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"Designing for the web ought to mean making HTML and CSS" by DHH m.signalvnoise.com/designing-f

"[T]he industry is making it too hard to work directly with the web. The towering demands inherent in certain ways of working with JavaScript are rightfully scaring some designers off from implementing their ideas at all. That’s a travesty."

Signal v. NoiseDesigning for the web ought to mean making HTML and CSSBy DHH

I sort of wonder if all the industry momentum towards SPAs and JS frameworks will start to swing back in the opposite direction, towards more "HTML, CSS, and a sprinkle of JS." If nothing else, the latter has got to be easier and cheaper to maintain, right?

Or maybe it's just the perception that everybody is doing SPAs, when it's merely that everyone is *writing* about SPAs, because the alternative is so simple that there's not much to say. Not sure.

Stuart Langridge

@nolan I think a lot of it is subconscious elitism. If you don't need to set up a complicated build chain with lots of tools you've installed from github, and instead you just need to open Notepad and write some things, then the thing you made can't really be good because it was too easy to do.
What I wish I could get people to understand is: suffering is not noble. A thing isn't better because it was harder to achieve.

@sil It's funny because, in other parts of software, we see the value in making our lives easier. Removing manual steps, simplifying build processes, etc. Somehow here it works differently? Maybe because client-side-rendering inherently lends itself more to obscene amounts of tooling, whereas server-side-rendering doesn't, and CSR vs SSR is a fundamental decision that tends to be made upfront in a project's lifecycle? I dunno.

@nolan I think that kicks in _once_ you've pushed a bunch of people out. Certainly I have no trouble imagining a bitter war between different framework developers about how much easier to use their tooling is than those other guys, while someone stands on the sidelines saying "but I just wrote an HTML page in notepad in 8 minutes and it does everything your page does and it works and I didn't need any tools at all" and goes completely unheard in the conversation.

@nolan I don't see why CSR is a decision that gets picked, hardly ever. When I've asked people, what does this do that _requires_ it to work on the client-side only, I never get an answer. I feel like someone said once "page loads are bad for the user experience", which is a reasonable argument to make, but we've now built -- and demand that people use -- a huge inverted pyramid of tools and confusion balanced solely on that one tiny point, which wasn't that good a point to begin with.

@nolan obviously that's unreasonable and wrong and I'm just being bad-tempered about it, of course. I mean, pinafore itself which I'm using right now makes more sense as a client side app. It's that half the time the discussion was never even had: question 1 isn't "does this thing need to be built on the client side" because the answer is seen to always be "yes". So new devs won't even get told that that's a question, and if they ask it they'll get told to be more "modern".

@sil Yep, despite being someone who went all-in on the CSR model for Pinafore, I definitely think it's overused. Brutaldon shows it's perfectly fine to go all-in in the opposite direction. It's just about tradeoffs.

The average static content site does not need to be an SPA, but yeah, you wouldn't know that from a lot of the "modern" refreshes of various websites. I think the conversation isn't had because it's usually more about team dynamics than about product needs.

@nolan totally. The new Captain Marvel site drove me nuts. It's not just a pastiche of terrible old 90s sites, it's a pastiche of terrible old 90s sites and built WORSE than them because the body is completely empty until the JS all loads. I mean, aaaaaaaaaaargh

@sil Oof yeah, I think your average 90s static site would fare a lot better than that: webpagetest.org/result/190213_

@nolan yup! Notice that part of the contribution to that score of 27 in the Lighthouse checks is a specific audit which checks whether you have any content without JS, which I honestly didn't think would actually catch anybody in this day and age. Just goes to show how wrong you can be, I suppose 🙂