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> 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 e

> 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 Web tech goes out of date so quickly that it never gets to live past a decade...never mind multiple decades.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.

imiric 3y ago
> Or we are talking about different eras. I'm on about early 90s. I think you're misremembering then. There _was_ no web development to speak of in the early 90s. The web was largely a niche technology until the mid-90s. Mosaic released in January '93, Netscape in October '94, and IE in August '95. By the end of '93, there were a total of 130 websites[1], most of them from universities and research centers. By the end of '94, a whopping 2,278 websites. JavaScript first appeared in September '95 (Netscape), and CSS in August '96 (IE). > You didn't need Javascript most of the time and CSS incompatibilities were easy to remember (I'm talking about cognitive overhead here) Depending on what you're building, you still don't need JS most of the time today. The difference is that today all browser implementations are ECMAScript compliant, and the core functionality is much more capable than in the 90s, so you can get by with just sprinkling JS where and when you need it, without resorting to frameworks, build tools, libraries, and any of the complexities commonly associated with modern frontend web development. This is without a doubt, an objectively better state than what we had in the 90s. Of course, actually relying on external dependencies would make your life easier, so the difficult task is picking the right technology to use from a sea of poorly built and maintained software. This is the drawback of a platform exploding in popularity, but it doesn't say anything about the web itself. As for CSS, how can you honestly say incompatibilities were easy to remember? Netscape was initially pushing for its own competing styling format, JSSS[2], and it didn't officially support CSS until version 4.0 (June '97). Even then, not all CSS properties were supported[3]. So it wasn't even a matter of remembering incompatibilities; developers literally had to target specific browsers, and even specific versions of browsers. Vendor prefixes were required for pretty much everything, and are still used today, though thankfully, core CSS features are widely supported, and they're only needed for advanced features. There's no way that all of these incompatibilities were easier to deal with in the 90s. > 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. jQuery appeared precisely as a response to the lackluster state of JS in browsers, and to make development easier by not worrying about browser incompatibilities. My point is that up until then, web development _was_ a shitshow. > Its not a sentiment. It's a fact Funny how I can disagree with a "fact" then... > The hard part is finding something that will still be around in 5 years time. It's really not, unless you're chasing the latest hype train. jQuery is 17, React is 10, Vue is 9, etc. And like I said, you don't strictly need any of it. If you write standards-compliant HTML/CSS/JS, it will serve you for decades to come with minimum maintenance. You've been able to do the same since arguably the late 2000s. > Who writes plain HTML and JS? Many people do. > There's so much bloat required to get anything to look modern that nobody writes plain web sites any longer That is factually not true. > That's literally how sites were originally written. It's not a new invention I'm not saying it is. My point is that you can still do that today. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_before_1995 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS#Difficulty_with_adoption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS#Difficulty_with_adoption

imiric 3y ago

> Or we are talking about different eras. I'm on about early 90s. I think you're misremembering then. There _was_ no web development to speak of in the early 90s. The web was largely a niche technology until the mid-90s. Mosaic released in January '93, Netscape in October '94, and IE in August '95. By the end of '93, there were a total of 130 websites[1], most of them from universities and research centers. By the end of '94, a whopping 2,278 websites. JavaScript first appeared in September '95 (Netscape), and CSS in August '96 (IE). > You didn't need Javascript most of the time and CSS incompatibilities were easy to remember (I'm talking about cognitive overhead here) Depending on what you're building, you still don't need JS most of the time today. The difference is that today all browser implementations are ECMAScript compliant, and the core functionality is much more capable than in the 90s, so you can get by with just sprinkling JS where and when you need it, without resorting to frameworks, build tools, libraries, and any of the complexities commonly associated with modern frontend web development. This is without a doubt, an objectively better state than what we had in the 90s. Of course, actually relying on external dependencies would make your life easier, so the difficult task is picking the right technology to use from a sea of poorly built and maintained software. This is the drawback of a platform exploding in popularity, but it doesn't say anything about the web itself. As for CSS, how can you honestly say incompatibilities were easy to remember? Netscape was initially pushing for its own competing styling format, JSSS[2], and it didn't officially support CSS until version 4.0 (June '97). Even then, not all CSS properties were supported[3]. So it wasn't even a matter of remembering incompatibilities; developers literally had to target specific browsers, and even specific versions of browsers. Vendor prefixes were required for pretty much everything, and are still used today, though thankfully, core CSS features are widely supported, and they're only needed for advanced features. There's no way that all of these incompatibilities were easier to deal with in the 90s. > 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. jQuery appeared precisely as a response to the lackluster state of JS in browsers, and to make development easier by not worrying about browser incompatibilities. My point is that up until then, web development _was_ a shitshow. > Its not a sentiment. It's a fact Funny how I can disagree with a "fact" then... > The hard part is finding something that will still be around in 5 years time. It's really not, unless you're chasing the latest hype train. jQuery is 17, React is 10, Vue is 9, etc. And like I said, you don't strictly need any of it. If you write standards-compliant HTML/CSS/JS, it will serve you for decades to come with minimum maintenance. You've been able to do the same since arguably the late 2000s. > Who writes plain HTML and JS? Many people do. > There's so much bloat required to get anything to look modern that nobody writes plain web sites any longer That is factually not true. > That's literally how sites were originally written. It's not a new invention I'm not saying it is. My point is that you can still do that today. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_before_1995 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS#Difficulty_with_adoption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS#Difficulty_with_adoption