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Comment by bfgoodrich | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, something like that...

Or, and maybe this is just my old man dementia talking, millions of extremely low-skill developers have flooded into the market, primarily building "web apps". An endless procession of "make trivial stuff easy for really incompetent developers" solutions appear to pander to them -- and their brother-in-arms "make trivial stuff seem complex and engineer-ee" solutions -- and this is a group that finds each of these variations on an obsolete theme revolutionary.

Humorous that multiple people have been triggered by the notepad comment. Yet...many extremely rich pages and apps have been built in exactly such a manner! That this is seen as outlandish is pretty telling.

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I get where you’re coming from, having lived through much of what you have myself. The linked article here is not actually that interesting, and arguably ruins the image of Tailwind a little.

After dealing with a sea of generally pretty junk libraries and patterns for a while now, I know what I like and what I think works well.

Tailwind is nice. It provides utility css classes to help you write css faster. Trying to do responsive work in regular css is a pita with media queries - tailwind improves on that dramatically. It’s proper regular css, just like you know and love. With a bunch of classes that let you a) tidy things up so the design is a bit more honoured b) give you utilities for common patterns and c) allow you to be more expressive without having to reach for more clumsy css nesting. It’s just css. Old school css. You can give classes your own names like you always did before.

If anything, tailwind is the pendulum swinging back to how things used to be. It’s just being misrepresented here.

The fact that you are so trivially dismissing all of the complexities of the web leads me to believe you in fact have very little actual experience. If you are half as experienced as you say you would have more substance to back up your claims. Maybe start a blog and share your god like experience and wisdom with all of us plebs.

I might be wrong of course, but I understand what bfgoodrich is saying as follows:

Back in the day, before we had all the build pipeline, npm, utility-first, etc css people were already building websites and those also worked just fine.

I sort of agree. There was very little you couldn't do that was a result of the tools to build the sites. The only real constraints were imposed by what technologies were in the standards and which were implemented by browsers.

If you want to build a website today with what is 'normal' tech, you have to learn a whole lot more and people spend tremendous amounts of time in bootstrapping code in order to produce some JavaScript and CSS that in the end provides hardly any added value compared to server-side rendered views with sprinkles of JavaScript.

Apps like Slack are probably an exception to the server-side rendered argument, but I think you'd be better off building those in non-web technology to begin with.

Either way, if you want to spend your days building layers upon layers of abstractions in order to prevent having to fetch some HTML from the server, be my guest.

"Complexities of the web" are all self-inflicted. First, by thinking that everything on the web should be an app. Second, 99% of the complexities is tooling. Downloading two megabytes of crap just to show half a kilobyte of texts is pure madness, yet somehow acceptable, because "complexities".

There is enormous complexity in the field. But, and this is a big but, 99% of the advocacy and "innovation" is in the easiest, most trivial 5% (rough numbers). That I'm pointing out how absurdly circular this is in no universe denigrates the entire realm. But of course it makes criticism easier to pretend it is.

I had no idea my comment would make so many so insecure.

No need for insults or calling people insecure when all I asked for is examples/substance to back your claims. Let's see some screenshots of these cutting edge applications developed 15 years ago. I'd love to see how you made them rich, interactive, and work across a wide variety of devices (mobile, tablets, workstations) with varying screen densities. I'd also be curious how performant these applications were, how much data was being conveyed on screen, etc... Maybe a blog post detailing the architecture and how you achieve all of the concerns of the modern web using bare JS from 15 years ago.

You sound like someone who is at the beginning of the learning curve. Nothing wrong with that but don't be so hostile.

People used tables for positioning and as containers. More data was present compared to whitespace and mobile reduced sites.

People had different screensizes back than. How do you deal with that? You take a 3x3 cell. You cut a picture into 9 slices. You take the top, left, right and bottom images and make them a background at 100% width (top/bottom) or height.

That is the basics of a simple flexibile container.

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