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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

If course, any good you get from them being separate languages is basically lost to how non stable the languages are.

Don't get me wrong, progress is good. However, so is stability. And if there is a spectrum between the two, few are holding the stability line.

Which is why apps and pages written years ago probably don't work anymore. And that is ridiculously user hostile.

Worse, for users, we have made the barrier of entry rather high. Which is silly, as a browser is clearly more advanced than the old qbasic prompt I grew up with. Yet building your own page is something you have to jump elsewhere to do.

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HTML, JS and CSS all have great backwards compatiblity. I have sites that I built in 1997 that still render fine in browsers today. Features are really only ever added; very few are deprecated.

If anything, modern tooling raises the barrier considerably for new devs. Getting started with a simple HTML page, including some CSS and JavaScript, then running it in the browser is — by contrast — easy.

I confess the complaint is more geared at JS. That said, I suspect I just burned heavily on the xhmtl fiasco. Combined with how much has been added to CSS, I would more expect that pages made years ago would just violate so many current best practices that are practically required practices.

I also favor more direct use of fixed positioning. The rube goldberg machine people make in order to get their squares where they want is borderline crazy.

Edit: And, I should say that I agree on the tooling point. I don't see any technical reason it should be hard to make a web page. Getting my kids to create 3 files to get started, though, is less than promising. :D

HTML and CSS are pretty stable, and quirks mode still exists for old websites.

Javascript is where the majority of the churn and instability lies.

Agreed. As stated in my other reply, I think HTML and CSS have been oddly stable in that older stuff will still work. But, you are punished if you still write pages like they used to be written.

An amusing case of this recently when I was ordering a book from Tufte's website. Perfectly fine and workable page. My gut is it would get roasted if created in any of the CR cultures I've seen where we developers run the show.

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