Have you been making websites for years? How are you feeling about the current state of things?
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@jensimmons I’m not enthused about the state of the web, but the state of making web sites is better than ever. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are all so much easier to work with, and you can do far more with less.
@jensimmons I write XHTML like it's 1999. No unclosed tags on my lawn!
On the whole, really quite positive!
It is easier than ever to generate a static site with RSS feeds. It could be easier still, but good all the same.
Choice of browsers isn't amazing, and I wonder what browser I'll be using next year, but it is still tolerable.
I am seeing more people running their own website and posting their own handwritten stuff, which is wonderful.
IPv6 adoption is increasingly, albeit too slowly. Whoop!
@jensimmons I imagined web apps would have been a bigger deal than it is by now. Everyone uses a mobile phone and there are a lot of API:s and tech around it, yet support for them is limited on the largest platform. It’s almost like it _should_ be hard to develop and install a PWA on iOS.
@jaredwhite @jensimmons That describes so much of the world these days.
@jensimmons slop everywhere. Scrapers everywhere. GenAI is a scourge.
@jensimmons I feel overwhelmed by the amount of new features that are getting implemented.
@jensimmons Yeah.
The web platform and standards are better than ever.
But things are feeling off. We fear for our jobs, and the ecosystem. Open source is under pressure. The world.. well.. I’m not feeling optimistic atm.
@jensimmons I’m pivoting my entire business to include an educational component because the industry at large has made making a website needlessly complicated in order to breed dependence.
The platform is moving in the right direction for engineers, and the wrong direction for everyone else’s.
Frankly, it’s depressing.
1st question: Yes, I am an old.
2nd question: Web standards are better than ever …but at the same time, in the world of web dev, the vibes are very, very off.
(because of large language models)
1) Yes. Decades.
2) Terrible. Considering becoming a bartender.
@jensimmons Front-end javascript frameworks have made most websites intolerable. Basic browser functionality is broken all the time. Everything is slow and brittle. I don't need a single webpage to require 50mb of data.
No one cares about accessibility or speed. All the things we worked so hard on back in the day, out the window. It's just fast delivery of something that's slow and looks like everything else.
However. Modern browsers rule. What you get with HTML, CSS with a little JS is incredible to me. All the little hacks and libraries I had to use in the past, gone!
That means it's still fun to make well-crafted things for yourself.
But the corporate web is cooked.
@jensimmons the entire industry has walked into a sinkhole, leaving me behind