourself. And ... heh, well, yeah, we had a few corners here or there where we grew that "special weed", ya know, but nobody really gave a shit, it was just us. > We were pretty good gardeners. Well, you pretty much had to be in those days, if you didn't know your way 'round with rake and shovel, you didn't really get much out of it. Still, we were quite happy with it. So happy actually that we thought we should share that. I mean, there's so many people out there who don't even know just how great the garden is! And we invited them in. They looked around and, well, most of them didn't quite "get" it. Sure, it was nice, here or there, well, if you're into botany, that is, but it's kinda hard to get around and find your way through the jungle, and using a machete wherever you go, phew, hard work! But a few of them stayed. They didn't quite know what they do, but we handed them a few saplings and some seed and some actually managed to learn a thing or two about gardening. Sure, of course a few smartasses tried to steal our stuff, but we usually didn't have much of a problem to whack them with our shovel and get our stuff back. And, heh, yeah, we, too, went into each other's yards and played some pranks on each other, painted their roses black and the like, but it was all in good fun! And hey, they sure liked our ... ya know, "special stuff". They still had no idea how to grow it, but they were quite willing to help us share everything with everyone, as long as they got their share, too. And, well, why not, pass the blunt! > That was about when the corporations noticed that, hey, where did all the people go? They took a look at the garden and they went batshit crazy. I mean, sure, we knew that it's great, but we never saw anyone go so insane about it. They saw it as the next big thing to make money with, and we laughed. Money? With this? Dude, you can't make money out of a system based on freedom and sharing! Everything in here is free. Yeah, in both ways. > True. You can't make money in such a system. Unless of course you change the rules. And changing the rules, they could. > I can't help but think that this must be how the natives of the US felt after they were "discovered". Because we had to face that there are suddenly areas in what we considered OUR garden where we couldn't go anymore. Worse, something that was the staple of our culture, going to a guy who did something great and asking him for a sapling of his wonderful tree. Became anathema. Instead of you SHOULD imitate and build on top of mine, the new creed was you MUST NOT. This rule, of course, did only surface after they themselves took from our gardens what they could possible rake together quickly. You might understand our utter disbelief and of course outrage when we noticed that turnabout is not fair game. > Well, we have had our share of trolls and nuisances before. Long before we already had to deal with people who trampled through our gardens or were a general pest. Our solution was simple, we took our superior gardening skills and whacked them from here to next week with our shovels 'til they either learned to play nice or left for good. This didn't work out so well this time. No, not because they had the better gardeners. But they didn't need to. They had a much more powerful weapon in their arsenal: The law. First, they ensured that the laws would benefit them, and then they used it against us. And despite how despicable it may be, we have to admit that it is quite efficient to have others take care of your battles, especially when you know that you cannot win a conventional war. > And now we're sitting here in what's left of our once beautiful garden. The once mighty jungle has been tamed and civilized, what used to be interesting and a land for explorers is now divided into lots that you may buy instead of simply use. You can get there easier now... well, if you prefer using long winding roads to a direct route, but the long winding roads are necessary so you pass by all the billboards that block your view to what's really interesting. Of course you may not step anywhere, only where you're allowed to, and don't even think about taking anything, rest assured it's for sale, not free. > So we're sitting here now, at the edge of something we once knew as beautiful and free. We're looking at it and we wonder what we did wrong. Where did we fail? And I can only come up with one solution for when we try something like this again: Don't invite the masses in. Keep it to yourself. It's the only way how you can really keep it. And the only way you can do without a camo net over your herb garden.

purple_ducks 8y ago

> Despite what Tim Berners-Lee claims, the Web wasn't a single invention 1. Yes, we know that one man says that he invented it (grudging thanks to Tim), but he did so on the back of a thousand other technologies He got that right.. Wish the media would do the same

lioeters 8y ago

While it's a bit long and I don't agree with everything, the article raises important reminders for web development with empathy and accessibility. This part felt especially relevant: "[Progressive enhancement] won't work with something like React though, and I don’t cry about that. This is a distinct robust design pattern, which we feel is durable and doesn't lock us into a limited-life framework that will get replaced by something else in a year or two." (emphasis mine) I imagine this last line gets some people reacting emotionally. I've spent the last few years in React-land (in addition to a soon-to-be-legacy stack slowly transitioning), and benefited much from the paradigm shift. It has moved the web (and web dev) forward in many ways, especially conceptually. At the same time, I can't deny that it will eventually get replaced, just like the rise and fall of jQuery. That means we must keep in mind not to be locked-in, to emphasize the core concepts which will outlive any framework du jour. Progressive enhancement is certainly doable with server-rendered React, but it does seem like the recent trends have favored developer experience at the cost of user experience.

EastSmith 8y ago

Dear writer, I am forwarding this to my product lead, and going back to Jira.

CM30 8y ago

This is something I've wanted to mention for ages. A lot of modern web development seems to be about what's 'fun' for the developers rather than what works best for the company or user, and you can see it in the framework/tech obsession present in many companies and organisations. A lot of the time they don't need all React/Angular/Vue/Docker/Serverless/blockchain/whatever, they just need a simple CRUD system that lets them input content and have it shown to the user in plain HTML/CSS. But that's not 'fun', it doesn't get them respect on Twitter or at conferences (or on Hacker News) and makes it hard to hire programmers for, so hey, let's overengineer everything and pretend our blog is freaking Google. Still, over engineering sites and products because you want work to be 'fun' isn't exactly exclusive to web developers. Quite a few game designers have similar issues in that field, and I suspect there's a bit of a clash in ideals between creators and audiences overall. It's rare you find a creator of any kind who just wants to do the same thing over and over and works solely for the money, and that's the cause behind all these issues.

guscost 8y ago

This whole conversation baffles me. The web is a sloppily-evolved designed-by-committee sofa-bed, nobody will ever feel completely happy with it, and it shouldn't be any other way. Most of the time I work on "web applications", where the difficult part is managing the necessary complexity of the domain model and the user interfaces. JS and framework-happy architecture isn't perfect (not even close), but adding constraints like "the application must weigh less than a megabyte" or "the application must provide basic functions (?!) without JavaScript" turns what can be a fairly serious project into a clown-car pileup. There's a faction of web people who want web applications to compete feature-for-feature with native apps. I'm closer to that camp for historical reasons, but I also understand that compromise on application features is completely worth it if the benefit is an (even partially) "open" platform for applications to build on. But then there's this other faction of HTML purists who see the "true" web as necessarily document-based, declared with markup, typeset with CSS, and compatible with absolutely every computer system of the past 30 years. This makes perfect sense if you work for a magazine and see the web as a platform for open (and often static) content, and I'm sure some of them do understand the difficulty and the value of compromise, but I never hear that. So now it's 2018, the "beat native apps" camp and the "documents for all" camp talk past each other through the years and nothing really changes. Maybe some people are in both camps and suffering from cognitive dissonance, who knows. But there are good reasons why web applications don't do what Photoshop does, and good reasons why Photoshop doesn't even try to provide copy-and-pasteable URLs for every unique application state. There are good reasons why "serious" declarative application frameworks (like XAML) are a terrifying mess, and good reasons why building a CMS from scratch in C++ would be insane.

arkades 8y ago

The last time this went up, someone made a comment about disabilities being relatively rare. I wanted to add a point here: In the United States in 2015, 11 percent of noninstitutionalized adults reported having a disability (National Council on Disability (NCD). The Current State of Health Care for People with Disabilities). Disability in mobility and in cognition were most frequently reported (5 percent). Data from the 2009 to 2012 National Health Interview Survey found that 11.6 percent of United States adults 18 to 64 years of age reported a disability (defined as serious difficulty with hearing, vision, cognitive ability, or mobility [walking or climbing stairs]).(MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2014 May;63(18):407-13.) That makes disability more than 5x more common than being a natural blonde.