As an amateur web designer in the 90s and early 2000s, this speaks to me. I stopped web development when CSS became popular and I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
Is there a petition I can sign to scrap all this nonsense modern web progress and go back to that beautiful, dial-up friendly HTML?
I stopped doing frontend work when responsive design became important. Super unpleasant work. Now I’m happier at the backend where I don’t have to worry about how my shit looks on the 7 million possible screen sizes people are likely to use. Life is more peaceful here.
Wanna play a modern front-end dev simulator? Check this https://artpolikarpov.github.io/garmoshka/
This is literal art
Alright hang on now - responsive design is about not excluding people based on the device they’re using. Many people do everything in their lives from a low end cell phone and cutting them out is a shit thing to do. Responsive design and progressive enhancement are objectively good things.
The tools have gotten better over the past several years, it’s not as hard as it used to be.
Better? Not really. My experience is that sites have gotten “better” for mobile at the cost of making them nearly or completely unusable for people using desktop browsers with non-default settings (especially additional security lockdown, but even forcing a specific colour scheme can break some sites because some idiot calling himself a designer used css background-image for images that are content). Which means a fair number of sites are broken to some degree for me.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Those things are completely unrelated? I said the tools for responsive design have gotten better, which they objectively have.
You’re not wrong that most css in the wild is trash, and I love dark mode as much as the next guy but you can’t complain that sites break when you’re fucking with styles. It’s the cost of tinkering.
Frontend developer here, please save me from my torment, thanks
As recently as 6 or 7 years ago I maintained some apps that forced 5.5 compatibility mode. Because they were poorly architected in a shitty framework and no one was willing to do or pay for or train for a rewritten version. They were finally migrating to .NET when I left. It was the govt so they are likely wrapping up that migration now.
Check out Gemini!
It’s an alternative protocol to HTTP with a focus on simplicity and being much harder to abuse for user tracking.
It’s still a small community, but growing.
If you miss the internet of the nineties, there’s some echoes of it here.
Let’s just design every website using a table again. Or even better, frames!
Think my eye twitched from the thought of frames again 🫨
Don’t forget image maps!
Laughs in frameset!
Kids nowdays try hard to do with divs what was already possible with framesets.
Also I feel bad every time I remember that was taken away from us!
I second this request to rewind time back to 90s, I would like to remake few life decisions I made :D
Only a few?
Lucky guy.
Image Transcription: Meme
STOP USING CSS
* HTML WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE GIVEN CLASSES
* YEARS OF MARKUP yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND for styling beyond \ * Wanted to center content for a laugh? We had a tool for that: It was called ""
* “Yes please align that content exactly 32.89% left. Please align 59.0px down”
- Statements dreams up by the utterly derangedLOOK at what FRONT-END Devs have been demanding your Respect for all this time.
(This is REAL CSS. done by REAL Devs)[Three screenshots of CSS code, each one marked with a number of red question marks. The first screenshot has five question marks and reads as follows:]
h1 { font-size: .75em; position: absolute; bottom: 20px; width: 94%; left: 2%; }[The second screenshot has eight question marks and reads as follows:]
*{ font-size: 30px; } q::before { content: "«"; color: blue; ] q::after { content: "»"; color: red; }[The third screenshot has sixteen question marks and reads as follows:]
#header ul a:focus, #header ul a:active, #header ul a:hover { background-color: #5A5A5A; outline-color: -moz-use-text-color: outline-style: none; outline-width: medium; }[The screenshots end.]
“Hello center that div please”
They have played us for absolute fools
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And not by a small margin.
Good human
The web is beyond bloated.
The heavy reliance on JavaScript has suck the joy out of browsing the web for me
I’d say the over exploitation of JavaScript to leverage tracking, interaction and marketing has helped create the poor experiences we now have on web. The underlying technology when used for creating interactive and helpful UIs is very beneficial
Web pages are supposed to be hypertext documents, not “interactive… UIs!”
So I should download an app for everything beyond that?
You’re “downloading an app” anyway, even if it’s JavaScript running in a browser. How do you think the client-side code gets to the client‽
But yes, I think we need a new version of something like Java Web Start, except with the ability to steam parts of itself as-needed instead of having to download the entire
.jarbefore being able to run. If you’re going to have an app, have an app that has proper libraries for the UI etc. instead of hacking everything on top of a whole bunch of DOM cruft!I guess WebAssembly is a step in the right direction, but it’s still too tied to the document viewer known as a “web browser,” for no good reason.
May I introduce you to the Gemini project?
It’s a new(ish) protocol for sharing interlinked text documents. It’s intended to sit between Gopher and HTML in terms of complexity and is deliberately, aggressively simple (some might even say crippled) with the intention that it will be nearly impossible to extend the protocol for surveillance capitalism. It’s not trying to replace ye olde WWW, but to provide a human-focused place for text-first, 90’s-style sites to live. …just without the blink tags.
…just without the blink tags.
NOOO! IT IS BROKEN!
How am I build my cool website without a blinking “Thank You For Reading!”???
“This page best viewed while rapidly closing and opening your eyes”
Oh, got that layout looking all nice and modern?
Be a shame if somebody… tried to email it!
Really though it’s a shame that so many devs still try to treat the web like print where they have full control over the layout at any given time. Even after the death of Flash and the introduction of smartphones and their need for fluid layouts. Meanwhile concepts like progressive enhancement got left behind.
At least we’ve got flexbox and grid now.
deleted by creator
Flexbox
Flexbox everywhere
And grid if you’re feeling fancy
Grid is just flexbox but worse
both grid and flexbox are just
position: absolutebut worse.who needs mobile users anyways, fuck them
I like to draw my pages out on graph paper, then just use
position: absoluteand tons of media queries to place everything with x and y coordinates. It’s the ultimate grid system.
The future of HTML is classless, stateless and moneyless! 🏴
HTMLs of the world, unite!
You’re never supposed to use pixels in CSS anyway; you should bare minimum use percentages to account for different screen sizes to make the designs responsive and not look terrible on different screen sizes.
Except margins of inner elements and paddings of course.
Are you even a real dev if you haven’t used marquee and blink?
The problem is that HTML was not designed to be a layout description. Your browser was to decide.
So, to force HTML to be a layout description rather than simple markup, we have this mess.
HTML != TeX
CSS? More like CSS-illy.
The web killed the Internet.
JavaScript killed the web.
CSS defiled its corpse.
Honestly and without any trace of irony, I wish CSS would die and be replaced by maybe half a dozen new HTML tags to support a few specific responsive design patterns.
CSS runs counter to the concept of HTML. Web design used to be inherently user-centric. The designer was not supposed to have much of a say in how it looked on a client’s system, because that was up to the client. The designer only provided high-level hints like “this is a paragraph” or “this is emphasized”. The browser decided how a paragraph should be displayed, which fonts to use, etc.
Over time, visual designers clawed more and more control from the user, much to the detriment of the entire rest of the world.
99% of web sites would be better if they conformed to basic semantic markup. Low-level design parameters should not exist on the web.
It’s a straight line from CSS to Google’s new trusted web bullshit. It’s all about wresting control away from the user and giving it to the site designer. Fuck you, site designer. My eyeballs do not belong to you.
I only disagree with you in that for an application, the application designer should choose what an application looks like.
The argument of if applications should be deployed via web browser is an independent discussion.
The argument of if applications should be deployed via web browser is an independent discussion.
That discussion begins with the question “Should applications be deployed via web browser?” and ends with the response “No”
yeah, substance > style.
the content/facts/information is what should matter, make it accessible. share it.
let the audience access it however best suits them.
Good thing web pages are supposed to be documents and not “applications,” then!
If you want a goddamn application, go resurrect Java Web Start or something.
That was true 20 years ago. Things evolve. No one wants to download and install ten million individual apps for every single thing they do on the internet.
The irony of people posting on web applications they utilize for their own enjoyment, “applications don’t belong on web browsers” is killing me here.
There is a portion of the tech industry with their head stuck firmly up their ass and it seems a lot of em hang out in the fediverse. These people would demand we go back to party lines and manual switchboards. Techno-hipsters who are just angry at the next generation who took their BBS internet and actually made the world use it.
Downvote me, that’s fine. Use that interactivity application on your browser. Go be the very definition of irony. Please.
lol. lmao. What am I even reading?
The CSS is literally openly served along with the website. One line change in the HTML (in
Javascript. That’s who.
Have no idea what old mate is even on about. I thought it might have been a parody or copypasta
Javascript sits closer to Mozilla than Google. JS was created for the Netscape Navigator, and Netscape created Mozilla.
There is also a bit of a design arms race going on here.
My business has a bloated site with animations, Google fonts, graphic design, etc., etc. Why? Because normie customers expect it and if I don’t have it they’ll go to a competitor that had a more “designed” website.
If most websites looked as if they were built in the year 2000 we wouldn’t lose much functionality and we’d spend much less resources on this stuff…
Richard Stallman?
As a frontend dev I hate frontend. CSS is not even the main issue.
Fuck Jest and having to mock libraries. I’m gonna go backend in Go or something like that ASAP.
You will still need to mock things for tests in Go
Yeah but the tool chain isn’t a poorly constructed house of toothpicks
i might have some bad news for you
I’m sure that means something.
My main issue isn’t even that CSS exists, or its current functionalities. It’s the expectation that, if you’re creating a web page, you must use CSS extensively, and ditch every single “pure” HTML feature that might solve your problem.
On a practical level, what’s intrinsically wrong with the center tag? Or tables for alignment? Those might be bad in some situations, but they’re rather succinct and simple ways to get what you want.
“But what if in the future…” - address future problems in the future. As soon as they appear - not before or after that.
Have you even made a production grade front end project?
You can’t use “pure” HTML solutions because every browser can display these differently. You have to use CSS to make a website look and behave modern. “Pure” center tag is clunky and doesn’t work everywhere and that’s “by design” (That behavior is defined in specification, and we can’t change specification to meet today’s standards because that would make it non backwards compatible). Additionaly you need to make your website scale to wide range of devices. And sometimes you need to even add JS to fix some of the issues if you don’t want the developer to implement a non-maintainable solution taking him 5 hours, if he could do that in JS in 5 minutes.
Look CSS is not perfect. It’s hacky solution to a problem, but news flash: most software engineering is. And it’s proved to be working.
“But what if in the future…” - address future problems in the future. As soon as they appear - not before or after that.
That’s the stupidest thing I’ve read today. I hope you’re not any kind of engineer. There are some situations where it might not be worth it to future-proof something, but if you apply that to everything you end up needing a full rewrite instead of just adding a feature.
Or tables for alignment?
Tables are for displaying data, not styling. They worked in the past because there was no alternative but they are the wrong tool for the job; like cutting a board with a hammer.
Any tool or resource is for whatever usage people make out of it.
The distinction between data and layout is not some inviolable dogma.
Tables still work in the present, even if there are alternatives nowadays.
like cutting a board with a hammer
Frankly, that is a short-sighted and really dumb analogy.
A hammer won’t be able to cut the board. A table will however be able to create the basic layout of a site.
A better analogy would be cutting some wood with a knife. Sure, if the chunk of wood is really thick you’ll waste a lot of time doing it, and you’ll probably want an axe or saw instead; but even the knife will do it. However, if it’s just some thin branch, the knife will do the trick.
And it’s the same deal here. If you’re making a huge site, full of SEO and machine-generated “content” and 4MiB of Javascript and lots of “marketing opportunities” (i.e. spam = advertisement) from your “associate partners” (i.e. spammers = advertisers), that’s going to be maintained by some intern, you’ll probably want to use CSS. But if you’re making some simple homepage,
<table><tbody><tr><td> side panel </td><td> main content </td></tr></tbody></table>will do the trick. For everything else, it depends.
