The future of HTML is classless, stateless and moneyless! 🏴
HTMLs of the world, unite!
I’m sure that means something.
CSS? More like CSS-illy.
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.
That’s not a Jest problem, that’s your skill issue 😎. Mocking stuff is basic shit when you’re unit testing.
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
Oh shit…
😅
The web is beyond bloated.
The heavy reliance on JavaScript has suck the joy out of browsing the web for me
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”
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
I rotate between 4 websites for content essentially.
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.
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.
I legit hate working with CSS it’s so confusing
Better than a decade ago when you had to worry about 5 different rendering engines. Nothing worse than finding a great solution and then seeing it works in most of them but not all, so you have to polyfil it
Yeah I do recognize it’s the best option, and way better than options in the past
Yeah I do recognize it’s the best option, and way better than options in the past
can we go back to web 1 pls
deleted by creator
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.
I would argue that json has become the data format method of choice for most applications.
What you want is mostly what json is, not html.
The format doesn’t bother me too much.
json can be great for sure.But I reckon some people could still bung a load of unnecessarily complex layout and aesthetic data in there, and potentially screw up the data structure and still make it harder to access than need be.
I accept that, if the json is structured logically, it should handle both substantive and layout data, and probably easiest to get to either the content or the formatting.
I think that the argument here lies in where people draw the line on what is considered valid formatting and “too much”.
I think, that since html has paragraph hints, there is little difference in also describing what paragraphs should look like. Which slippery-slopes our way to entire applications. If html is more than just a data format, but also a visual formatting language (paragraphs are visual formatting hints, don’t try to argue otherwise) then additional visual formatting rules is the natural progression. The vast, vast, vast majority of people view html as a markup language for describing the visual layout of information. HTMLs creation is basically a declarative method by which visual representation of data can be made, while also including the data to be displayed.
I personally have been developing HTML since 93/94 and JavaScript since 96. Not once during the early years did anyone ever say “HTML” isn’t a visual markup language. If you wanted a data markup language you used something else. XML was developed specifically for that purpose… To define the data markup without the visual aspect of it because HTML was for visual representation.
I get it. You are nostalgic for a bygone era… Or you don’t like developing with JS… Or css is just too hard for you to understand. I get it. HTML was a dev language, that made dev quality UI and barely would scrape the grey box standards of today… And then designers got involved and things got hard.
Damn.
I’ll argue that paragraphs are not just visual formatting hints. Like
<em>, they impart semantic meaning. Text within a paragraph is closely related and should not be scattered across the page or broken up by other elements. Just like<h1>is more than just “bigger and bolder!”There are other tags you could’ve chosen that would support your argument.
<div>for example is pure layout, so I’m not saying your argument holds no water, but you put the parenthetical there and it seems either poorly thought out or lacking in perspective.I think the key here is that there was initially no CSS and it was required to have a way to assist the readability of the content and so layout tags were added, but I’d argue that’s an artifact of how the web evolved and not the purpose of HTML.
If appeal to age is an important factor, I’ve been using the internet since before there was a “world wide web.”
I don’t know why I can’t make it stop inserting these close tags. Probably a client bug.</div></h1></em>
Lol. That’s a good argument but I didn’t say paragraph doesn’t denote more than visual information. I said that it unequivocally denotes visual information.
I agree with the rest of your analysis though.
To be fair, the distinction should be pointed out that no sane individual would deploy their entire application to a browser right?
Like their whole stack?
Right? padmeface.jpg
electron lmao
Honestly… They are excellent targets.
How many multiplatform applications have you made that respected the designers/UX/UI choices well?
It’s way harder outside of html/css/js…
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.
And then the Internet killed the radio star smh out loud
Richard Stallman?
I use lynx btw
How do I upvote this more than once?
lol. lmao. What am I even reading?
The CSS is literally openly served along with the website. One line change in the HTML (in
<link ref="stylesheet" .../>allows you to make your own CSS for a site. There’s a world of difference between that and “Google’s new trusted web bullshit”. And you know who sits much closer to Google than HTML and CSS?Javascript. That’s who.
It doesn’t matter if it’s open or closed. The problem is the unnecessary complexity and lack of straightforward and standardized meaning. If you want to customize the way you view the web in general, you will either limit yourself to small changes like ad blockers, or you will need a handcrafted custom CSS for every site you visit. There’s no real standardization in formatting. Everything is just a div with an arbitrary name.
RSS feeds could address much of this, but it would need to be taken a step further.
Javascript sits closer to Mozilla than Google. JS was created for the Netscape Navigator, and Netscape created Mozilla.
I think its not the creation its things like obfuscated js and proprietary webassembly
That I agree with. People are praising webassembly to replace JS (it won’t, but that’s another story), but at least obfuscated JS can still be read, albeit with some difficulty, but it’s harder to read WA executables. There will be a lot of malware created with WA.
2.0b baby
Have no idea what old mate is even on about. I thought it might have been a parody or copypasta
I really would like that styling was a part of the structure itself too, but way before then, I’d love for JS and HTML to be coupled closer together. The way Angular/React/etc couple things at render time is just way more straightforward.
Unfortunately, I can also think of a bajillion reasons why Js should stay decoupled.
If only they actually did that instead of faking it then rendering it afterwards.
That shadow Dom is a crazy making factory… Although it’s probably better today.
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…
Because normies customers expect it and I don’t have it they’ll go to a competitor that had a more “designed” website.
This is exactly where I decided to just not have a website for my business (electrical contractor in a tourist town). I’m already busy enough as is, and it’s just one more aspect that helps filter out knuckleheads that usually end up being more trouble than the money is worth.
I had intended on creating a basic website that had all of the pertinent information. Then as I started getting into it, everyone had their “design/visual recommendations” and that “a polished website was a testament to the quality of my work.” It kinda dawned on me one day that I’d rather have something basic and functional so that I can focus on what’s important, the actual work. Well, that’s not how the world works anymore, so I said screw it. Now I just tell people I don’t have time for it, and if they take issue with it, find someone else.
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
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 <TABLE>
* Wanted to center content for a laugh? We had a tool for that: It was called “<CENTER>”
* “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
I am a human who transcribes posts to improve accessibility on Lemmy. Transcriptions help people who use screen readers or other assistive technology to use the site. For more information, see here.
This comment was formatted better than the image.
And not by a small margin.
Good human
Oh, got that layout looking all nice and modern?
Be a shame if somebody… tried to email it!
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.
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.
A hammer won’t be able to cut the board.
Not with that attitude it won’t. I assure you that, with enough tenacity and/or a large enough hammer, one can absolutely cut a board.
Your analogy is definitely closer though. However, I’d say it’s closer to using a flathead screwdriver to chop a mortise. Possible, without too extreme of measures but results are unlikely to be optimal, to hold up well to a heavy load, or offer fine controls.
A simple site, like something that could work on Gopher or Gemini, or simple home page will absolutely do fine though. And, if that’s what’s required to avoid SEO trash, I’ll live.
Well, we have these devices with smaller screens these days. And people really want to use them for browsing the web as well.
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.
It’s the easiest way to bloat up a web page, and turn 1kb of text into 5mb of download.
People whine about cryrocurrency wasting energy; it’s nothing compared to the petajoules wasted on bloated web pages, full of unneccessary Javascript and CSS.
To be fair most of that bloat comes from the Javascript; if your CSS stylesheet is above, say, 100Kb, odds are that you’re doing something wrong.
The major damage that I see is on another level: raising the bar for what you’re expected to know, just to make a site and publish some stuff. It’s the wrong way to go - the development of new tech should enable more people to do more stuff, not the opposite.
CSS stylesheet is above, say, 100Kb, odds are that you’re doing something wrong.
Hello, non minified bootstrap reporting
I would absolutely consider shipping non-minified bootstrap doing something wrong
Configuring your bundler properly has to be done once per app, and it can significantly cut down on your app’s size.
People expect to see apps, not web pages, but we can be smart about it. Tree shaking has been around for years now, if you build your app properly your bundle will only include the pieces of code that actually gets referenced, e.g. if you pull in a 2 megabytes large library but only use it for one function, only those few lines from the lib will end up in your bundle.
Tell me you suck at css without telling me you suck at css
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.
* {
display: flex;
}
This is the way.
I felt that 💔
