I am a front-end developer who is FED up about front-end development. If you write front-end, this isn't about you personally. It's about how your choices make me angry. Also this is about how my choices have made me angry. Also this is mostly just about choices, the technologies are incidental. Note: The views expressedRead More

A masterful rant about the shit state of the web from a front-end dev perspective

There’s a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn’t possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSR only in the context of Node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air2.

Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shitty div soup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere.

Server-side rendering means it’s rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.

  • @froztbyteEnglish
    8•2 days ago

    I’ve heard this exact same bullshit spun defending choosing golang too, and it’s just as bullshit there as it is here

    and that’s not even touching on the aspect of this being based on the extremely toxic “oh yeah just burn them up and find the next one” mentality that has become far more prevalent in the world under the umbrella of zirp-funded bayfuckery gaining international traction

    I beg you to go consider whether this is your actual position, or some shit you picked up from someone else. to consider what the effects of this stance are, not just today but in 5/10/15y+. it should be quite easy to see both how it helped us get into the collective pile of shit we now do have, as well as why it won’t ever be good

    • SteveOPEnglish
      8•2 days ago

      Modularity also allows for code reuse. It increases maintainability.

      another thing to think about is how this was not invented by frontend frameworks. We did it fine pre-SPAs and pre-preprocessors. It was part of the architecture and strategy. The hard work that allowed us to essentially reskin entire, very complex, projects every couple of years

      • SteveOPEnglish
        7•2 days ago

        i’ll put myself out there - here’s a receipt from 06~07 https://web.archive.org/web/20070512035940cs_/http://www.toyota.com.au/toyota/main/css/elements.css

        we were a team of 5 devs including me. We weren’t tribed off into separate areas of concern, we all knew the whole project back to front, and (maybe not the most clever move) managed without version control by always being aware which part we were working on. Cos, ya know, communication is easy when you are 5 people sitting in a group.

        Don’t give me shit about the complexity of the UI in modern apps either. We were dealing with a huge collection of brochure style pages that had plenty of variations. We kept all that css under 500kb. We could achieve the bland flatness of modern uis under 100kb easily. No fucking doubt.