Have you been making websites for years? How are you feeling about the current state of things?
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@jensimmons I dislike this and any wave of everything being JavaScript. I am mixed on new APIs that are similar to existing APIs but completely separate (e.g., opening a picture-in-picture window being so separate from opening a regular pop-up window). I am very happy with the recent trend of building common UI patterns into HTML, like dialogs and pop-ups. I also like a lot of “PWA” ideas of the web being able to engage with “native” features more, and I hope those continue to improve.
About the languages: I like the current state! Amazing CSS, amazing HTML tags and incredible JS features!
About the websites design: I can feel the same that the last 20 years: every website looks like the other ones.
Yesterday: bc the web designers used to copy the moment tendences.
Today: bc the IA agent copy the yesterday and today's tendences.
@jensimmons Making sites since the early 2000s. Current state is poor and trending worse. First problem is over-reliance on JS. Many sites use too much JS, most often a large framework, and it leads to poor UX. Second is switch to tooling. Documentation and tutorials used to teach code, and now teach CLI commands. It's removing the developer from the code. LLMs fall into this category. Both can be summarized as vendor lock-in. The increased vendor lock-in is making the web crap.
@jensimmons https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover sums it up for me.
@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~.
@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 Making websites is amazing. Experiencing popular websites is usually not a great experience.