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.
Frontend developer here, please save me from my torment, thanks
Have you considered just forcing everyone to access your sites via Internet Explorer 5.5?
and netscape navigator. ah my glory days!
Ahh the old Nutscrape Aggrivator. Refused to update with Microsoft standards and spent the next 8 years being a pain in the ass for website compatibility.
Microsoft standards?
Sounds like we’re due for a history lesson.
In 800x600 pixel resolution.
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.
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.
? Who said anything about excluding anything or anyone? I’m just saying I don’t like the work that has to go into making sure nobody’s excluded. In a way, I’m not excluding anyone by excluding everyone now. I quit frontend altogether, left other people to deal with it. At the backend I don’t have to worry about what kind of screen the other end might be using to view the JSON string I sent them. You don’t get “I just looked at your response headers on my 32:9 monitor that I divided into 9 randomly sized tiles and it looks like shit, please fix” calls when you work backend.
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.
Modern frameworks make responsive design easier but yes it is still a lot to wrap your head around. I remember building my hs robotics team website in high school right as responsive design was becoming a thing. “WHAT DO YOU MEAN I HAVE TO NEST A CONTAINER IN A CONTAINER I ALREADY HAVE ONE!!!”
Bless those who came up with flexbox
I love to see the occasional flexbox appreciation, since at least for me (someone just getting into Design/Web dev) flexbox changed responsive design from being a totally unfeasible project to being genuinely fun to work on, and sometimes the most exciting part!
Wanna play a modern front-end dev simulator? Check this https://artpolikarpov.github.io/garmoshka/
This is literal art
Let’s just design every website using a table again. Or even better, frames!
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!
What do you mean? I still write my sites in HTML 4.1 and frameset works fine in all the browsers I’ve tried. HTML 4.1 is still a standard, I can only recommend more people use it. HTML5 isn’t really a standard… it’s a “living document”… pff.
``
You’re allowed to
<center>things and use `` without shame… or if you really do prefer it, you can still wrap that relative positioned<div>with auto margins in an absolute positioned parent<div>or whatever CSS bullshit makes stuff centered nowadays.One thing I always though was very backwards in CSS is the paradigme to make
<div>into tables instead of the other way. Tables are an easy and simple way to layout things and if it could degrade into divs you’d have your responsive design making many related CSS standards unnecessary.</div></div></div><table></table></center>Sheriff? Yes, this commenter right here.
Oh no you wouldn’t…
- knocks on door
- It’s the Wild Web Sheriff!
- What the… You’ll never catch me!
- rumble
- a vase breaks
- silence
- Okay, okay I was just kidding. Tables are bad. HTML5 is the future.
“And so the Gods (also known as the W3C) spoke down to the Programmers and said: ‘You shall not use tables for non-tabular data.’ And so it was.”
You’re insane if you think doing layouts with tables is easier than flexbox/grid.
In the context of the modern web, I take that as a badge of honor. I’ve build pages using flexbox/grid and I’ve done so only for the sake of responsive layout, because of the way that tables can’t degrade to a bunch of boxes, but a bunch of boxes can by styled to look like a table. It is a convoluted way of doing table layout instead of just using a table.
A table has semantic meaning: it’s for presenting tabulated data, not for building layouts. That’s why they behave the way they do and require the format they require. Table layouts have always been a hack, it’s just that for awhile there weren’t better options.
Again, you are insane if you’re still doing table layouts in 2023.
I stand by that iframes had their place, even if the backend devs absolutely hated them.
Running each app component in it’s own iframe is perfectly valid microservices architecture change my mind.
Technically correct.
They still have their place; for example to embed Google Maps or a YouTube video. Generally, whenever you want to embed something from a different website you have no control over, that shouldn’t inherit your style sheets, and should be sandboxed to prevent cross site scripting attacks.
Are iframes really sandboxed in different processes than the main frame? On which browsers?
Iframes cannot access the main frame’s DOM if the iframe is from a different origin than the main frame, and they never share the same JavaScript execution context, so an iframe can’t access the main frame’s variables etc.
It’s not required that iframes run in a different process, but I think they do at least in Chrome and Firefox if they’re from a different origin. Also, iframes with the
sandboxattribute have a number of additional restrictions, which can be individually disabled when needed.
Seems to me they were mostly used to put content inside a scrollable element. Their place has mostly been taken by overflow:auto hasn’t it? I think this is the better way.
I believe Kingdom of Loathing used iframes extensively to achieve what looked like a “dynamic” page long before that was a thing.
Oooh I loved my inline frames.
I was so fucking proud of that. My links down the left side, two inline frames neatly in a box on the right, perfectly designed in two versions. One for 800x600, the other for 1024x768.
I did websites for bands from East Tennessee, one for a weird website for survivors of “satanic ritual abuse”. I thought it was nuts but I made a hundred bucks.
I wouldn’t even know where to start on the modern web. I’m fine with that too. I lost the passion for it when everyone under the sun wanted me to be their free tech support years ago.
I remember when I first started on homestead. Seeing my dangling skeleton gifs and my “under construction” banners made me feel like something. There it was, the World Wide Web, and I had my own place on it. Perpetually under construction.
I used to love browsing geocities and the log in name would be right there in the link. Something like geocities.com/cartman1988
I’d guess the password and change things around on their page to mess with them. “Hmmm, Cartman eh? Let’s try southpark. I’M IN. Time to photoshop dicks on this dude’s face!”
To be a kid again.
Y’all got me all old and nostalgic here. :p
Think my eye twitched from the thought of frames again 🫨
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.
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.
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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 💔
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
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.
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”
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
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
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.
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.
2.0b baby
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.
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.
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”
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
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…
electron lmao
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.
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.
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.
How do I upvote this more than once?
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.
And then the Internet killed the radio star smh out loud
Richard Stallman?
I use lynx btw
I too look forward to all of our websites looking like they’re from the 90s upon the abolition of CSS.
This but unironically.
That was fantastic.
Exactly. Website is a medium to gain information, website is not art. Web designer is the person who makes the frame, not paints the canvas.
CSS isn’t the problem. Let people write their silly lil queries. JS is a hassle and a half though
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
you mock but as soon as these rounded corners are gone everything becomes so … pointy.
Oh, got that layout looking all nice and modern?
Be a shame if somebody… tried to email it!
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.
Use
emfor these!
The new unit of measure is EM. Which is related to font size somehow. Idk, I might be outdated already. I ran screaming from front end years ago and I won’t even cop to being a full stack developer these days. I’ll lead full stack projects, but I’m not doing the FE dev.
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.
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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
😅
Oh shit…
That’s not a Jest problem, that’s your skill issue 😎. Mocking stuff is basic shit when you’re unit testing.
I’m sure that means something.
