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I'm more of an ops and backend guy, but I used to do a lot of web development in the early days of the web - assembling HTML, a sprinkling of javascript, hand-r

I'm more of an ops and backend guy, but I used to do a lot of web development in the early days of the web - assembling HTML, a sprinkling of javascript, hand-rolled CSS and embedded styles. In a certain way it was very simple, but in another it was horribly complicated. Sure, the pages we built were simple compared to today, but the tools we had were extremely crude and building a large website required some pretty clever things to stay maintainable. After I started doing more backend stuff, I lost touch with the evolution of Javascript and its various frameworks and I believed everything had become very complex. Recently, however, for fun I've been tinking with TypeScript and Vue and I have to say, it all seems way easier than how we did it back in the day. CSS seems far more reliable, HTML now has sane ways to lay things out, Typescript/Javascript has evolved wonderfully, and these modern frameworks that isolate components from each other and bundle code, style and layout together are almost a pleasure to use. Sure, there are some concepts you have to learn, and there's so much magic happening behind the scenes it's terrifying. But I'm building stuff I would have spent days on in a matter of hours now and I have no idea what I'm doing. What I'm noticing now though is that now that frontend development has become a lot more about coding and a lot less about knowing arcana, frontend coders seem to be going through growing pains that are a lot like backend coders have already gone through. For example, it's funny to me to see discussions about how to handle components needing to access shared data. Should you pass the down down through the component hierarchy or have a single global data object that components can interact with, and I'm thinking, next stop, a dependency injection framework. I'm not sure I'm actually right about that, since I've only just played around a little bit. I'd be interested if others would agree with that assessment.

tomwheeler 4y ago
This is my experience as well and I agree with your point. 25 years ago, I had to know which parts of HTML, JavaScript, or CSS did or didn't work properly in different versions of Netscape, Internet Explorer, and a few other browsers. This also varied by platform. Internet Explorer 4.x varied significantly between the 16-bit version on Windows 3.11, the 32-bit version on Windows 95/98, and the surprisingly decent version they released for the Mac. "Graceful degradation" was the goal on my team, so it wasn't so much about building functionality with JavaScript as it was about using it to make things more convenient when possible, without breaking things otherwise. For example, we would use client-side validation to save a round-trip to the server, but server-side validation would ultimately catch the problems if a client had JavaScript disabled. Keeping those validation rules in sync was a pain, because the server-side code was written in a different language from the client-side code. I do think that frontend development is more complicated than it needs to be these days, but understanding the evolution, I can certainly see why it reached this point.

tomwheeler 4y ago

This is my experience as well and I agree with your point. 25 years ago, I had to know which parts of HTML, JavaScript, or CSS did or didn't work properly in different versions of Netscape, Internet Explorer, and a few other browsers. This also varied by platform. Internet Explorer 4.x varied significantly between the 16-bit version on Windows 3.11, the 32-bit version on Windows 95/98, and the surprisingly decent version they released for the Mac. "Graceful degradation" was the goal on my team, so it wasn't so much about building functionality with JavaScript as it was about using it to make things more convenient when possible, without breaking things otherwise. For example, we would use client-side validation to save a round-trip to the server, but server-side validation would ultimately catch the problems if a client had JavaScript disabled. Keeping those validation rules in sync was a pain, because the server-side code was written in a different language from the client-side code. I do think that frontend development is more complicated than it needs to be these days, but understanding the evolution, I can certainly see why it reached this point.