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I built my first website when I was 14? It was a fansite for the Sims. It used tables and the colours wouldn't pass any accessibility...
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Bravo! I totally feel the same. Specially after being rejected in interviews by devs half my age (with half my experience) because "I don't know enough React" 😂 Anyway I do enjoy React and modern development, but the culture around it is toxic and destructive. It's a competition to always being right (while all the others are wrong), the over-opinionated era where best practices won't last a week. If you blink, everything changes, something new comes up, and all the community go crazy to refactor everything once again to follow the new golden hype. Nobody mentions standards anymore, or semantics, or accessibility... I really suffer from framework/hype fatigue to the point where I don't code anymore. It's just not fun, and not reliable. I don't mind learning but the feeling that what you learn will be obsolete next week is truly discouraging.
Anyway, thanks for putting these words together, someone had to say it!
Wow, very interesting read! I remember when I decided to become a web developer I just took a course on html/css/javascript. One night, after finishing in my laptop a website for my last assignment in a web dev class (a shitty one) I felt so proud of having become a web developer in such a short time. Next morning I decide to check my masterpiece on my desktop monitor to find out, to my horror, that all the elements had shifted. Fixed everything, then checked it on my laptop. The website looked whacked on my laptop now. After a quick google search, I found something called "responsive web design". That day I realized how little I knew and that there was an even bigger mountain to climb in front of me.
I'm glad I stuck out with web development. The new technologies are wonderful but sometimes I miss the simplicity.
It was the same for me. I used to design websites with Photoshop and at some point i have learned how to code it with HTML, CSS and JS with jQuery. Life was simple and fun. You could make something that works (and you can still) over night.
I remember it was okay to use CMS's and there was no problem using jQuery to speed up development. But at some point. Everything that helps the developer to code less, cleaner and faster it is the devil to JS community.
Today, over-engineering is priced and i'm (maybe) too old to understand why. I do not understand why jQuery is wrong, i do not understand why PHP is wrong, i do not understand why i need to use react, angular, flutter, vue or whatever is trend this week to make a simple three pages website for a local bakery.
I'm too old at 27 years old to understand what the hell is going on with web development these days.
Wow.. I needed to hear this. I've been forced into CSS in JS lately and I share so many of your sentiments, I miss the cascade and the structure of plain and simple CSS.
Beautifully written. Look forward to reading what comes next :-)
I don't understand these kind of posts. Every year we hear, how complex JS has become.
With all due respect, for me such posts always sound arrogant and portraying authors as people, who hope to never learn anything in their lives anymore, or believe that they've had their share of learning already, and just want to keep working 9 to 5 building primitive web pages, sprinkling them with JavaScript.
Noone forces noone to use frameworks or anything.
But the thing is – browsers evolve, they provide more and more features for developers to explore, allowing us to build more complex and powerful interfaces.
And businesses want to explore this opportunity.
Simple static websites simply cannot provide the same UX as a real web application. It solves completely different problems.
Browser is the most popular cross-platform solution, and if it's possible to use this platform to build something, that was previously only available on desktop, then why not take this opportunity?
Take a look at Figma, for example, is it bad that we have such an awesome web-service today?
Of course, with the progress of the web, the problems that web-developers face evolve as well, and every new framework tries to solve these problems in its own way.
Of course, we could still be using jQuery for everything, but it is just not that convenient than, say, React, when working on really large projects.
I also want to remind that HTML and CSS evolve as well. New properties and attributes appear every year, new specifications arrive, and personally I am very happy with it. There's an infinite number of possibilites to explore, and for a long time already frontend is not a single area, but many-many different domains. Anyone can find something of interest – animations, 3D graphics, complex web apps, Web Audio etc.
Don't take this personally, please. I just want to encourage everyone to keep learning new things, dive deeper into JS and others fields of web dev.
This forum is great for the purpose, by the way.
What does that have to do with people replacing CSS and HTML with JS? If they are evolving to meet web application needs better, why are we still using JavaScript only frameworks to paper over them with a low level, procedural, imperative language that's has to implement things like Suspense to accomplish things progressively enhanced HTML and CSS has been able to accomplish for a decade?
Very interesting read. I remember programming with just HTML/CSS and a sprinkle of JavaScript just for being able to brag that "I'm using DHTML, yo! It's so rad!"
Still I think there's a place for us developers with self-taught talent for designing and sketching. Not every project needs to be a full Webpack fest with components that you have no idea where they came from.
I kinda feel relieved every time I need to make a custom WordPress theme because at most I'll be using some kind of SASS to CSS converter, then it's just my PSD/AI file, my browser and my code editor.
This is spot-on! Thank you, Laura, for sharing this.
I think a lot JS frameworks are wildly over-engineered. What's wrong with simple pages that are actually written in html?
JS frameworks are solving a completely different set of problems than simple HTML sites.
JS frameworks tend to be the hammer that turns everything into a nail.
I still subscribe to the less is more approach.
I don't know ... I've heard sentiments similar to this a lot recently: "Where are the good old times of geocities", something along those lines.
I'm not saying that React and Webpack are the end-all-be-all, but it would be sort of sad if we'd be coding web sites or web apps in the same way we did 30 years ago. My point is, even when using React or other JS frameworks it's still "web" and manipulating the DOM, just using a different syntax, and nobody is forcing anyone to use CSS-in-JS. It's just that we have way more options nowadays.
Yes, lots of people are forcing other people to use CSS in JS. I am forced to use it at work.
And it's not about "doing things the same way." Even without React, we would not be doing things the same way as 30 years ago. HTML had changed. CSS has changed. JavaScript has changed. None of them existed in 1990, by the way.
Haha you're right, 30 years ago none of this existed. The very first website in history was put live on 20 December 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee) so that's less than 30 years ago, and Javascript was nowhere to be seen (not even CSS probably).
Also true that even without React we wouldn't be doing things the same way, all of the standards and APIs have evolved, a lot. My point is that React is just a "tool" to get work done, and ultimately it's just the DOM with markup and CSS, only with a different syntax and some build tools.
Hi i love to see that you hate react please look into this and post feedback i would love to hear from you about your opinion my example only shows build in customElements but could easy get extended to use unknown html element as its base.
dev.to/frankdspeed/the-html-compon...
Very interesting read. I remember programming with just HTML/CSS and a sprinkle of JavaScript just for being able to brag that "I'm using DHTML, yo! It's so rad!"
Still I think there's a place for us developers with self-taught talent for designing and sketching. Not every project needs to be a full Webpack fest with components that you have no idea where they came from.
I kinda feel relieved every time I need to make a custom WordPress theme because at most I'll be using some kind of SASS to CSS converter, then it's just my PSD/AI file, my browser and my code editor.
❤️ So much this.
anyone remembers dreamweaver?
I do remember it but never used it, though it was hyped at my college
The Photoshop of webdelopement hehehe
This article is amazing. Btw frontpage ruled! I built my first site with it at age 12~ ish.
About part 4.: I get what you're saying (even though I'm a modern barbarian who started with React right away). But I think this can only change by changing from the top to bottom. We can't really go javascript-off when our clients want to follow the trend, and the trend is to have a ducking disco 🎆 on the frontend. :D
Macromedia, you just opened wounds that I thought where closed. I guess I'll have to go to repress some memories again,
And you had to put a picture of FrontPage, you cruel, cruel woman.
... I'll be crying under a cold shower if someone come looking for me.
Yeah. React within the Node.js/npm ecosystem (much as I do like this or that about them) is the worst thing to happen to the the web and to frontend development in the 20 years I have been doing it. It wouldn't be so bad if it were less popular. If it were just one somewhat crappy option among several others, any of which had a nearly equal chance of being chosen, the web and frontend development might be okay.
But people really think it's the best. They think it's the best because it's so popular and because they hear that it rescued frontend development. They hear frontend development before React was awful. Newer developers are especially vulnerable to this bullshit narrative. Full stack developers or frontend developers who were educated and trained more like backend developers who have no idea what it's really like to develop for the web without trying to shoehorn it into traditional software engineering are understandably serving their own interests. Though they should be serving the end user instead, because that's what frontend is.
Because React isn't especially good and we know now exactly why and how. A few of years after it came out was its peak. Then new options took the best parts of React and gave back things React traded away. Bundle size, for example. Restored ladders, for example.
I see no reason to use React for a new project. If a company promised me I'd never have to use React again, I would let them hire me in a heartbeat. React chased all the people I loved working with away from web development. I managed, but its strong impact on web development has ripple effects that have slowly ground all the joy from my work. I also started as a designer, and can't work with design as effectively anymore. The products I work on have nice aesthetics, but that's the only real quality they give end users. Performance sucks, perceptual loading sucks, they eat bandwidth and device battery life, they lack resiliency to the various issues that go wrong with distributed UIs transferred over networks, they're responsive only in name, they're inaccessible, they're ridiculously huge and complex when the features are simple, etc.
And I, alone, can't do anything about it. I'm fighting the tsunami of React and of thinking of web frontend like it's backend or native. I'm just some old CSS person fighting progress in their minds. No one else mentors them about the unique needs of the web, about accessibility, or about empowering non engineers with the ability to contribute directly to production! It's different from their JavaScript comfort zone and they just want to be like their JavaScript thoughtleader idols, why do I have to nag them about stuff no one else cares about?
It's ironic, since the lack of available mentorship in these areas has been blamed for the situation. Those mentors? Bay area tech culture and its cargo cults ran them out of town with pitchforks.
Interesting rant. I can't say I yearn for the bubblegum and duct-tape days of yore. But I agree with the sentiment that our current technologies have heavily over-complicated the landscape. Elm and Reason mentions are a bit misplaced. I found it much simpler to make apps with the likes of these than with component-based frameworks, no fancy math involved.
Then you will love unpoly js. Unobstrusive javascript at its best. Turbolinks on steroid which is the sweet spot for a lot of uses cases. IMHO
This is kind of a gatekeeping function that occurs in any engineering discipline. Gone are the days.
Durkheim and the rest wrote well on the subject.
Details?
Switch to Angular. Clear HTML, CSS and TS file separation per module.
When I was 14 I hosted my site on GitHub pages (it's completely static). I didn't know much JS but the css was Soo overdone and looked quite stupid but looked amazing to be back then.
Oops
It is interesting.