39 upvotes, 3 direct replies (showing 3)
View submission: Is modern Front-End development overengineered?
As someone who did a lot of front end development for native mobile apps, we could have attractive, accessible, localized, and internationalized screens adaptable for many different phone/tablet sizes and aspect ratios back in the late aughts using frameworks that were a pleasure to use and did not require any arcane knowledge or sacrificing of goats to the CSS gods. I miss those days, I loathe every web framework, and I wonder what it would take to get web development to not be a nightmare
Comment by AyrA_ch at 19/12/2024 at 20:46 UTC
15 upvotes, 2 direct replies
and I wonder what it would take to get web development to not be a nightmare
The only thing at this point is a complete reset of the standard, and replacing it with something much simpler. Our current standards come from the early 90s, and our obsession with backwards compatiblity means this wordle clone[1] I wrote to work with the first ever webbrowser[2] works well in your latest Chrome, Edge or Firefox. Probably even works in Safari at this point.
1: https://wordle.ayra.ch/mosaic.php
2: https://i.imgur.com/u5EFXa9.png
As long as we keep stacking ~~shit~~ new features on top of this set of standards and insist on them staying compatible, it only gets worse. Even Microsoft gave up on making their own browser engine, and Edge has been using chromium as the underlying engine for a while now.
Admittedly, the standards work great for some type of websites, like social media and blogs, but not so for business applications, and with everything migrating away from native solutions to web based solutions, this factor will become more important in the future, but I doubt there will be any significant change.
Comment by shableep at 22/12/2024 at 08:16 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Plasmic is slowly but surely seemingly getting really close to something like this. Worth checking out.
Comment by Blecki at 21/12/2024 at 15:22 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
You can have that today if you can just make the client stop caring if some element is 2px lower than they want.
