4 ms·

> Back in the 90s it was hacky, but the extent of those hacks were small enough that even hobbyists could memorise those edge cases. You're either misrememberi

by imiric 3y ago

> Back in the 90s it was hacky, but the extent of those hacks were small enough that even hobbyists could memorise those edge cases. You're either misremembering, or have some thick rose-tinted glasses on. The late 90s were times of the Wild West Web. Every browser had custom behaviour and rendered pages differently. JavaScript and CSS were still new, and it took years for the implementations to be standardized. Websites had "Best viewed in Netscape" or "Built for IE" badges. Java applets, ActiveX, Flash, and a bunch of other technologies surfaced to make early versions of web "apps" actually possible. Even as late as 2005, projects like jQuery were needed to make web development easier. I'd say that it wasn't until the late aughts, well after "web 2.0", that web development didn't feel hacky. By then, though, the JS ecosystem exploded, and frontend frameworks took off. So I get the sentiment that modern web development is difficult, bloated and buggy, but the good news is that the web is fully mature now, and there are plenty of projects that make it possible to build simple and robust web sites. Web developers are spoiled with choice, so a hard task is simply selecting the right technologies to use. Unfortunately, sometimes this is out of our hands, or we inherit decade-old codebases that make maintenance a nightmare. But it's never been easier to write plain HTML/CSS/JS that will work across browsers, and deploy it as a static site that works reliably at massive scale. If you need more features, then complexity can creep in, but it is possible to minimize failure points with good engineering.

from-nibly 3y ago
Agreed. The thing that has changed about the web is the expectations have increased. There is no way that people could make the websites users expect today with only technology from the 90s.
- civilitty 3y ago
  The expectations of apps have skyrocketed too which is why everyone is using Electron to cope. If GUI development were still as easy as the drag and drop builders in Delphi 7 and VB6 with a bunch of static 800x600 monitors and double-click to edit component code-behind, we’d be shoehorning fewer apps into HTML and making more desktop apps. I remember how big of a pain in the ass Windows distribution (alone) was in the 2000s with entire businesses like InstallShield built around it. Tack compatibility testing on top of that and a desktop app for a single OS because a massive effort. With the web you could just upload PHP and off to the race. That slowly evolved into what we had today via jquery and electron and friends but what won was distribution and ease of development, despite all the handwringing people do about frontend. The grass isn’t greener on the other side and hasn’t been for decades. It’s not even remotely competitive anymore. My favorite example is GoldenLayout: it takes me less than a few hours to read the docs and implement a full blown tabbed and split screen interface using a third party library and combine it with any framework I want like React, Svelte, or just vanilla JS. Each desktop framework have their own solutions to the problem usually in the form of commercial components but even in the best case, they take lots more time to wire together.
  - hnlmorg 3y ago
    I was writing resizeable desktop applications in the 90s and it was easy then too. Differing screen resolutions is not a recent thing. The reason for Electron's popularity is because: 1. web developers are cheaper and easier to hire than people with desktop software development experience 2. Electron is cross platform Point 2 is a compelling reason. But it's not like other cross platform toolkits haven't existed. They've just been left to languish because of point 1. If companies only hire web developers then of course everyone is going to invest time into writing Electron apps and banging on about the benefits of web applications. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. I say this with experience having watched the tides turn, first hand, as a software developer.
    - civilitty 3y ago
      I was there too with a Sony GDM-FW900 monitor with 2300x1400 resolution and my experience was very negative. Both as a user and as a developer (though I was just a kid getting started in ‘99). Any software that wasn’t made by a major company was a crapshoot and Delphi layout was brittle for my own apps. Anything that got deployed to university computers with their bulk purchased monitors was mostly fine except for the deployment process. There are more web developers because it was a lot easier, even before npm existed and frontend frameworks went out of control. That’d didn’t happen in a vacuum - Electron was really late on the scene as far as frontend tech goes. It was originally made to support an IDE and not regular business apps and still won.
      - hnlmorg 3y ago
        > I was there too with a Sony GDM-FW900 monitor I’m talking about the early to mid 90s of web development and you reply with a monitor released around 2000. That’s a completely different era. > with 2300x1400 resolution and my experience was very negative. That’s more an issue with OSs not doing scaling back then than it is a problem with desktop software. You’d still have the same issue today if you run a super high resolution with zero scaling. > There are more web developers because it was a lot easier It’s has a lower barrier for entry but I wouldn’t call it easier. > even before […] frontend frameworks went out of control. So you’re basically agreeing with me then. The current state of affairs is out of control. > Electron was really late on the scene as far as frontend tech goes. It was originally made to support an IDE and not regular business apps and still won. Its origins doesn’t disprove my point. Lots of things start out as one thing and evolve into something else. That isn’t unique to the web nor Electron.
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  > There is no way that people could make the websites users expect today with only technology from the 90s. That's my point though. The web should never have been bastardised into making applications. We should have seen the desires of web2.0 and built an entirely new software stack purpose built for online applications. It wasn't fit for applications then and it still isn't now. It's just we keep trying to convince ourselves it is because we're too locked into the web now to ever move past it.
hnlmorg 3y ago
> You're either misremembering, or have some thick rose-tinted glasses on. > The late 90s were times of the Wild West Web. Or we are talking about different eras. I'm on about early 90s. > Every browser had custom behaviour and rendered pages differently. They did. But there was less of spec to have to concern yourself with. The biggest day to day differences was around frames (which was a pain in the arse) and tables (which was easy to work around). > JavaScript and CSS were still new, and it took years for the implementations to be standardized. You didn't need Javascript most of the time and CSS incompatibilities were easy to remember (I'm talking about cognitive overhead here) > Even as late as 2005, projects like jQuery were needed to make web development easier. That's in the region of 10 years after when I'm talking about. A completely different era. By that point the web had already turned into the shitshow it is now. > I'd say that it wasn't until the late aughts, well after "web 2.0", that web development didn't feel hacky. I couldn't disagree more. By that point people had Stockholm syndromed themselves into believing web technologies were actually good. But it wasn't. > So I get the sentiment that modern web development is difficult, bloated and buggy Its not a sentiment. It's a fact > the good news is that the web is fully mature now, No its not. We're just Stockholm syndromed into thinking its mature. But half the technologies we use are constantly churning. That's not the definition of mature. > Web developers are spoiled with choice, so a hard task is simply selecting the right technologies to use. The hard part is finding something that will still be around in 5 years time. > or we inherit decade-old codebases that make maintenance a nightmare. I've worked on plenty of decade-old codebases and I'd never rank web development in there precisely because of the aforementioned churn. Web tech goes out of date so quickly that it never gets to live past a decade...never mind multiple decades. It's simply not a mature platform to write software on despite what you claim. > But it's never been easier to write plain HTML/CSS/JS that will work across browser Who writes plain HTML and JS? There's so much bloat required to get anything to look modern that nobody writes plain web sites any longer (In fact I did for one of my open source projects and people hated it and rewrote it in Vue). It was much easier to write plain HTML et al in the 90s. In fact that was exactly how web development back then was done. > and deploy it as a static site that works reliably at massive scale That's literally how sites were originally written. It's not a new invention ;) The web was intended to be a static collection of documents. What we've since done is tried to turn it into an application framework. And that's what it sucks at. > If you need more features, then complexity can creep in, but it is possible to minimize failure points with good engineering. Sure, but again this isn't a new invention. This was the case right from the inception of the web. It's just gotten a hell of a lot harder to do good engineering for the web.

by imiric 3y ago

from-nibly 3y ago

Agreed. The thing that has changed about the web is the expectations have increased. There is no way that people could make the websites users expect today with only technology from the 90s.

civilitty 3y ago
The expectations of apps have skyrocketed too which is why everyone is using Electron to cope. If GUI development were still as easy as the drag and drop builders in Delphi 7 and VB6 with a bunch of static 800x600 monitors and double-click to edit component code-behind, we’d be shoehorning fewer apps into HTML and making more desktop apps. I remember how big of a pain in the ass Windows distribution (alone) was in the 2000s with entire businesses like InstallShield built around it. Tack compatibility testing on top of that and a desktop app for a single OS because a massive effort. With the web you could just upload PHP and off to the race. That slowly evolved into what we had today via jquery and electron and friends but what won was distribution and ease of development, despite all the handwringing people do about frontend. The grass isn’t greener on the other side and hasn’t been for decades. It’s not even remotely competitive anymore. My favorite example is GoldenLayout: it takes me less than a few hours to read the docs and implement a full blown tabbed and split screen interface using a third party library and combine it with any framework I want like React, Svelte, or just vanilla JS. Each desktop framework have their own solutions to the problem usually in the form of commercial components but even in the best case, they take lots more time to wire together.
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  I was writing resizeable desktop applications in the 90s and it was easy then too. Differing screen resolutions is not a recent thing. The reason for Electron's popularity is because: 1. web developers are cheaper and easier to hire than people with desktop software development experience 2. Electron is cross platform Point 2 is a compelling reason. But it's not like other cross platform toolkits haven't existed. They've just been left to languish because of point 1. If companies only hire web developers then of course everyone is going to invest time into writing Electron apps and banging on about the benefits of web applications. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. I say this with experience having watched the tides turn, first hand, as a software developer.
  - civilitty 3y ago
    I was there too with a Sony GDM-FW900 monitor with 2300x1400 resolution and my experience was very negative. Both as a user and as a developer (though I was just a kid getting started in ‘99). Any software that wasn’t made by a major company was a crapshoot and Delphi layout was brittle for my own apps. Anything that got deployed to university computers with their bulk purchased monitors was mostly fine except for the deployment process. There are more web developers because it was a lot easier, even before npm existed and frontend frameworks went out of control. That’d didn’t happen in a vacuum - Electron was really late on the scene as far as frontend tech goes. It was originally made to support an IDE and not regular business apps and still won.
    - hnlmorg 3y ago
      > I was there too with a Sony GDM-FW900 monitor I’m talking about the early to mid 90s of web development and you reply with a monitor released around 2000. That’s a completely different era. > with 2300x1400 resolution and my experience was very negative. That’s more an issue with OSs not doing scaling back then than it is a problem with desktop software. You’d still have the same issue today if you run a super high resolution with zero scaling. > There are more web developers because it was a lot easier It’s has a lower barrier for entry but I wouldn’t call it easier. > even before […] frontend frameworks went out of control. So you’re basically agreeing with me then. The current state of affairs is out of control. > Electron was really late on the scene as far as frontend tech goes. It was originally made to support an IDE and not regular business apps and still won. Its origins doesn’t disprove my point. Lots of things start out as one thing and evolve into something else. That isn’t unique to the web nor Electron.
hnlmorg 3y ago
> There is no way that people could make the websites users expect today with only technology from the 90s. That's my point though. The web should never have been bastardised into making applications. We should have seen the desires of web2.0 and built an entirely new software stack purpose built for online applications. It wasn't fit for applications then and it still isn't now. It's just we keep trying to convince ourselves it is because we're too locked into the web now to ever move past it.

hnlmorg 3y ago

> You're either misremembering, or have some thick rose-tinted glasses on. > The late 90s were times of the Wild West Web. Or we are talking about different eras. I'm on about early 90s. > Every browser had custom behaviour and rendered pages differently. They did. But there was less of spec to have to concern yourself with. The biggest day to day differences was around frames (which was a pain in the arse) and tables (which was easy to work around). > JavaScript and CSS were still new, and it took years for the implementations to be standardized. You didn't need Javascript most of the time and CSS incompatibilities were easy to remember (I'm talking about cognitive overhead here) > Even as late as 2005, projects like jQuery were needed to make web development easier. That's in the region of 10 years after when I'm talking about. A completely different era. By that point the web had already turned into the shitshow it is now. > I'd say that it wasn't until the late aughts, well after "web 2.0", that web development didn't feel hacky. I couldn't disagree more. By that point people had Stockholm syndromed themselves into believing web technologies were actually good. But it wasn't. > So I get the sentiment that modern web development is difficult, bloated and buggy Its not a sentiment. It's a fact > the good news is that the web is fully mature now, No its not. We're just Stockholm syndromed into thinking its mature. But half the technologies we use are constantly churning. That's not the definition of mature. > Web developers are spoiled with choice, so a hard task is simply selecting the right technologies to use. The hard part is finding something that will still be around in 5 years time. > or we inherit decade-old codebases that make maintenance a nightmare. I've worked on plenty of decade-old codebases and I'd never rank web development in there precisely because of the aforementioned churn. Web tech goes out of date so quickly that it never gets to live past a decade...never mind multiple decades. It's simply not a mature platform to write software on despite what you claim. > But it's never been easier to write plain HTML/CSS/JS that will work across browser Who writes plain HTML and JS? There's so much bloat required to get anything to look modern that nobody writes plain web sites any longer (In fact I did for one of my open source projects and people hated it and rewrote it in Vue). It was much easier to write plain HTML et al in the 90s. In fact that was exactly how web development back then was done. > and deploy it as a static site that works reliably at massive scale That's literally how sites were originally written. It's not a new invention ;) The web was intended to be a static collection of documents. What we've since done is tried to turn it into an application framework. And that's what it sucks at. > If you need more features, then complexity can creep in, but it is possible to minimize failure points with good engineering. Sure, but again this isn't a new invention. This was the case right from the inception of the web. It's just gotten a hell of a lot harder to do good engineering for the web.