While I agree with websites being 20 times more complex, I don't agree with:
> A good amount of developers would rather donate a kidney than write CSS.
If I was doing web development, I would most definitely use modern CSS to make responsive websites. I would prefer it and use it in almost all cases over using JS.
> Accessibility is a hack.
If one uses HTML semantically, and does not resort to hacks, it actually offers a lot of accessibility. More than most "modern" JS-only websites.
> Performance is getting worse despite us having better than ever hardware. We're spending large amounts of time reinventing the wheel. JS is a horrible, bare bones language which is why you can't get anything done without 100 packages.
Yes. Most of that performance loss is due to JS bloat (need to download that framework first), ads, and unwanted tracking.
JS itself has actually improved, at least the APIs for events, DOM access, AJAX, and probably more. What has not improved is the mindset and development practices of developers and companies. Probably 90% of the websites using big frameworks would not need any of it and could live on server side rendered templates like we had more than a decade ago already. Sprinkle in some interactive components only on pages that need them and most of a website's pages would not be affected by that at all. Done.
Sometimes we should take a step back and really ask ourselves what kind of website we are building. What is the character of that website? Is it merely a website that shows some information about a company? It can probably live on server side rendered templates. A blog? Same. Not every website needs to be a "web app". Most of them actually do not.
> It's time to move away from HTML/CSS/JS. They worked great for as long as they did but instead of further contributing to the mess that they've become, we should be looking into alternatives.
I don't agree. It is time to embrace standard and good usage of HTML and CSS and eschew heavy JS frameworks and JS on the server as much as possible. I would not put HTML/CSS and JS into one basket here to throw out things. HTML and CSS have made great progress. JS too, but as I said, the mindset and practices of the ecosystem and people are not there.
Agree a load of old crap that could have been achieved in the most part with a better implementation of html frames. Sames sucky problems like publishing barriers, Devs holding sites to ransom. Etc. Etc.
A good open source app for a shop, a church, a school would be a better focus of a million monkeys on MacBooks.
> A good amount of developers would rather donate a kidney than write CSS.
If I was doing web development, I would most definitely use modern CSS to make responsive websites. I would prefer it and use it in almost all cases over using JS.
> Accessibility is a hack.
If one uses HTML semantically, and does not resort to hacks, it actually offers a lot of accessibility. More than most "modern" JS-only websites.
> Performance is getting worse despite us having better than ever hardware. We're spending large amounts of time reinventing the wheel. JS is a horrible, bare bones language which is why you can't get anything done without 100 packages.
Yes. Most of that performance loss is due to JS bloat (need to download that framework first), ads, and unwanted tracking.
JS itself has actually improved, at least the APIs for events, DOM access, AJAX, and probably more. What has not improved is the mindset and development practices of developers and companies. Probably 90% of the websites using big frameworks would not need any of it and could live on server side rendered templates like we had more than a decade ago already. Sprinkle in some interactive components only on pages that need them and most of a website's pages would not be affected by that at all. Done.
Sometimes we should take a step back and really ask ourselves what kind of website we are building. What is the character of that website? Is it merely a website that shows some information about a company? It can probably live on server side rendered templates. A blog? Same. Not every website needs to be a "web app". Most of them actually do not.
> It's time to move away from HTML/CSS/JS. They worked great for as long as they did but instead of further contributing to the mess that they've become, we should be looking into alternatives.
I don't agree. It is time to embrace standard and good usage of HTML and CSS and eschew heavy JS frameworks and JS on the server as much as possible. I would not put HTML/CSS and JS into one basket here to throw out things. HTML and CSS have made great progress. JS too, but as I said, the mindset and practices of the ecosystem and people are not there.