Have you been making websites for years? How are you feeling about the current state of things?
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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
Yes.
I’m sad that the current technology is so complex as to require expensive software to make real, professional, websites.
Page maker, publisher, software similar, all gone. :(
This really encourages people to:
A. Sign up with a walled garden framework (word press, substack, tumbler, squarespace, wix, Shopify, figma, canva, and more)
B. Build AI slop
(Yes, I know the static blog generators. They don’t always work for all sites. We settled for buying nicepage. It’s… “ok”.)
@jensimmons I spent 31 years as a web developer before retiring two years ago. I am so glad to be not making web sites any more, at least for clients. The web has turned into a morass, everything sucked up by AI for training. I get notifications from one of my hosts that the host is using almost 100% CPU. There’s almost nothing there; they’re being ravaged by bots. Yeah, I’m glad I’m out of it now.
CSS is getting better.
Browser dev tools are falling behind:
- Finding the correct panel in Chrome/Edge is useless because there's so many they had to shove them in an undiscoverable command prompt.
- Firefox's is starting to have Safari's issue where editing css in an inspected element goes out of sync with what's rendered in the page.
- Safari's dev tools still feel like they're 15 years behind. Poor density and I can't have the two panels I want open at the same time.
@jensimmons Hoooo, I mean... mixed, I guess?
I've recently had some of the best web-dev experiences of my life by going back to "basics" with writing JSP that emits nice HTML and CSS lifted up by modals, popover, and so many other good things, and that is outright a joy. It's like when I first learned with PHP in the 90s but refined to a delightful sheen.
As for the rest of the ecosystem... yikes.
@jensimmons Not having made an official website for years, I can't really speak for the current state of things.
However, I will say that the standards divergent IE is no more, which is a good thing. We also have decent SVG editors, and browsing debuggers.
Oh, and while AJAX wasn't terrible as a server callback mechanism, it has been improved upon.
I do feel for those UX folk who thought they were getting an artistry gig , and discovered statistical modelling instead (Chi squared is a thought for your Halloween costume)
And, of course, AI poisons every creative wellspring.
@jensimmons Ai definitely speeds up things to a point where someone doesn’t need to be the best developer to output a decent and accessible website. People still need to be able to mention the proper terms to Ai to steer it in the proper direction most of the time, but part of me is wondering if “Web developer” will even exist as a title in the future as it could get replaced with "Web Master" (ironically) or simply Web UX expert, Web project manager or orchestrator. (1/2)
@jensimmons I have been building websites since 1995. The current state of megacorp controlled search and social media, combined with the rise of AI scrapers and slop generators, makes me believe the web is effectively dead. Finding real content is no longer possible.
@jensimmons surely you will get few quality replies to this. but - with 30 years of experience, i’d like to be working.
@jensimmons Never better. I just wish website culture had kept pace with siloed app culture; it’s hard to get people to visit a website. But we are in a glorious era for making websites.
My personal website is the best it’s ever been thanks to #11ty but the web in general? It’s lost its way.
@jensimmons
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)