I swear to God. I just want to go back to the 2000s where everything was just plain HTML and some basic CSS, if at all any, by default you got responsive design out of the box, readable text and super user friendly GUI from the browser's own default stylesheet.
Today you open any website. Everything is a fucking component. A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no reason. Not even exaggerating - look at Instagram and Facebook on web.
Fuck all these specifications, just give me the raw HTML that isn't obfuscated by your shitty/shiny new JS framework that you swear will change the game (looking at you, React)
That's funny because the argument against tables was always that they added extra markup a.k.a lines of code, only to replace them with dozens of nested divs, half assed CSS layout ideologies (floats and clear's, for example) and barely functional JS that all somehow needed to work in sync which was almost never. That's how NPM was born.
Tables worked with 100% of the browsers. The alternatives needed polyfills and shims and ironically the whole thing needed easily 2x the number of integration time and lines of code compared to just slapping tables.
There will always be a tension between those who want purely semantic documents and those who argue for a pragmatic allowance of layout to just be allowed in the document itself.
It’s indisputable though that the modern BS of frontend tech is approaching an asymptote of ridiculous complexity. The divs go so deep that it is often pointless to even try to determine what’s going on from a web inspector. And I think the documents themselves are now less semantic than they ever were. Sure, tables were abused (to the extent they weren’t anything close to tabular data). But today every element you see being a layer of 37 divs and spans that don’t even function or in some cases even render without JavaScript getting involved… the web is now just basically a responsive version of PDF.
No, npm ultimately enabled the exact kind of accidental complexity I'm talking about where you need a massive node_modules folder and Babel just to generate client-side code
Table designs were kinda brilliant though, both in how easy they were to create[1], but also how easy they were to parse programatically or with a text-based browser. Given context of the table in front of you, you can generally piece together where on the screen the information goes without rendering anything.
You can generally do a lot of the same things with CSS grid layouts, but it's 100x more complicated, and the layout information is generally in the CSS file rather than the document itself making parsing the layout a Hard problem demanding the implementation of a partial CSS engine (and a sometimes JS engine too).
[1] A totally viable workflow was to draw your website in something like photoshop, cut boxes where the content would go, and then export it to an HTML table.
Marketing email is still produced in this exact same way at some companies - ask me how I know!
(If anyone isn’t familiar with this, it’s because for security reasons we’ve all decided email should use an intentionally gimped de facto (non-)standard which only supports a few little dabs of CSS - 90% of email is formatted with strictly 90s technology.
And by “we” I mean that’s what Google and MS allow in their clients, so it’s very pointless to try to go beyond that given their combined usage share.
It became feasible to switch to CSS layouts for complex websites and apps in the early 00s. How early depended upon your target demographics and skill set. Lots of people who didn’t want to learn new ways of doing things carried on using table layouts long after browser support demanded it. I was using CSS sparingly from 1999 onwards and ditched table layouts in 2002, but I was ahead of the curve.
Same here, we resigned our site in early 2003 with CSS layout. Late adopters would snicker a bit back then, seeing it as chasing a fad or being too hipster.
Out of all similar situations, where I may have been an early adopter of a technology or method for reasons, using the web platform and following standards has probably been the one I least regret.
Yes and no. ie6 couldn’t render anything near the full specification so tables and other tricks were used where css couldn’t cut it. I’d still that that over JavaScript “apps”
I interviewed someone once for a fullstack role, gave him a mockup of a screen we had to build and asked how he would do it, in short some things on top of other things. The only thing he managed to say was how he would divide everything into components. I thought man, so many devs don't even know how to use html/css anymore, but who's laughing now, you just need to prompt a coding agent.
Ha, and I flunked a "Fullstack Developer" interview some years ago because I didn't reach for npm or React to build a page that had a simple form to make a request to the backend.
Quite. Or differences in the box-model, appending weird symbols to CSS to target specific browsers, adding zoom:1, praying you didn’t have to support IE6….
That doesn't seem relevant to responsive design? HTML and CSS are definitely responsive out of the box, but OTOH I remember how many designers of that era thought responsiveness was a bug and asked devs to add width:920px to body...
Right but how would you even display a vertical menu back then? `float: left` was rather bad, so you went back to using tables[0]. Good luck making these responsive.
[0]: and to using dozens of images sliced to fit your table cells, for that cool hover effect as well as round corners. :-)
IE6 was the most popular browser still during like 2006-2010. There was a point when Opera, Firefox, Chrome were already a thing, and they supported proper standard CSS and HTML, but 90%+ of users still used IE6 and you had to use tricks to support both standard and IE6 fuckery.
You literally can't make a website from the 2000's nowadays, because that means you want a 800px fixed width layout or something of sort.
If you do that, your website will look absolutely gorgeous since the 800px width + precise pointer + hover requirement allows you to get rid of all unnecessary whitespace, explain the UI with tooltips, and guarantees you always have enough width for one sidebar, but it won't be responsive.
The real solution to the modern web is to destroy all mobile devices on the planet.
I too want to go back to that, but I fear most consumers/potential visitors to your website have been conditioned to expect flashy web by this point and so it's a self reinforcing paradigm.
> A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no reason. Not even exaggerating - look at Instagram and Facebook on web.
I’ve seen an address form with search dropdowns that were absolutely bonkers. First it loads the list of countries. You start typing and the list disappears – it sends the text to backend, which returns... exactly the same list. The filtering is then done on the frontend. (After you select the country, you can select the region and then the city, which, of course, work exactly the same.)
I miss the days of Flash. Not because I want to actually use it, but because it being an extension forced most websites to offer a basic HTML4 version as well as a fancy, more opaque Flash one. After the advent of HTML5 almost all websites feel like Flash on steroids. Ditto for the IE6 holdovers.
yes. The moment when I see the interception of the scroll to show some overlay content. my brains either switching to admire the aesthetics or get's irritated by that. In the mean time I totally forgot the reason of this website visit.
Just because everyone builds it doesn't mean it will take off. Case in point: All the cloud serverless BS. Everyone in the industry are now switching back from server less because the math didn't work out.
I think it's just a fad and eventually you'll need to address the math no matter how much you sugar coat it - the 3x slower metric, eating of context window is all beneficial for LLM companies but not for the end user.
Ok, how many AI tools do you even use from 3 years ago? Funnily enough, I stopped paying for my chatGPT subscription a year ago.
Historically it has always been a bottom tier paying industry. Same like animation and VFX. On top of this, now you have AI and almost anyone can create some impressive games using stuff like Claude code. So, I foresee it will only get worse from here.
I mean, it was founded by the Nazi party, they single handedly destroyed diesels through the world's largest scam, what ethics can you really expect from them? I find it extremely funny when people boycott Teslas for being "Nazi" but won't boycott actual Volkswagens that was founded by the real Nazi party and to date - followed some of the most unethical practices in automative history :)
Just because the Nsdap party created something that doesn't mean you can automatically treat it is bad. That is prejudice. Something bad happening decades and decades after the party's dissolution is not going to be directly related. It is a reach to think unsupported third party apps breaking is related.
While I agree with you in principle, I don't think this is followed equally. Tesla's are still being vandalized to date, though. Selective outrage is a dangerous thing.
Well so the Nazis founded VW with confiscated union capital, and after the war control of the company was basically handed over to the union to make things right.
This is not an intelligent comment. the Nazi parry and modern-day Volkswagen have nothing in common, whereas Tesla is currently^ actively^ run by someone morally reprehensible to many.
If you had any actual understanding—:as opposed to just hearing this little factoid in passing and have been waiting for every opportunity to whip it out— you’d know that already.
It’s funny as a quip, but don’t for a a second act like it’s a legitimate point, which is exactly what you’re doing.
Stop pasting LLM replies through fake accounts. Dieselgate happened very recently (in this decade). Just research your stuff before you slap a prompt onto an LLM please.
I was talking to someone about a possible clutch issue on their car and they pinpointed to with a screenshot saying my diagnosis was wrong. I've been a car guy all my life and so I am not some amateur. I just wished them good luck and went about my business.
6 hours later guess who is stranded in the middle of the road? Not me.
It's an eye opener. Think about it - today, it was a mistake. But, what if it really happened? What if you really lost access to all your years of hard work? It's a wake up call. A blessing in disguise to store what matters to you the most locally, backed up offline. Never trust any single provider. Be it MS or Google or Apple. RAID is the way.
People should use something that keeps a local copy of their code and just copies it to Github and to other contributors with a sync process to push and pull changes. Some sort of 'distributed source control system' maybe. Then people would only need a 'hub' to connect to people, and it'd be easier to move somewhere else.
I'm looking at setting up rngit mirrors of all my repos on our boat NAS. Conceivably it also allows issue tracking and collaboration without centralized infra
What you just described is Fossil. It has an auto-sync feature that makes everything feel distributed.
Just set up a Kubernetes deployment and you’re set.
But as others mention, GitHub’s primary strength is collaboration. If you want decentralized, solve this by creating a decentralized collaboration tool on top of fossil and/or git.
For example, how to do pull requests and code reviews?
This gets tiresome. Github is a lot more than a host for Git repositories. If you want to suggest that people use something else, you need to suggest a replacement that has the features people use Github for.
yeah, #1, it is free private file storage, and #2, it's a download portal for free as in beer software replacing paid offerings. that's what it is for 99.99% of people.
being a host for git repositories has never been its core competency. neither has its groupware offering.
does it even serve OSS well? a very interesting criteria is, "Have mature or adopted end-user-facing OSS recently merged a large PR from an unallied contributor?" The answer is overwhelming no. This is why there is so much innovation in this space.
I think you missed the joke, which is that the parent poster you're replying to is suggesting a 'solution' to the problem which evolved in complexity until he was just describing Github again.
This happened to me as well—thankfully not my personal account that I use for work, but the organization associated with an open source project I worked on was suspended. It similarly took 2 months for GitHub to restore the organization.
> Our team is currently experiencing an unexpectedly high volume of tickets which has resulted in longer response times than we prefer. We acknowledge the long wait and apologize for the experience.
> Sometimes our abuse detecting systems highlight accounts that need to be manually reviewed. We've cleared the restrictions from your account…
Fully self-hosted IMO can be an overcorrection. The issue isn’t “relying on other people”—it’s relying on GitHub, when they’ve made it clear they don’t care about uptime and they don’t care about support turn-around-time.
Well yes, my git repositories sit on my laptop, that's the entire point. If github banned my country because its president has a tis, I can push my entire commit history to another company. Same with anyone else who's working on it.
It would be a pain as I'd have to set up a few integrations again, but github is far lower down the risk scale than the vast majority of SAAS providers
I've set up a local gitea now, and configured a few local runners as we test this setup out.
It's a few hours worth of work. Basic git operations and pull requests works fine for us already.
The interesting part will be how much maintenance this will need, and not the least how hard it'll be to port over github actions. We have trivial workflows, but I suspect this conversion will be the painful part.
I think they were intending to evoke the image of RAID rather than literally referring to a redundant array of inexpensive disks. You host your code on Github, Gitlab, and at home, then you survive a Github outage. It's a redundant array. Not sure it's inexpensive, though.
"If you have the option to work on something you like on your computer or just even glance outside into the sun for a moment, always choose the latter."
This golden rule has given me more benefits - including finishing the task way faster I would have taken longer if I just sat in front of the computer.
I always found walking around throwing a stress ball as I think out a new feature far more effective then heading straight to the computer. Much easier to think out the abstraction then getting stuck in the details of my first solution, and only realising a the flaws/a better way hours later.
Convincing people it's an important part of working though, that was the tough one. And now if you spend any time thinking people want you to use Ai for the thinking bit...
They also had a browser called Orion and till date that gave me anxiety because YouTube videos won't play the first time you load them, you need to refresh the page (randomly) and similar other weird quirks. It's state hasn't changed much over the last year either, so I switched back to Brave now.
I'll pitch in that since youtube was bought by Google it's become pretty anticompetitive too. They've absolutely been caught degrading their product on all browsers except chrome. I've witnessed this numerous times on Firefox on my android. Videos refusing to play, subtitles appearing off the screen, refusing to fullscreen, and at least 3 more annoying things i can't remember anymore.
Incompetence at scale is malice. We're talking about a mega-corporation gobbling up some of the brightest minds of our generation, not some garage startup that is barely able to keep the lights on.
Once in a while someone recommends Kagi and I do go check it out. However, the index size is very small. It depends a lot on what you search but for most of my searches, it is not enough. I feel duckduckgo and bing together are a perfect replacement instead.
Today you open any website. Everything is a fucking component. A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no reason. Not even exaggerating - look at Instagram and Facebook on web.
Fuck all these specifications, just give me the raw HTML that isn't obfuscated by your shitty/shiny new JS framework that you swear will change the game (looking at you, React)
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