Tags: overengineering

Web developers: remarkably untalented and careless? – Baldur Bjarnason

I’d like to suggest that everybody in web dev point their dysfunctional novelty seeking (of which I suffer as well) in the direction of HTML and CSS. See how much can be done without JavaScript. It’s a lot! Then look at writing more lightweight JavaScript that’s layered on top of the HTML as enhancements. Because it’s an enhancement and not required for functionality, you can cut the line higher and use newer tech without worry.

See how refreshing that feels.

Just normal web things.

A plea to let users do web things on websites. In other words, stop over-complicating everything with buckets of JavaScript.

Honestly, this isn’t wishlist isn’t asking for much, and it’s a damning indictment of “modern” frontend development that we’ve come to this:

• Let me copy text so I can paste it.
• If something navigates like a link, let me do link things.
• …

SPAs were a mistake | Go Make Things

Browsers give you a ton of stuff for free, built right in, out-of-the-box. SPAs break all that, and force you to recreate it yourself with JavaScript. Most developers do it wrong, and for the ones who do it right, it results in a ton of extra code to recreate features the browser already gave you for free.

Software developers have stopped caring about reliability

My web browser has been perfectly competent at submitting HTML forms for the past 28 years, but for some stupid reason some asshole developer decided to reimplement all of the form semantics in JavaScript, and now I can’t pay my electricity bill without opening up the dev tools. Imagine what it’s like to not know how to do that. Imagine if you were blind.

Folks, this is not okay. Our industry is characterized by institutional recklessness and a callous lack of empathy for our users.

Google Workspace Updates: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering: this may impact some Chrome extensions

Yikes!

We’re updating the way Google Docs renders documents. Over the course of the next several months, we’ll be migrating the underlying technical implementation of Docs from the current HTML-based rendering approach to a canvas-based approach to improve performance and improve consistency in how content appears across different platforms.

I’ll be very interested to see how they handle the accessibility of this move.

Aegir.org | Canvassing

Strong same:

I’m glad I have this site to play with things, almost all web development and ‘front-end’ stuff leaves me cold these days. It’s all so process driven, so full of unnecessary complexities and dependencies, it’s as if the entire industry wants you to forget you can write HTML by hand and upload it somewhere and it’s a working website. It’s complexity for complexity’s sake, like what accountancy software companies did to the tax code: “Oh this is too complex you need to pay us lots of money to sort it out.” Annoying. I can see some resistance to it and there are still people making blogs and playing around with stuff, so hopefully the professional professionals will calm the fuck down at some point.

The tangled webs we weave - daverupert.com

So my little mashup, which was supposed to be just 3 technologies ended up exposing me to ~20 different technologies and had me digging into nth-level dependency source code after midnight.

The technologies within technologies that Dave lists here is like emptying a bag of scrabble pieces.

The “modern” web stack really is quite something—we’ve done an amazing job of taking relatively straightforward tasks and making them complicated, over-engineered, and guaranteed to be out of date in no time at all.

The plumbing and glue code are not my favorite parts of the job. And often, you don’t truly know the limitations of any given dependency until you’re five thousand lines of code into a project. Massive sunk costs and the promise of rapid application development can come screeching to a halt when you run out of short cuts.

Your blog doesn’t need a JavaScript framework /// Iain Bean

If the browser needs to parse 296kb of JavaScript to show a list of blog posts, that’s not Progressive Enhancement, it’s using the wrong tool for the job.

A good explanation of the hydration problem in tools like Gatsby.

JavaScript is a powerful language that can do some incredible things, but it’s incredibly easy to jump to using it too early in development, when you could be using HTML and CSS instead.

Simple & Boring | CSS-Tricks

Let’s take a meandering waltz through what other people have to say about simplicity.

A Simpler Web: I Concur

Tales of over-engineering, as experienced by Bridget. This resonates with me, and I think she’s right when she says that these things go in cycles. The pendulum always ends up swinging the other way eventually.

Over-engineering is under-engineering – Baldur Bjarnason

Following on from that link about the battle between control vs. using what the browser already gives you, Baldur sums up the situation:

To pick a specific example: the problem with an over-engineered form is that the amount of code required to replace no engineering (i.e. native form controls with basic styling) is enormous and almost always only partially successful (i.e. under-engineered).

They are under-engineered because they are over-engineered—tried to replace native controls.

And so we get two schools of engineering thought:

1. Keep it simple.
2. Control everything, even though that means reimplementing everything in JavaScript.

If, as it’s starting to look like from my perspective, these two communities are incapable of learning from each other, then maybe we should start consider some sort of community divorce?

We get HTML, CSS, and SVG. We love that shit and you just keep stuffing it into the JavaScript sack whenever you are left alone with it.

You get to keep WebGL, Shadow DOM, WASM, React, and Angular.

(I know which group I’d rather be in.)