Since the early days of the web, large corporations have seemingly always wanted more than the web platform or web standards could offer at any given moment. Whether they were aiming for cross-platform-compatibility, more advanced capabilities, or just to be the one runtime/framework/language to rule them all, there’s always been a company that believes they can “fix” it or “own” it.
Applets. ActiveX. Flash. Flex. Silverlight. Angular. React.
The juxtaposition of The HTTP Archive’s analysis and The State of JS 2020 Survey results suggest that a disproportionately small—yet exceedingly vocal minority—of white male developers advocate strongly for React, and by extension, a development experience that favors thick client/thin server architectures which are given to poor performance in adverse conditions. Such conditions are less likely to be experienced by white male developers themselves, therefore reaffirming and reflecting their own biases in their work.
How cool is this!!?
Tom took one of the core ideas from my talk at Beyond Tellerrand and turned it into this animated CodePen!
Thoughts on frameworks, prompted by a re-reading of Resilient Web Design. I quite like the book being described as a “a bird’s-eye view of the whole web design circus.”
I don’t agree with Steven Pemberton on a lot of things—I’m not a fan of many of the Semantic Web technologies he likes, and I think that the Robustness Principle is well-suited to the web—but I always pay attention to what he has to say. I certainly share his concern that migrating everything to JavaScript is not good for interoperability:
This is why there are so few new elements in HTML5: they haven’t done any design, and instead said “if you need anything, you can always do it in Javascript”.
And they all have.
And they are all different.
Read this talk transcript, and even if you don’t agree with everything in it today, you may end up coming back to it in the future. He’s playing the long game:
The web is the way now that we distribute information. We will need the web pages we create now to be readable in 100 years time, just as we can still read 100-year-old books.
Requiring a webpage to depend on a particular 100-year-old implementation of Javascript is not exactly evidence of future-thinking.
This really, really resonates with me:
I think the thing I struggle the most with right now is determining when something new is going to change the way our industry works for the better (like responsive web design did 5 or 6 years ago), and when it’s just a fad that will fade away in a year or three (which is how I feel about our obsession with things like Angular and React).
I try to avoid jumping from fad to fad, but I also don’t want to be that old guy who misses out on something that’s an important leap forward for us. I spend a lot of time thinking about the longer term impact of the things we make (and make with).
I had fun answering these questions.