11 ms·

The second paragraph is just simply plain wrong throughout. You should actually learn the web stack and look at how things work in 2023 instead of reading other

by o1y32 3y ago

The second paragraph is just simply plain wrong throughout. You should actually learn the web stack and look at how things work in 2023 instead of reading other people's rants or secondhand opinions to form your own opinions. CSS is not hard. Performance talking is meaningless without benchmarks. No, you can definitely build a decent small website with a few or even no package dependencies. Maybe do a reality check first. > It's time to move away from HTML/CSS/JS Just meaningless empty talks over and over on HN. People who don't understand web stacks ranting about web without knowing the complexity and nuances. What alternatives do you have? Are they going to provide enough features and customization as the status quo? Will this new thing achieve at least 80% of development speed? Many companies adopted web stack for their application because of the flexibility and time to deliver. They make products, instead of being a purist

tjoff 3y ago
Alternatives we have? Regular good old html without or with minimal amount of javascript. Absurdly fast compared to todays site. Many orders of magnitude less power. Faster to develop and better user experience too. But I also think we should think about alternatives. Things like gemini are interesting but will have a hard time go mainstream. But I do believe we need something completely new because the user hostile nature of the web today is so devastatingly toxic that I see no hope for the future.
- pferde 3y ago
  The best thing would be to split webpages and webapps. Webpages can keep using HTML with some minimalistic, gracefully degrading javascript, while webapps need something better than hacks upon hacks upon hacks upon ... on top of technology that was meant to display static interlinked documents.
  - elementalest 3y ago
    Isn't that whats happening to a certain extent with wasm?
    - solarkraft 3y ago
      I don't see how
      - refulgentis 3y ago
        [flagged]
- ttfkam 3y ago
  > Regular good old html without or with minimal amount of javascript. You just described Svelte. All the JS minimalism and speed without sacrificing the power.
  - emptysongglass 3y ago
    (Not a web developer just curious): does Astro also offer this?
    - ttfkam 3y ago
      I know next to nothing about Astro.
    - ttfkam 3y ago
      I looked into this and here are my thoughts: Astro is a static site generator, which is different from a full dynamic component library and rendering/routing framework. Looks like a stripped-down version of SvelteKit with prerender = true. https://kit.svelte.dev/docs/page-options#prerender https://kit.svelte.dev/docs/page-options#prerender I wonder if Astro will remain a simple static site generator. If it tries to add dynamism (and complexity), I think it will lose some of its luster. But if all anyone needs from it is a static site generator, it looks very clean. A lot of the functionality and minimalism leads me to believe it was inspired by Svelte and other recent web tools. That said, the complete lack of JavaScript in the output seems to me like a stylistic—even ideological—choice rather than an established use case. Still, it's easier to make a simple solution elegant than a complex one. Astro fits into its intentionally small niche very well.
- LeFantome 3y ago
  It depends on what you mean by user hostile. Gemini is cool but probably just repeating the pattern. If companies and users wanted that, HTML use would have gone a different way. The truth is that both consumers and producers of even “simple”, “static” content want a lot more than these kinds of solutions offer. We have web fonts, animated gradients, SVG logos, responsive layouts, and the like because people want them. Choosing another tech that lacks them will only result in them all getting added back again.
  - tjoff 3y ago
    I really, really, don't think the consumers care about that at all. They were never asked and they have no choice in it.
    - akarlsten 3y ago
      Yeah, that's why absolutely nobody bought color TVs back when those first became available.. /s People care about things looking nice. In particular, people who pay others to create websites also obviously want their stuff to stand out, look nicer, and "pop" more than the competition - and the things the person you replied to listed is part of that.
      - tjoff 3y ago
        And then they put on full page banners and autoplay videos? Bullshit Todays pages do not "pop", they abuse.
        akarlsten 3y ago
        That's not the fault of the underlying technology, if anything it will be EASIER for predatory adTech to display such things when the entire UI is rendered in an opaque <canvas>-equivalent. How do I get uBlock to block specific elements (like a video player) when there is no longer a discrete video element to block?
        3y ago
- solarkraft 3y ago
  > I do believe we need something completely new because the user hostile nature of the web today is so devastatingly toxic that I see no hope for the future. Capitalism ate the HTML web and it's native to expect that it wouldn't eat the gemini web given there's a profit to be made. The thing that makes an alternative technology non-hostile is simply that it's too unpopular to make a profit from making it suck.
  - tjoff 3y ago
    I know Microsoft tries their hardest to change this we barely see this on the destkop.
smarkov 3y ago
> You should actually learn the web stack and look at how things work in 2023 instead of reading other people's rants or secondhand opinions to form your own opinions. I didn't base my response on anybody else's words. I've been around the web since the good old days where jQuery was the norm and everything had a phpBB forum. It's coming from my own experience and observations. > Will this new thing achieve at least 80% of development speed? You're so concerned with development speed, yet you're rewriting the same thing in a new framework every 2 years.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  OPs right, and it's sort of immature to pretend its all broken and say wildly false things like "you're rewriting the same thing in a new framework every 2 years." Who is? That sounds like a management problem, not a...I don't even know, language problem? Package manager problem?
  - ori_b 3y ago
    Stack maturity problem?
- ttfkam 3y ago
  I've been around the web since document.write() and <font color=red> were cutting edge. You're wrong. There is no way, shape, or form where 2008 web technology is comparable to today. (IE6!!!) Not in styling. Not in consistency. Not in performance. Not in accessibility. Not in security. And certainly not in management of complex sites. A cursory look at caniuse.com should disabuse you of any notion of stagnation or lack of capability. Folks rewrite "every two years" because it gets better so quickly. Svelte/Solid/Qwik are clearly steps forward from React. Were you advocating for sticking with older stuff simply because you don't like change? Or did you think C, Unix, et al technologies were born fully formed as they exist today with no evolutionary steps (and missteps) in between?
  - nirvdrum 3y ago
    I think the charitable interpretation is there are a whole class of web sites/applications (news sites, e-commerce, etc.) that haven't appreciably changed in the last 15 years. Yeah, there's been some incremental improvement, but the core experience is the same. However, the versions today are generally resource hogs. It's not rare for me to leave a browser tab open and find it grows to > 2GB RAM. I had one hit 28 GB and it would have kept going if I hadn't killed it. One thing I miss on the M1 is the fan kicking on so I know when a browser tab has run away. I think the OP has a point. We've been building a massively complex ecosystem on a very shaky foundation. The web has indeed advanced, but most of the time it feels like duct taping something onto this monster of a creation. Between backwards compatibility and competing browser vendor concerns, it's hard to push meaningful change through. So many security (especially supply chain) and dependency issues in JS would go away if there were a reasonable standard library. But, there isn't, so we're doomed a large graph of inter-related dependencies that break regularly. The constant churn in frameworks is mostly related to novel ways to work around limitations in the web platform and bridging behavioral differences across browsers. It's more than just churn in frameworks though. It's depressing how many person-years have been spent on build systems and bundlers or CJS vs ES6. Participating in the open source ecosystem means needing to be familiar with all of it, so it's not enough to pick one and run with it. Prior to flexbox, people struggled to center content with CSS; it was bad for layout. There's a ton of old CSS out there, much of it accomplishing the same thing in different ways, often with vendor-specific options. You still run into this if you have to style HTML email. Given the difficulty in mapping CSS back to its usages, it's incredibly challenging to refactor. It requires familiarity with the entire product and a lot of guess work to intent since comments don't exist. Moreover, there have been massive changes in "best practices". React and Tailwind violate the previous principles of unobstructive JS and semantic naming that were the prevailing practices not too long ago. My cynical take is a lot of that is driven by consultants looking to stand out as thought leaders. Regardless, it adds to the complexity of what you need to know if you do have to work with older (often other people's) code. I'm fairly confident that if we had today's use cases in mind when designing the foundational web technologies we'd have a very different platform to work with. It almost certainly would be more efficient, less error-prone, and likely more secure. It'd be nice if we could take a step back and revisit things. A clean break would be painful, but could work. Developers are already building web apps that only work on Chrome, so much as it pains me to say, having to get all the vendors on board isn't entirely necessary.
lvass 3y ago
>What alternatives do you have? Gemini for pages and if you really need an app, wasm and webgl/webgpu. HTML/CSS/JS can definitely be replaced by better, already existing things, but browsers will still need to understand those for many years going forward, even if everyone suddenly stopped developing with them.
- FireInsight 3y ago
  WebGPU/GL can't replace HTML on the web, even in webapps, because it has zero accessibility or semantics
  - lvass 3y ago
    Webapps don't really have semantics. Accessibility is the toolkit's job, leaving that to the web platform invariably generates half baked results in an app.
kitkat_new 3y ago
> CSS is not hard. CSS is more difficult than C++
Y_Y 3y ago
The tone of this post really rubbed me the wrong way. I know nobody reads the guidelines, and that this post violates them even more, but I really like the civilised interaction norm here and when otherwise earnest and substantive replies come in form that appears to me combative and unempathetic then it's quite disappointing.

by o1y32 3y ago

tjoff 3y ago

Alternatives we have? Regular good old html without or with minimal amount of javascript. Absurdly fast compared to todays site. Many orders of magnitude less power. Faster to develop and better user experience too. But I also think we should think about alternatives. Things like gemini are interesting but will have a hard time go mainstream. But I do believe we need something completely new because the user hostile nature of the web today is so devastatingly toxic that I see no hope for the future.

pferde 3y ago
The best thing would be to split webpages and webapps. Webpages can keep using HTML with some minimalistic, gracefully degrading javascript, while webapps need something better than hacks upon hacks upon hacks upon ... on top of technology that was meant to display static interlinked documents.
- elementalest 3y ago
  Isn't that whats happening to a certain extent with wasm?
  - solarkraft 3y ago
    I don't see how
    - refulgentis 3y ago
      [flagged]
ttfkam 3y ago
> Regular good old html without or with minimal amount of javascript. You just described Svelte. All the JS minimalism and speed without sacrificing the power.
- emptysongglass 3y ago
  (Not a web developer just curious): does Astro also offer this?
  - ttfkam 3y ago
    I know next to nothing about Astro.
  - ttfkam 3y ago
    I looked into this and here are my thoughts: Astro is a static site generator, which is different from a full dynamic component library and rendering/routing framework. Looks like a stripped-down version of SvelteKit with prerender = true. https://kit.svelte.dev/docs/page-options#prerender https://kit.svelte.dev/docs/page-options#prerender I wonder if Astro will remain a simple static site generator. If it tries to add dynamism (and complexity), I think it will lose some of its luster. But if all anyone needs from it is a static site generator, it looks very clean. A lot of the functionality and minimalism leads me to believe it was inspired by Svelte and other recent web tools. That said, the complete lack of JavaScript in the output seems to me like a stylistic—even ideological—choice rather than an established use case. Still, it's easier to make a simple solution elegant than a complex one. Astro fits into its intentionally small niche very well.
LeFantome 3y ago
It depends on what you mean by user hostile. Gemini is cool but probably just repeating the pattern. If companies and users wanted that, HTML use would have gone a different way. The truth is that both consumers and producers of even “simple”, “static” content want a lot more than these kinds of solutions offer. We have web fonts, animated gradients, SVG logos, responsive layouts, and the like because people want them. Choosing another tech that lacks them will only result in them all getting added back again.
- tjoff 3y ago
  I really, really, don't think the consumers care about that at all. They were never asked and they have no choice in it.
  - akarlsten 3y ago
    Yeah, that's why absolutely nobody bought color TVs back when those first became available.. /s People care about things looking nice. In particular, people who pay others to create websites also obviously want their stuff to stand out, look nicer, and "pop" more than the competition - and the things the person you replied to listed is part of that.
    - tjoff 3y ago
      And then they put on full page banners and autoplay videos? Bullshit Todays pages do not "pop", they abuse.
      - akarlsten 3y ago
        That's not the fault of the underlying technology, if anything it will be EASIER for predatory adTech to display such things when the entire UI is rendered in an opaque <canvas>-equivalent. How do I get uBlock to block specific elements (like a video player) when there is no longer a discrete video element to block?
        3y ago
solarkraft 3y ago
> I do believe we need something completely new because the user hostile nature of the web today is so devastatingly toxic that I see no hope for the future. Capitalism ate the HTML web and it's native to expect that it wouldn't eat the gemini web given there's a profit to be made. The thing that makes an alternative technology non-hostile is simply that it's too unpopular to make a profit from making it suck.
- tjoff 3y ago
  I know Microsoft tries their hardest to change this we barely see this on the destkop.

smarkov 3y ago

> You should actually learn the web stack and look at how things work in 2023 instead of reading other people's rants or secondhand opinions to form your own opinions. I didn't base my response on anybody else's words. I've been around the web since the good old days where jQuery was the norm and everything had a phpBB forum. It's coming from my own experience and observations. > Will this new thing achieve at least 80% of development speed? You're so concerned with development speed, yet you're rewriting the same thing in a new framework every 2 years.

refulgentis 3y ago
OPs right, and it's sort of immature to pretend its all broken and say wildly false things like "you're rewriting the same thing in a new framework every 2 years." Who is? That sounds like a management problem, not a...I don't even know, language problem? Package manager problem?
- ori_b 3y ago
  Stack maturity problem?
ttfkam 3y ago
I've been around the web since document.write() and <font color=red> were cutting edge. You're wrong. There is no way, shape, or form where 2008 web technology is comparable to today. (IE6!!!) Not in styling. Not in consistency. Not in performance. Not in accessibility. Not in security. And certainly not in management of complex sites. A cursory look at caniuse.com should disabuse you of any notion of stagnation or lack of capability. Folks rewrite "every two years" because it gets better so quickly. Svelte/Solid/Qwik are clearly steps forward from React. Were you advocating for sticking with older stuff simply because you don't like change? Or did you think C, Unix, et al technologies were born fully formed as they exist today with no evolutionary steps (and missteps) in between?
- nirvdrum 3y ago
  I think the charitable interpretation is there are a whole class of web sites/applications (news sites, e-commerce, etc.) that haven't appreciably changed in the last 15 years. Yeah, there's been some incremental improvement, but the core experience is the same. However, the versions today are generally resource hogs. It's not rare for me to leave a browser tab open and find it grows to > 2GB RAM. I had one hit 28 GB and it would have kept going if I hadn't killed it. One thing I miss on the M1 is the fan kicking on so I know when a browser tab has run away. I think the OP has a point. We've been building a massively complex ecosystem on a very shaky foundation. The web has indeed advanced, but most of the time it feels like duct taping something onto this monster of a creation. Between backwards compatibility and competing browser vendor concerns, it's hard to push meaningful change through. So many security (especially supply chain) and dependency issues in JS would go away if there were a reasonable standard library. But, there isn't, so we're doomed a large graph of inter-related dependencies that break regularly. The constant churn in frameworks is mostly related to novel ways to work around limitations in the web platform and bridging behavioral differences across browsers. It's more than just churn in frameworks though. It's depressing how many person-years have been spent on build systems and bundlers or CJS vs ES6. Participating in the open source ecosystem means needing to be familiar with all of it, so it's not enough to pick one and run with it. Prior to flexbox, people struggled to center content with CSS; it was bad for layout. There's a ton of old CSS out there, much of it accomplishing the same thing in different ways, often with vendor-specific options. You still run into this if you have to style HTML email. Given the difficulty in mapping CSS back to its usages, it's incredibly challenging to refactor. It requires familiarity with the entire product and a lot of guess work to intent since comments don't exist. Moreover, there have been massive changes in "best practices". React and Tailwind violate the previous principles of unobstructive JS and semantic naming that were the prevailing practices not too long ago. My cynical take is a lot of that is driven by consultants looking to stand out as thought leaders. Regardless, it adds to the complexity of what you need to know if you do have to work with older (often other people's) code. I'm fairly confident that if we had today's use cases in mind when designing the foundational web technologies we'd have a very different platform to work with. It almost certainly would be more efficient, less error-prone, and likely more secure. It'd be nice if we could take a step back and revisit things. A clean break would be painful, but could work. Developers are already building web apps that only work on Chrome, so much as it pains me to say, having to get all the vendors on board isn't entirely necessary.

lvass 3y ago

>What alternatives do you have? Gemini for pages and if you really need an app, wasm and webgl/webgpu. HTML/CSS/JS can definitely be replaced by better, already existing things, but browsers will still need to understand those for many years going forward, even if everyone suddenly stopped developing with them.

FireInsight 3y ago
WebGPU/GL can't replace HTML on the web, even in webapps, because it has zero accessibility or semantics
- lvass 3y ago
  Webapps don't really have semantics. Accessibility is the toolkit's job, leaving that to the web platform invariably generates half baked results in an app.

kitkat_new 3y ago

> CSS is not hard. CSS is more difficult than C++

Y_Y 3y ago

The tone of this post really rubbed me the wrong way. I know nobody reads the guidelines, and that this post violates them even more, but I really like the civilised interaction norm here and when otherwise earnest and substantive replies come in form that appears to me combative and unempathetic then it's quite disappointing.