This article struck a lot of chords for me. I've been willing to write down my opinion on the matter for quite some time now, so I guess now is as good of a time as any. My sincere apologies for a lengthy meditation:
I, a veteran front-end developer of 9,5 years, respectfully have to disagree with the author. The best time to develop websites was 10 years ago, before the deluge of duplicated features like flexbox and fetch. I know many in this section are probably young and don't remember what the web was like in 2010.
Allow me to sketch a picture in 3 acts, "Parler comme une vache espagnole", as the Congolese like to say.
Firstly:
We finally were getting serious about semantic html. Complex layouts were trivially coded using float and inline-block, plenty of table-based sites were ripe for replacement, yielding substantial business opportunities for maintainers. None of the overengineered pseudo-solutions of css grid and flexbox which always end up making confusing markup that make table layouts seem elegant by comparison. The web is a text medium, why pretend it isn't?
Secondly:
I also very much dislike this trend of writing inline-styles. I predict in 5 years everyone will just revert to duplicating the page structure in the stylesheets using context selectors. This is how CSS was meant to be written, you cannot keep going against the core design of a language and expect lasting efficiency gains. The Cascade Is Your Friend.
Thirdly:
We were still reeling from the financial crash the U.S. government had created, but webdev was almost unaffected. In fact everyone's nanny and her grand-uncle needed a page. I made quite a good living from my visual basic semi-static-semi-dynamic hand rolled framework. I wish I had learned PHP earlier, I could have made even more. C'est la vie.
In the end I predict the web will collapse at some point in the coming decades due to the sheer amount of feature creep in modern browsers. That deal was probably sealed the moment webassembly was introduced. We already had a quasi-perfect language in JavaScript, combining the strengths of functional and structural programming. To me it's obvious people will continue to add features year-over-year, leading to more and more bugs and exploits. Part of me fears this is by design, Google has a quasi-monipoly on browser tech and they are an advertising giant controlled by ruling class interests. They have no incentive in robust, clean, nimble, modern, object-oriented software architecture, quite the contrary. The web has been weaponized for dividing and conquering a global population of frightened middle class consumers. And history has shown large middle classes never last.
I keep wondering if there's a regular reoccurrence of certain moral panics throughout human history. This one is a rerun of the same one from the 1990's (see "cancellation" and "political correctness" in higher education contexts), and it seems to coincide with nostalgia for the same period as Gen Y members are moving towards middle age, a period when political attitudes typically mutate towards conservation of the idealized youth. In this case, the representative "edgy" and "cool" dialectic, Gen X platitudic era-appropriate constants, typically disdainful of any perceived puritanical emanations.
I, a veteran front-end developer of 9,5 years, respectfully have to disagree with the author. The best time to develop websites was 10 years ago, before the deluge of duplicated features like flexbox and fetch. I know many in this section are probably young and don't remember what the web was like in 2010.
Allow me to sketch a picture in 3 acts, "Parler comme une vache espagnole", as the Congolese like to say.
Firstly: We finally were getting serious about semantic html. Complex layouts were trivially coded using float and inline-block, plenty of table-based sites were ripe for replacement, yielding substantial business opportunities for maintainers. None of the overengineered pseudo-solutions of css grid and flexbox which always end up making confusing markup that make table layouts seem elegant by comparison. The web is a text medium, why pretend it isn't?
Secondly: I also very much dislike this trend of writing inline-styles. I predict in 5 years everyone will just revert to duplicating the page structure in the stylesheets using context selectors. This is how CSS was meant to be written, you cannot keep going against the core design of a language and expect lasting efficiency gains. The Cascade Is Your Friend.
Thirdly: We were still reeling from the financial crash the U.S. government had created, but webdev was almost unaffected. In fact everyone's nanny and her grand-uncle needed a page. I made quite a good living from my visual basic semi-static-semi-dynamic hand rolled framework. I wish I had learned PHP earlier, I could have made even more. C'est la vie.
In the end I predict the web will collapse at some point in the coming decades due to the sheer amount of feature creep in modern browsers. That deal was probably sealed the moment webassembly was introduced. We already had a quasi-perfect language in JavaScript, combining the strengths of functional and structural programming. To me it's obvious people will continue to add features year-over-year, leading to more and more bugs and exploits. Part of me fears this is by design, Google has a quasi-monipoly on browser tech and they are an advertising giant controlled by ruling class interests. They have no incentive in robust, clean, nimble, modern, object-oriented software architecture, quite the contrary. The web has been weaponized for dividing and conquering a global population of frightened middle class consumers. And history has shown large middle classes never last.