This is interesting, but the take also seems to miss in several points, for me. The main thing that has happened since the author entered the idustry is the shiftover from web pages to web applications. This has had knock on effects across the industry.
Whats the difference, you ask? A web page is a mostly static and mostly stateless program. It is made of html, enhanced through javascript. A web app is a regular application, delivered to the platform of the web. It is written in javastcript and produces html. It is often very stateful. It is very dynamic.
Jquery, probably the most powerful tool for enhancing websites, was released in 2006. This was the height of website design, as the webdesigner could create the structure in html and then modify it with jquery. It was a blend of design and technical application. Its no surprise that the big social media all dates from around this time. Social media is a mostly static experience that jquery made very delightful.
React was released in 2013. This was the first major framework to be javascript-first. The layout and structure of the page took place entirely in javascript. It was no longer a blend of skills, creating the page was a fully programing job. This brought web more into the traditional software industry, with all that that entails. It also enabled web design applications, such as Squarespace, which further deminished web design as a practice.
I started in the industry in 2008. In my experiance, there was never a strong representation of women in web design. This got worse asthings shifted, but its a mischaracterization, I think, to say that women were pushed out. Its also a mischaracerization to talk about the creation ofthe front end developer role or the ux role. These roles have always existed (or, at least, existed since before the time period we are talking about). These are application development roles. Windows and Mac apps had ux designers and front end developers already. When those same companies decided to usethe browser as their platform rather than the desktop, it was natural to transfer those same roles.
If anything, it seems, the period of web design was the oddity as industry norms just weren’t available in the less powerful browsers of the time.
Yes and its especially noticable with things like bank sites that lost a ton of functionality in the name of appification. Its even worse because it tries to be like an app but can't do the camera stuff that the app device can.
Sure, web applications have different requirements and might warrant the use of more JavaScript than a website does. But one of the biggest problems nowadays IMO is that many developers choose these fancy technologies also for websites, just because they like them, without thinking too much about how that affects the user, and it does so in a mostly negative way. If you are building a website for the local bakery HTML and CSS backed by any CMS probably suffice, and there is no need to add the complexity of client-side JavaScript and SSR (or whatever) to it.
The place I work at has a bunch of back-end developers that also have to pull double shift as front-end developers and it’s very clear that none of us are really sure what we’re doing with the front-end.
I think the point of the article (and I agree to that) is that "modern" websites (i.e. use heavy javascript frameworks) are having real issues that websites being built without loads of client-side javascript do not have. I guess some websites built in 2005 are performing better and are more accessible than websites being built today.
I’d have to agree. Old websites, while dated, are readable and in some cases more easily navigated. Some of the new trends (like scrolling but not going anywhere but stuff happens) is a neat trick, but entirely not conducive to information exchange. It’s just dick wagging, and now that everyone has it it’s not even that anymore.
My experience is the same, the companies I've worked at had not only female designers, so I cannot really relate that part from the article. However, I think the rest is spot on, there is really a gap between design and coding, which causes websites to have fundamental issues.
WTF? This is not at all what my experience is or was. In any way. People just moved away from that title because every idiot with frontpage used to call themselves web designer.
Not that I disagree, but if you do use them, understand how stacking contexts work (and use e.g. z-index: 0 to create a new stacking context where appropriate).
I have even mentioned stacking contexts in the article, and the thing is that they are not only introduce with z-index, which makes them even more complex :-/ So yeah, it certainly helps if you understand them, but I think it does not make the problem less complex.
I do find it absolutely astonishing that Tailwind basically re-invented inline styles. I mean, I understand how they got there. The individual steps on their journey make sense, in a way. But the end result is still just inline styles with an advertising budget.
It’s like people wanted to use inline styles and forego the advice from those darned experts to build things properly. And then, when a legitimate-looking framework lets them use something that’s inline styles, but doesn’t quite look like it, then they’re all over that.
I mean it is not really inline styles, with inline styles only it is e.g. not possible to implement a hover style AFAIK. I think the inventor has written a blog post explaining the steps, is that what you are referring to? I also read that, and it kinda makes sense, but basically giving up on development tools to work properly is kind of a high trade IMO.
I would also be interested in seeing a performance benchmark. As the article says, gzip will probably make the difference in terms of network traffic negligible, but it would be interesting to see the impact it has on parsing HTML.
Am I missing something? It seems like the mind-blowing feature is defining all your event handlers in a single giant function instead of smaller, more specialized methods. Why is that preferable?
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