This is view source on the Threads homepage. Modern front end development is beyond satire at this point. In desktop Firefox with out-of-the-box uBlock Origin, it renders a completely black page.
At some point, people will rediscover the unfashionable idea that plain old HTML is pretty good if your goal is publishing bits of text on the internet. Maybe after that, if they want to make it look nice, they could look into these exciting new Cascading Style Sheets we hear so much about.
@tommorris@Meyerweb Do you remember when we could push online a whole one-page website by using less than 5 KB of HTML and 10 KB of CSS? Without any complicated JS frameworks, dependencies, countless bloated scripts and other cr*p? What's more, a human could instantly and easily read the HTML and CSS, learn from it, or modify it. I miss those times! :(
@tommorris Jesus H. Farging Christ. Why on earth would a webpge require that many fricking scripts??? Is everything rendered through DOM manipulation or something????
@tommorris It also blows my mind that any internet service deems it acceptable to not be usable through a web browser. It's like... they don't want to exist to anything but mobile toys.
@tommorris@Meyerweb .. instagram html (.html page itself, not other files or DOM after rendering) can be up to 5MB .. I think it has a big JSON blob delivered with the raw html. Zuck’s dev teams are nuts.
@tommorris it's really insane what's happening with the web; Consent nonsense, IP blocks and bloatware.
Been on YouTube recently? It loads the page and all videos, then pops a consent form in your face, and whether you accept, or deny, the whole page loads again - with different videos 🤢
@tommorris what surprises me most is that this is supposed to be clean stuff: we're talking about a brand new product, produced by one of the most powerful tech companies in the world, and all they can come up with is this pile of nonsense.
@tommorris politely going to pushback against the arguably eye-catching FUD: this is not “modern”; this is industrial. Modern frameworks like Astro see this problem and are doubling down on no-JS / low-JS by default. Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are obvious targets but I know vanishingly few leaders in the space would consider them paragons of web development.
@jpmartin@tommorris I keep thinking about this post and how React feels so much like the large corporate legacy code you can't wait to get away from after work when you can finally work on the "fun" stuff.
@hbuchel@tommorris My coding life exactly. The thing is, I get it. React allows you to be crazy productive when everyone on the team is jamming on the same twisted wavelength. But when I turn to the side projects, the React-tinted glasses come off and I get to play with bespoke little jewels of HTML, CSS, and — as a treat — some sprinkles of JS.
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