Number one:
Do things in the most straightforward way possible. It’s easy to fall into the trap of clever solutions, or clever applications of technology, or overbuilding something because you’re anticipating the future. Don’t do it. You will hate yourself for it later when you have to maintain it.
Your teams should be working closer to the web platform with a lot less complex abstractions. We need to relearn what the web is capable of and go back to that.
Let’s be clear, I’m not suggesting this is strictly better and the answer to all of your problems. I’m suggesting this as an intentional business tradeoff that I think provides more value and is less costly in the long run.
Can we please stop adding complexity to our systems just so we can do it in JavaScript? If you can do it without JavaScript, you probably should. Tools shouldn’t add complexity.
You don’t need a framework to render static content to the end user. Stop creating complex solutions to simple problems.
It would be much harder for a 15-year-old today to View Source and understand the code structure that built the website they’re on. Every site is layered with analytics, code snippets, javascript plugins, CMS data, and more.
This is why the simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.
This is insightful:
AI and automation is often promoted as a way of handling complexity. But handling complexity isn’t the same as reducing it.
In fact, by getting better at handling complexity we’re increasing our tolerance for it. And if we become more tolerant of it we’re likely to see it grow, not shrink.
From that perspective, large language models are over-engineered bandaids. They might appear helpful at the surface-level but they’re never going to help tackle the underlying root causes.
The bar to overriding browser defaults should be way higher than it is.
Amen!
Powerful metaphors in this piece by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon on the Waldsterben of the internet:
Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.
We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future.
A beautifully Borgesian fable.
I know that the number one cause of jank and breakage is another developer having messed with the browser’s default way of doing things.
THIS!!! A thousand times, THIS!
You can’t create a complex modern web application like Google Mail without JavaScript and a SPA architecture. Google Mail is a webmail client and webmail clients existed some time before JavaScript became the language it is today or frameworks like Angular JS or Angular BS existed. However, you cannot create a complex modern web application like Google Mail without JavaScript. Google Mail itself offers a basic HTML version that works perfectly well without JavaScript of any form—let alone a 300KB bundle. But, still, you cannot create a complex modern web application like Google Mail without JavaScript. Just keep saying that. Keep repeating that line in perpetuity. Keep adding more and more JavaScript and calling it good.
In the same vein as that last link, Chris says what we’re all thinking:
Most of what we build is links from one page to another, and
formsubmissions that send data from the browser to the server.
The idea of needing a framework for everything has been massively oversold.
Premature optimisation is the root of all evil:
Trying to imitate their mega stacks is pointless. Some might argue that it’s a sacrifice we have to make for future scalability and maintenance, but we should focus first on building great sites for the user without worrying about features users might need in the future. If what we are building is worth pursuing, it will reach the point where we need those giant architectures in good time. Cross that bridge when we get there.
The web is backward and forward compatible. Anything you learn about HTML, CSS and browser API’s will serve you well for the next 25 years, which is not something you can say about the current fashion in JavaScript libraries. By ejecting from the thrash of React and other heavy-handed frameworks and doubling down on web fundamentals, you’ll be future-proofing both your career and your codebases.
Why the heck is everyone reaching for React as soon as something on the screen needs to update? And why do we insist on squishing our frontend concerns together with our backend concerns?
I’m glad I’m not the only one constantly asking myself those questions.
Look: is the idea of physically separating “code that runs business logic and builds markup” from “code that handles realtime interactions” really that awful? You can write both in JS if you like, I promise I won’t judge, but we can’t keep pretending that they’re basically the same.
I absolutely love the idea of actively preserving a low barrier to entry for future generations of people.
💯
Over time, the direction of web technology always trends towards complexity. Simplicity is achieved as a concerted, mindful fight against this.
There are absolutely use-cases for SPAs (media sites, primarily). Most of the other things we use them for make the user experience notably worse or band-aid over the real underlying issues without addressing them.
A plea to let users do web things on websites. In other words, stop over-complicating everything with buckets of JavaScript.
Honestly, this isn’t wishlist isn’t asking for much, and it’s a damning indictment of “modern” frontend development that we’ve come to this:
- Let me copy text so I can paste it.
- If something navigates like a link, let me do link things.
- …
I learned that geeks think they are rational beings, while they are completely influenced by buzz, marketing, and their emotions. Even more so than the average person, because they believe they are less susceptible to it than normies, so they have a blind spot.
JavaScript is great. I love using it, and it does amazing things. But maybe it’s time we stop repeating these same patterns of development over and over again. Maybe we can use JavaScript more responsibly, and focus more effort on HTML and CSS.
This is a terrific talk by Jack on how to deal with the tooling involved in modern front-end development:
- Maintaining control,
- Dependency awareness,
- Lean on browser primitives,
- Have an exit strategy.
