alt Hacker NewsI swear to God. I just want to go back to the 2000s where everything was just plain HTML and some basic CSS, if at all any, by default you got responsive design out of the box, readable text and super user friendly GUI from the browser's own default stylesheet.
Today you open any website. Everything is a fucking component. A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no reason. Not even exaggerating - look at Instagram and Facebook on web.
Fuck all these specifications, just give me the raw HTML that isn't obfuscated by your shitty/shiny new JS framework that you swear will change the game (looking at you, React)
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In the 2000s wasn't everything just misused/abused table layouts? Maybe we frequented different places, but that's how I remember it.
I interviewed someone once for a fullstack role, gave him a mockup of a screen we had to build and asked how he would do it, in short some things on top of other things. The only thing he managed to say was how he would divide everything into components. I thought man, so many devs don't even know how to use html/css anymore, but who's laughing now, you just need to prompt a coding agent.
Responsive design out of the box? Were you actually there? Back in 2000 you could make a career out of scripting browser polyfills or "DHTML".
IE6 was early 2000s, I remember it not being so great. CSS was starting to be supported but it was a minefield of un-supported features.
It was bad enough I swore off front end work and made a pact with myself to focus only on backend or embedded, for my own mental health :-)
The cause is businesses are putting emphasis on showing their brand on the site. Every dropdown has to look and feel like their product.
In short almost everyone wants their website to be a video game.
I too want to go back to that, but I fear most consumers/potential visitors to your website have been conditioned to expect flashy web by this point and so it's a self reinforcing paradigm.
> A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no reason. Not even exaggerating - look at Instagram and Facebook on web.
I’ve seen an address form with search dropdowns that were absolutely bonkers. First it loads the list of countries. You start typing and the list disappears – it sends the text to backend, which returns... exactly the same list. The filtering is then done on the frontend. (After you select the country, you can select the region and then the city, which, of course, work exactly the same.)
I miss the days of Flash. Not because I want to actually use it, but because it being an extension forced most websites to offer a basic HTML4 version as well as a fancy, more opaque Flash one. After the advent of HTML5 almost all websites feel like Flash on steroids. Ditto for the IE6 holdovers.
> just plain HTML and some basic CSS
Or even better. XML + XLST.
True separation of representation and data.
Is thousands of nested <div> really a good idea?
<html><body bgcolor=“#FF0000”><blink><font size=“+3” color=“#0000FF”>Me too!</font></body></blink></html>
I feel like this comment is channeling https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
yes. The moment when I see the interception of the scroll to show some overlay content. my brains either switching to admire the aesthetics or get's irritated by that. In the mean time I totally forgot the reason of this website visit.
That's called reader mode. You're standing next to a fresh water spring complaining that you are thirsty.
> just plain HTML and some basic CSS, if at all any
I built my own website like this and I love it. Highly recommended.