The first few cohorts to learn web development did so by looking to the web as an open book of examples.
I mourn the loss of that type of learning for the current cohorts.
I cringe when I think that it's been considered an acceptable loss in a chase for performance when we have so very much more compute power and network throughput going around than we did then.
It's an absolute shame.
@djsundog Yes, but...
Well, view source on mastodon.social isn't going to tell you much, it's true, but looking at the repo sure will. So much great and powerful code, including the code behind websites, is out there to learn from now. We (largely) lost view-source, but we got a web full of great resources for learning the craft. Plus, do you remember the state of web page debugging in the 90s?
@maiyannah @djsundog Can I do that with <blink> ? maybe ActiveX?
https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32-19970114#center
In anything later, you have about 5 lines of browser-specific CSS. Per target browser.
@maiyannah @sungo @djsundog W3C standards are like democracy, "the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time". And I'm not even sure it's the best, but it's been very useful sometimes, it seems to me. (Of course I'm horribly biased both directions.)
@sungo @djsundog @maiyannah I'm totally impressed with PWA's, but sure they're not perfect. Native apps keep getting better and better; it's pretty hard to keep up in a cross-platform way.
@sungo @djsundog @maiyannah Yeah, I was on a kick recently about measuring my heart rate during exercise and everything in my price range was crap. The best I found (still crap) actually used a webapp that worked on android-chrome. Deeply creepy to have a website taking my pulse. (But nice to see the source, and know I could write my own pretty easily; maybe I'll make it toot at extremes.)
@maiyannah @sungo @djsundog But I'm not really joking about "scorn". At least when I'm producing code I want others to build on, it's important to do it in a way they'll respect. Using <center> would be almost like using all-caps HTML. Maybe I could win their respect in other ways; I haven't wanted to center anything in recent memory.
@maiyannah @djsundog Yeah, my honest answer is I don't know. I remember when we had center. And I've done it with flexbox, but I don't remember how offhand.
@maiyannah The problem with using <center> is that people will scorn me :-) I'm okay with that on some things (like URL vs URI) where I really know what I'm talking about, but I don't like to buck the rules when I don't understand them well enough.
@maiyannah @sandhawke @djsundog I could do it in 0 typed characters in earlier web days: FrontPage/Dreamweaver! This also produced barely readable HTML 😜
@sandhawke sure do. how's it look now? how many different tools does it require? what's the learning curve and pace of change of each of those tools in order to keep up with the state of the external libraries they depend on? the current state of web development benefits the corporations who drive it in the direction they prefer. any benefit to an individual is coincidence.
@djsundog The churn at the leading edge is insane, but in fact a huge number of webdevs are still using jQuery just fine. I don't read anything evil into the churn, just a lot of people trying stuff in parallel and some of it catching on better than others. In fact, I think most industries are more stable because they're more about companies and their customers; webdev has more open source motivations.
@sandhawke you're far more forgiving of the current state of the web than I, then.
@djsundog I prefer the current state of the web to any of the previous states, because as a webdev I can do so much more. In some moods I can get angry that it's not better, sure. I also know a lot of the folks involved in the process, which makes me more forgiving; I know they're good people, trying to do good, but it's hard to get everything right the first time (and the second, and the third, ...)
@sandhawke I'm convinced that you are pleased with the current web ecosystem.
@djsundog Yep. Did you prefer it some time in the past?
@djsundog I'm trying to guess when that might have been, when it might have been better. Which decade?
@sandhawke each, starting with the first, in decreasing order of preference.
@djsundog *laugh* Okay, then. I loved web development in the 90s, too. Did some great stuff, I thought. But the UX didn't come close to what people have today. Some of that is useless glitz, but I really like some of things I get from sites now that were impossible before. Google maps turned the ajax corner, for instance.
@sandhawke Yes, adding Javascript made some cool things possible, as did many of the incremental changes along the way. Cool. I don't see why that means I need to like the proliferation of kitchen sink frameworks with their own custom package management system of choice in tow or the corporate representatives who put commerce in front of functionality.
You're highly unlikely to convince me it's better this way. Meanwhile, I'll be over there trying to undo most of the damage.
@djsundog Well, I expect I'd be happy to help undo the damage, if I can. Just so long as I don't have to feel gloomy about it. (It's funny, because I'm normally the curmudgeon in the room. But Mastodon makes me happy.)
