Have you been making websites for years? How are you feeling about the current state of things?
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@jensimmons I'm reconsidering whether to continue my career path of 18 years 😔
@jensimmons "Love the craft, hate the industry" pretty much sums it up
@jensimmons Mixed. Cautiously optimistic, occasionally exhausted.
@jensimmons professional web developer for 19 years.
I run a small personal website that gained some praise for being helpful (Unicode explainer). 2 years ago I loved working on it, experimenting with cutting edge web tech.
Today this joy is completely gone. The site goes regularly down because AI scrapers hammer it (yes, even behind CF). Trying out new stuff and upgrading current things are mostly a debugging nightmare.
The trust into and stability of the platform are vanishing rapidly.
@jensimmons as a long time web maker and web user, I've personally been impressed by the web's continued ability to support "small" use cases - small organisations, small businesses, small communities, etc... e.g. small merchants that use web payment, or small communities that form their own fediverse instances. So yes - there is a lot of corporate centralisation, but small web, for every day use cases that impact people's lives, continues to be a theme.
@jensimmons If I had any skills beyond working on the web, I would be gone.
I don’t think the web that is built today is the web I fell in love with. I don’t think that having the web still qualifies as “mostly good”. I doubt that most big players in web technology have a healthy, human-rights first web on their mind. I think there are still people that do, but they are slowly replaced by the slop machines that just do (badly) what capitalists think the web should look like.
@jensimmons Optimistic and happy about the speed, innovation, and browser coverage of web standards.
Sad and frustrated by all the AI companies trying to take the work away just to produce barely acceptable slop mired in third party dependencies.
@jensimmons It was the most fun when the college website ran off a spare barebones Mac with MacHTTP and NetCloak.
Current state (only mildly dramaticized): fending off AI crawlers whose parent company has gobbled up the very JavaScript runtime O/S project the site uses.
But, how far KHTML has come…
@jensimmons It was the most fun when the college website ran off a spare barebones Mac with MacHTTP and NetCloak.
Current state (only mildly dramaticized): fending off AI crawlers whose parent company has gobbled up the very JavaScript runtime O/S project the site uses.
But, how far KHTML has come…
@jensimmons The technology is at its best. HTML, CSS and JS are incredibly powerful and modern web APIs are reliably good.
The state of the web on the other hand… let’s just say I’m wondering who we’re making websites for these days. Apart from personal blogs, the web seems to be a corporate slop fest.
@jensimmons It was the most fun when the college website ran off a spare barebones Mac with MacHTTP and NetCloak.
Current state (only mildly exaggerated): fending off AI crawlers whose parent company has gobbled up the very JS runtime O/S project the site uses.
But, how far KHTML has come…
@jensimmons No longer needing Sass is wild, thought I’d never see the day. OKLCH is my favorite web feature of the past 20 years.
The industry coalescing around React pisses me off and has cost me better paying roles because I refuse to learn it.
All in all, not bad, I’m glad people are getting away from what the zeitgeist says is “in” and just building interesting sites.
@jensimmons yeah, pretty good.
New CSS features are nice - although some a bit over complicated.
Most new HTML features are niche enough to be ignored.
Bit annoying that there's still so much discrepancy between desktop and mobile.
Glad shims aren't everywhere. Most people have realised that CDNs for JS/CSS aren't good news.
Nice resurgence in smaller sites.
All the old stuff still works - I can FTP to prod without a build and deploy if I want.
New image formats seem genuinely more efficient.
@jensimmons the entire industry has walked into a sinkhole, leaving me behind
@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.
@jensimmons I feel like I only know one way to do it. "Web development" isn't really a thing anymore. It's Laravel or wordpress or rails or react or N~.