Bridget Stewart
Awww, I didn’t realize you read my piece and had such nice things to say. Thank you! 💚💚💚
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:
- Keep it simple.
- 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.)
Responses
Related links
Developers Rail Against JavaScript ‘Merchants of Complexity’ - The New Stack
Perhaps the tide is finally turning against complex web frameworks.
A Rant about Front-end Development – Frank M Taylor
Can we please stop adding complexity to our systems just so we can do it in JavaScript? If you can do it without JavaScript, you probably should. Tools shouldn’t add complexity.
You don’t need a framework to render static content to the end user. Stop creating complex solutions to simple problems.
Untapped – Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence
It would be much harder for a 15-year-old today to View Source and understand the code structure that built the website they’re on. Every site is layered with analytics, code snippets, javascript plugins, CMS data, and more.
This is why the simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.
Faster Connectivity !== Faster Websites - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
The bar to overriding browser defaults should be way higher than it is.
Amen!
Why multi-page apps? | Go Make Things
There are absolutely use-cases for SPAs (media sites, primarily). Most of the other things we use them for make the user experience notably worse or band-aid over the real underlying issues without addressing them.
Related posts
Multi-page web apps
A question via email…
Principles and the English language
Mashing up George Orwell with axioms of web architecture.
Robustness and least power
A tale of two principles.
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