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Phrases like "the content is what is important" come to mind. The whole project of graphic design has the same kind of abyssal qualities as other arts with a t

Phrases like "the content is what is important" come to mind. The whole project of graphic design has the same kind of abyssal qualities as other arts with a technical element - you can always go deeper, more specific. And in a competitive market it's really tempting to sell yourself on one-upping the techniques of others. With a computer in the mix, you can just add specification without end and it will soak everything up like a sponge. But each layer of that you add gets a little farther away from "creative medium" and a little more towards "bells and whistles production". The essence of it comes from the content, and this is true of everything on the Web too, despite all the interference on and around the platform. So it's more like a case of modern development being "you have to describe the medium you want to work within" because the base layers are this morass of vocabulary that isn't conceptually coherent.

riskable 5y ago
> "the content is what is important" The only problem there is that users have come to expect certain UI elements on any given web page and those things are far beyond "content". For example, let's say you want to allow comments on articles. Now you have opened an enormous can of worms by requiring logins, storing of passwords (hashes! with salts! using modern algorithms!), permissions management, password reset mechanisms, collection of emails (for password reset), and personal data. You can handle all that the old fashioned way and implement it yourself or you can look into the great wild of the Internet to see what solutions already exist. That's where the rabbit hole begins! Now you've got a back-end OAuth infrastructure supporting your website. You're using a login module that you were able to "easily" install via npm. You used an oauth2 module in your back end and everything seems to work fine except now your JS code is getting a little crazy with all the "time saving" npm stuff you're using so you start to look at "bundlers" like WebPack... Welcome to hell, my friend. This is modern "minimal" web development. Oh but perhaps you could use a static site generator instead! Surely someone has created the perfect Markdown/ReStructuredText tool for generating your perfect web page that has all the features you need! There happens to be one that's close. It does everything you need except that one little thing. So you reach into the npm bucket... Then you end up having to deal with bundlers again. It never ends!
- 8bitsrule 5y ago
  >users have come to expect certain UI elements on any given web page and those things are far beyond "content". Usually I visit pages to see if the content is worth my time. If the 'UI elements' somehow contribute to that content, great. That's rare. Most pages I hit are hiding poor content in swathes of katchi-vatchi. Do I really care if the headline slides down that big photo? Am I really going to scan those glaring sidebars? Once again I sigh and mouse-up to Firefox's 'Reader view' to cut through all that bandwidth-wasting crap.
  - megameter 5y ago
    Right. There's an element cleaving both ways of the developer being obligated to do complex and disempowering things for users for various reasons, and then users rejecting their disempowerment and trying to work around it. And I think if there's a future here it belongs to targeted protocols that decouple the use case from the UI, and filters like Reader view that reformat content to the medium the user wants to work in.

riskable 5y ago

> "the content is what is important" The only problem there is that users have come to expect certain UI elements on any given web page and those things are far beyond "content". For example, let's say you want to allow comments on articles. Now you have opened an enormous can of worms by requiring logins, storing of passwords (hashes! with salts! using modern algorithms!), permissions management, password reset mechanisms, collection of emails (for password reset), and personal data. You can handle all that the old fashioned way and implement it yourself or you can look into the great wild of the Internet to see what solutions already exist. That's where the rabbit hole begins! Now you've got a back-end OAuth infrastructure supporting your website. You're using a login module that you were able to "easily" install via npm. You used an oauth2 module in your back end and everything seems to work fine except now your JS code is getting a little crazy with all the "time saving" npm stuff you're using so you start to look at "bundlers" like WebPack... Welcome to hell, my friend. This is modern "minimal" web development. Oh but perhaps you could use a static site generator instead! Surely someone has created the perfect Markdown/ReStructuredText tool for generating your perfect web page that has all the features you need! There happens to be one that's close. It does everything you need except that one little thing. So you reach into the npm bucket... Then you end up having to deal with bundlers again. It never ends!

8bitsrule 5y ago
>users have come to expect certain UI elements on any given web page and those things are far beyond "content". Usually I visit pages to see if the content is worth my time. If the 'UI elements' somehow contribute to that content, great. That's rare. Most pages I hit are hiding poor content in swathes of katchi-vatchi. Do I really care if the headline slides down that big photo? Am I really going to scan those glaring sidebars? Once again I sigh and mouse-up to Firefox's 'Reader view' to cut through all that bandwidth-wasting crap.
- megameter 5y ago
  Right. There's an element cleaving both ways of the developer being obligated to do complex and disempowering things for users for various reasons, and then users rejecting their disempowerment and trying to work around it. And I think if there's a future here it belongs to targeted protocols that decouple the use case from the UI, and filters like Reader view that reformat content to the medium the user wants to work in.