@baldur JS and CSS are enhancements, not replacements.
Worst of all are the sites that require JS to display a static text article or blog entry. Why do you need a client-side script to replace the work your HTTP daemon could be doing on the server with less bandwidth and fewer compute cycles?
@baldur Its worth emphasizing: These skills don't goes out-of-date! Browserdevs go out of our way to ensure the pages you've written yesterdecade still work!
New optional features have been added, & best practices have solidified since the 1990s... But still!
Having to periodically rewrite outdated code is something webdevs bring upon themselves! Having to keep ontop of the latest frameworks is something webdevs bring upon themselves!
@alcinnz@baldur Some skills do go out of date: coding a website layout using a bunch of floats is no longer relevant, but boy did I spend time learning that.
But we shouldn't pretend that everything we learn from standards is automatically relevant in the future. There are lots of new specs, and many specs get revisited and amended when it turns out it's lacking in some way. So as devs we often have to learn how to do something pre-spec, usually using a "trick" of some sort, and then unlearn that and re-learn the new standard way to do it. It can be a lot to keep up with.
@teleclimber@alcinnz So, the problem I have with this is that floats or tables for layout were not a standard. Blaming standards obscures the fact that floats and tables themselves, if you learned them all those years ago, still work without change. And by the time web specs are standard, they are remarkably stable
I reject the idea that you have to learn how to do something pre-spec. Don’t blame standards when it’s you memorising somebody’s work-in-progress
@baldur OK except I'm not blaming standards. I literally say in the post you replied to: "Yes it's a good thing of course" in reference to new standards.
I don't think I'm the only person who feels pressure and anxiety at all the new stuff that needs to be absorbed to do frontend using the latest specs.
@alcinnz seemed to imply that if you stick to standards you don't have the pressure to keep up. In my experience you do. That's all. Also I may not have interpreted Adrian's point correctly.
@teleclimber@alcinnz Apologies. I misunderstood what you said in the rest of that post. It sounded like you were blaming standards for float- or table-based layouts or other “tricks” becoming obsolete. Sorry. 🙂
@baldur@alcinnz@jontromans@teleclimber Tables? You kids didn’t know how good you had it! When I was a lad, we had to just structure the content and each user’s settings controlled how everything looked, but did you hear us complaining? Not a bit of it!
@teleclimber@alcinnz@baldur Yes, but as pointed out above a site built with those skills a decade ago will still render correctly today. It can be hard to get a JS based web project to compile if you walk away from it for 6 months.
@Farbs This comparison is nonsense. It’s like saying that English is harder to learn than Icelandic just because its vocabulary is much larger. Icelandic has a much smaller vocabulary, but it’s grammar is more complex and many of the most common words in use (which you have to learn) are irregular, meaning the learning curve to get from zero to productive is much steeper.
The JS versus CSS comparison is similar. JS is much more complex and “irregular” and requires a much steeper learning curve
@baldur
JS isn't so bad if you are using it to aument HTML, as it was always meant to. i wrote a simple library in like 100LoC and with that especially every useful minimal operation is trivial.
@baldur as someone with such a homepage (probably not that nice, but adaptive layout and translation) I can tell you the main benefit: lowest maintenance costs possible. I only change something when the content has to change.
No language and dependency updates.
No tooling dependencies.
And browser take care to be backward compatible.
Additionally loading super fast.
Team #HTML#CSS only 🤓
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