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How has the web been subverted? By whom? And which notable, useful old tecnologies have been discarded? The capabilities of the web have only been expanded. Y
by arcturus17 6y ago
How has the web been subverted? By whom? And which notable, useful old tecnologies have been discarded?
The capabilities of the web have only been expanded.
You can still build websites in Django and Rails and myriad other "old-school" technologies. What are you missing? Perl and CGI?
To the point of this article, you can perfectly build a website with self-hosted fonts, or with default system fonts. Is this what "lock-in" and discarding good ole' tech looks to you?
It's tiring to see this bitterly pessimistic, conspiracy-laden rhetoric on HN. With the added bonus that as of late it's being radicalized ("subverted", "enslaved"), as some sibling commenters are pointing out. How ironic that the people accusing everyone else of being "enslaved" are themselves carried away by the trends of the time.
But more importantly, this rhetoric is profoundly demeaning.
To web developers and technologists, because it assumes that they are largely incompetent or malicious, and that the commenter and his clique of retro-futurists know much better and are morally more pure than all tech professionals nowadays.
To regular people at large, because it paints them as drones and slaves to greater powers, with no agency whatsoever, instead of analyzing why they may prefer Facebook over old-school forums, and empathizing with them and their problems.
But above all, it's demeaning to the authors of such comments themselves, because it paints them as dejected, bitter fanatics who have lost sight of the forest for the trees.
The web is still full of opportunity - artistic, technical, commercial and otherwise.
If you don't think so, maybe it's time you embrace a low-tech lifestyle and devote yourself to gardening? Everyone will be better off for it.
- metalforever 6y agoThis comment touches on some points which don't make sense from an engineering perspective. Different tools for different use cases. You can't throw the baby out with the bathwater and choose SPAs for every single application. They still perform poorly with SEO and people with disabilities that need a screen reader. It's not black and white (good or bad). Also, using Django and Rails are hardly the same as using Perl and CGI.
- arcturus17 6y agoWhat doesn’t make sense from an engineering perspective? I did not say you should build everything as an SPA. I said you still can build in SSR - not once did I say what you should or shouldn’t do. But I agree - some sites are better off as SSR, static sites or what have you. What in my comment made you think that I think otherwise? I also do not think that Django or Rails are remotely similar to CGI sites - what makes you remark that they are hardly the same, when my comment doesn’t suggest the opposite?
- robertoandred 6y agoNothing about SPAs hurts screen readers.
- tatersolid 6y agoThen DOM changing above or close to current position does trip up many accessibility technologies. Most SPA frameworks load all page components async so the page DOM fills in out-of-order. This is a problem even without accessibility tech, the page content bounces all over the place during load by default in many SPAs.