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I understand the toolchain juuust fine. I have been making HTTP and browser applications for two decades. The technology landscape is absolutely ridiculous if

I understand the toolchain juuust fine. I have been making HTTP and browser applications for two decades. The technology landscape is absolutely ridiculous if you want to do things for the web. Each browser has its own standard, chrome is the new IE6, the industry is hacking together assembly languages to port from other technologies, preprocessors, minification, state and what have you not. The web today had been tweaked beyond recognition and while the industry is doing so, most of us forgot the beautiful platform that resides underneath. I love HTTP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, I really do, but I really believe there is a huge tendency of amateurish approach towards making the web a better and more standardized place. Back in the day, we had much less choice, and that made working with the web a lot more joyful.

s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
Seems like you're just looking through the nostalgia filter. We're in a lot better place than we were a decade, let alone 2, decades ago.
- hombre_fatal 8y ago
  Also, seems like they're complaining that client development is hard. And then comparing it to their familiar back-end stack. .NET is far from simple.
stickfigure 8y ago
chrome is the new IE6 I've heard this repeated a few times, and it's utter nonsense. Unless you're deliberately going off into the weeds, a full featured SPA works the same on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. I don't even bother testing on multiple platforms anymore; they just work. I did web development in the IE6 era (and before). This is nothing like that.
- danielovichdk 8y ago
  I do believe the live standards from whatwg is a good example of some vendors making it possible to implement features before other vendors do. It creates a gap, it creates a constant drive forward which again seems, IMO, to sometimes be about vendor competition instead of the greater good of the web.
pault 8y ago
I don't doubt your experience, but when people say "toolchain" in the context of front end development, it's usually a reference to the dev environment and build toolchain, not the HTML/CSS/JS technologies themselves. I've been focusing primarily on front end development since 1999, and while I also hate the current complexity in setting up a complex JS client, it allows us to scale far beyond what was possible back in the jQuery days, and it has made my life much easier. It becomes a problem when people suggest that you set up babel, webpack and hot module reloading for a site with a couple of forms.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  > It becomes a problem when people suggest that you set up babel, webpack and hot module reloading for a site with a couple of forms. I've found that parcel-bundler "just works" for stuff like that without needing extra configuration, including the Babel part.

s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago

Seems like you're just looking through the nostalgia filter. We're in a lot better place than we were a decade, let alone 2, decades ago.

hombre_fatal 8y ago
Also, seems like they're complaining that client development is hard. And then comparing it to their familiar back-end stack. .NET is far from simple.

stickfigure 8y ago

chrome is the new IE6 I've heard this repeated a few times, and it's utter nonsense. Unless you're deliberately going off into the weeds, a full featured SPA works the same on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. I don't even bother testing on multiple platforms anymore; they just work. I did web development in the IE6 era (and before). This is nothing like that.

danielovichdk 8y ago
I do believe the live standards from whatwg is a good example of some vendors making it possible to implement features before other vendors do. It creates a gap, it creates a constant drive forward which again seems, IMO, to sometimes be about vendor competition instead of the greater good of the web.

pault 8y ago

I don't doubt your experience, but when people say "toolchain" in the context of front end development, it's usually a reference to the dev environment and build toolchain, not the HTML/CSS/JS technologies themselves. I've been focusing primarily on front end development since 1999, and while I also hate the current complexity in setting up a complex JS client, it allows us to scale far beyond what was possible back in the jQuery days, and it has made my life much easier. It becomes a problem when people suggest that you set up babel, webpack and hot module reloading for a site with a couple of forms.

crooked-v 8y ago
> It becomes a problem when people suggest that you set up babel, webpack and hot module reloading for a site with a couple of forms. I've found that parcel-bundler "just works" for stuff like that without needing extra configuration, including the Babel part.