5 ms·

I'm not, and never was, a "front-end guy". I've noticed more and more quirks (bugs?) in UIs where something is off screen, or unclickable, or suffers extremely

I'm not, and never was, a "front-end guy". I've noticed more and more quirks (bugs?) in UIs where something is off screen, or unclickable, or suffers extremely unhelpful placement that prevents or significantly impedes my use of a web site/app. Rotate phone/tablet, change font size, hide URL bar, mental note to try it on a desktop or laptop "later". This feels like the front-end version of "it works in dev".

bobthepanda 3y ago
If you’ve worked in front-end dev for a while you can be aware of all the issues. The problem, generally, is that frontend dev is taught poorly if it’s taught at all, and the barrier to entry is so low that there’s an Eternal September problem.
- calderwoodra 3y ago
  I'd think that eventually we'd have a large enough cohort of folks that know web dev well since the barrier is so low, but I think most people try to get out of frontend development asap.
  - zlg_codes 3y ago
    I'm trying to learn some JS in my spare time, if only to show in interviews that I can do it, but I understand why one wouldn't want to. I'm just doing bare JS for now, but even with a framework, there is so much to manage in the DOM to make consistent interfaces, and CSS3 is so much more complex (but also convenient, in some ways!), putting together good interfaces is legitimately hard. Responsiveness is the big hurdle in creating a well-behaving app, from my perspective. I think I could've learned a GUI toolkit and had something working in the time it's taken me to pick up building two JS apps. The barrier to entry may be low, but that's only because the feedback loop for webdev is super tight. Great for prototyping, experimentation, and getting more newbies in the field. But it's crazy that anything productive gets built on JS and DOM. The backend, with databases and storage and caches, service management and sysadmin, that's where the fun is!
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      JS and DOM are popular mostly because they exist everywhere, and there's a large ecosystem of support. In practice, given (until recently) difficulty in hiring, places found it easier to have one JS team than to have one native team for every possible platform (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, maybe even Linux). And it also does not help that each native platform can have wildly divergent frameworks and practices.
    - thrashh 3y ago
      Web dev frontend has a thousand quirks but has a billion more hours of human hours development time spent on it. CSS is annoying but way better than trying to jiggle random attributes and subclassing stock components to do something basic like right align a label. You'll notice that a lot of GUI toolkits have already adopted something like CSS (Qt Style Sheets, JavaFX CSS, etc.). Yet they will never become as good, just because there are much fewer people working on it.
      - zlg_codes 3y ago
        It's taken me some time to digest the angle of your comment. Maybe my dig at CSS3's complexity was taken as a dig against CSS itself? I've been practicing webdev since 1999 or so; I understand how useful CSS is and still remember the dark times of inline style attributes. :) Making something on the Web is a bit strange due to needing to set up 3 different technologies, and line them up just so, and pray a future browser update doesn't mess up some logical assumption you made along the way. It appears CSS classes are used somewhat like UI 'states', in a JS app. It's taken some time to adjust to using more logically meaningful class names instead of structurally meaningful that I used with regular non-JS webdev. Toggling a class somewhere sometimes requires doing other things in the UI, too. I've found lots of tiny little UI bugs as I develop and learn more about how things need to work in an event-based system. As a result, I find I do not like this way of building things. Sure, it's cross-platform, because the browser-makers do all the heavy lifting. But Tcl/Tk is cross-platform. Allegro and wxWidgets and Qt are, too. Tkinter is a single `import` away. Each has its own challenges that get added on as a result of not relying on a multi-gigabyte-per-instance virtual machine, but software is all about trade-offs is it not? Lesser used things aren't changed as often, for example. You can rely on them to not change so quickly. Compared to Mozilla or Google, who are competing for highest software version number and have a new release every 6 weeks.
  - jonny_eh 3y ago
    I dunno, I love it, quirks and all. The ability to make and deploy new UIs quickly is unmatched elsewhere. I also may be weird in that JS/TS is my favourite programming language.
    - calderwoodra 3y ago
      I'm in the same camp, I'm always 10x more proud of my frontend work if for no other reason than it's closer to the users. Once you learn a framework and build up a few tools, you can move insanely quickly.
bityard 3y ago
I have this shaky hypothesis where the majority of UX devs today (not just web devs) grew up consuming content on smart phones, ipads, and small laptop screens. Their default way of interacting with technology is one app or web page at a time, all in maximized windows taking up the whole screen, and switching between between full-screen apps to multi-task. Perhaps this pattern carries over into their adult work, where they design sites and apps that look great when taking up the whole screen of a typical PC or tablet, but outright fail when exposed to a typical "windowed" browser width. My normal browser width is about 1300 pixels and I see so many web sites and apps these days that can't tolerate what I consider a very reasonable browser width that this is the only explanation I can come up with.
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  Good points! The unfortunate side effect of having 4k and 8k screens is that 1080p is still common. I could understand why they'd assume nobody leaves a browser window covering only a quarter of their screen, but at the same time, both major browsers have a Responsive Mode where you can test screen resolutions, orientations, and tap events. There are devices with resolutions under 800x600 still accessing the Web. Every developer has to place where their own minimum threshold of consideration is. I personally aim for those old-school resolutions as the minimum, and may move upwards to something like 720p if it's a bit more complex. My screen itself is 1080p, so if it looks good at full screen, it will probably look decent on 4k as well as long as I'm using scaling units.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Your visitors and paying customers access your site on mobile. Mobile is the majority. If you don't design for mobile you lose business. It has nothing to do with the UX devs. If I notice 80% of my customers come from Japan, you better believe I will make everything available in Japanese. The same with mobile. Most people do not use computers. Most people who use computers only use them for work in specific applications. Most people who have a computer at home haven't been able to use it in years, because every time they try to boot it, Windows Update takes up all the system resources and bandwidth.

bobthepanda 3y ago

If you’ve worked in front-end dev for a while you can be aware of all the issues. The problem, generally, is that frontend dev is taught poorly if it’s taught at all, and the barrier to entry is so low that there’s an Eternal September problem.

calderwoodra 3y ago
I'd think that eventually we'd have a large enough cohort of folks that know web dev well since the barrier is so low, but I think most people try to get out of frontend development asap.
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  I'm trying to learn some JS in my spare time, if only to show in interviews that I can do it, but I understand why one wouldn't want to. I'm just doing bare JS for now, but even with a framework, there is so much to manage in the DOM to make consistent interfaces, and CSS3 is so much more complex (but also convenient, in some ways!), putting together good interfaces is legitimately hard. Responsiveness is the big hurdle in creating a well-behaving app, from my perspective. I think I could've learned a GUI toolkit and had something working in the time it's taken me to pick up building two JS apps. The barrier to entry may be low, but that's only because the feedback loop for webdev is super tight. Great for prototyping, experimentation, and getting more newbies in the field. But it's crazy that anything productive gets built on JS and DOM. The backend, with databases and storage and caches, service management and sysadmin, that's where the fun is!
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    JS and DOM are popular mostly because they exist everywhere, and there's a large ecosystem of support. In practice, given (until recently) difficulty in hiring, places found it easier to have one JS team than to have one native team for every possible platform (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, maybe even Linux). And it also does not help that each native platform can have wildly divergent frameworks and practices.
  - thrashh 3y ago
    Web dev frontend has a thousand quirks but has a billion more hours of human hours development time spent on it. CSS is annoying but way better than trying to jiggle random attributes and subclassing stock components to do something basic like right align a label. You'll notice that a lot of GUI toolkits have already adopted something like CSS (Qt Style Sheets, JavaFX CSS, etc.). Yet they will never become as good, just because there are much fewer people working on it.
    - zlg_codes 3y ago
      It's taken me some time to digest the angle of your comment. Maybe my dig at CSS3's complexity was taken as a dig against CSS itself? I've been practicing webdev since 1999 or so; I understand how useful CSS is and still remember the dark times of inline style attributes. :) Making something on the Web is a bit strange due to needing to set up 3 different technologies, and line them up just so, and pray a future browser update doesn't mess up some logical assumption you made along the way. It appears CSS classes are used somewhat like UI 'states', in a JS app. It's taken some time to adjust to using more logically meaningful class names instead of structurally meaningful that I used with regular non-JS webdev. Toggling a class somewhere sometimes requires doing other things in the UI, too. I've found lots of tiny little UI bugs as I develop and learn more about how things need to work in an event-based system. As a result, I find I do not like this way of building things. Sure, it's cross-platform, because the browser-makers do all the heavy lifting. But Tcl/Tk is cross-platform. Allegro and wxWidgets and Qt are, too. Tkinter is a single `import` away. Each has its own challenges that get added on as a result of not relying on a multi-gigabyte-per-instance virtual machine, but software is all about trade-offs is it not? Lesser used things aren't changed as often, for example. You can rely on them to not change so quickly. Compared to Mozilla or Google, who are competing for highest software version number and have a new release every 6 weeks.
- jonny_eh 3y ago
  I dunno, I love it, quirks and all. The ability to make and deploy new UIs quickly is unmatched elsewhere. I also may be weird in that JS/TS is my favourite programming language.
  - calderwoodra 3y ago
    I'm in the same camp, I'm always 10x more proud of my frontend work if for no other reason than it's closer to the users. Once you learn a framework and build up a few tools, you can move insanely quickly.

bityard 3y ago

I have this shaky hypothesis where the majority of UX devs today (not just web devs) grew up consuming content on smart phones, ipads, and small laptop screens. Their default way of interacting with technology is one app or web page at a time, all in maximized windows taking up the whole screen, and switching between between full-screen apps to multi-task. Perhaps this pattern carries over into their adult work, where they design sites and apps that look great when taking up the whole screen of a typical PC or tablet, but outright fail when exposed to a typical "windowed" browser width. My normal browser width is about 1300 pixels and I see so many web sites and apps these days that can't tolerate what I consider a very reasonable browser width that this is the only explanation I can come up with.

zlg_codes 3y ago
Good points! The unfortunate side effect of having 4k and 8k screens is that 1080p is still common. I could understand why they'd assume nobody leaves a browser window covering only a quarter of their screen, but at the same time, both major browsers have a Responsive Mode where you can test screen resolutions, orientations, and tap events. There are devices with resolutions under 800x600 still accessing the Web. Every developer has to place where their own minimum threshold of consideration is. I personally aim for those old-school resolutions as the minimum, and may move upwards to something like 720p if it's a bit more complex. My screen itself is 1080p, so if it looks good at full screen, it will probably look decent on 4k as well as long as I'm using scaling units.
carlosjobim 3y ago
Your visitors and paying customers access your site on mobile. Mobile is the majority. If you don't design for mobile you lose business. It has nothing to do with the UX devs. If I notice 80% of my customers come from Japan, you better believe I will make everything available in Japanese. The same with mobile. Most people do not use computers. Most people who use computers only use them for work in specific applications. Most people who have a computer at home haven't been able to use it in years, because every time they try to boot it, Windows Update takes up all the system resources and bandwidth.