Have you been making websites for years? How are you feeling about the current state of things?
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@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’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)
@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…