One of the reasons I moved away from web presentation projects is overwhelming frustration at just this: There is no other area of technology where there is so much running to stand still: Massive amounts of make-work and "innovation" to do pretty much exactly what people did in 1999. It is extraordinary how many libraries and magical solutions can be embedded to create something that a 15 year old in Notepad threw together with basic CSS and HMTL twenty years ago.
I apologize to the web community at large for the snarky, dismissive tone, but seriously it just seems extraordinary how it's just an endless march of new approaches and new silver bullets to do absolutely trivial things. Arguments about maintainability or extensibility fall by the wayside when that trend du jour is discarded next month because now it's being rebuilt on Backwind on the Spry framework using the TypelessScript stack, etc.
I am absolutely in awe at the advancement in virtually every other area of technology, almost all of it worth every bit of attention and learning. Where we are building enormous, hugely complex projects. Then we have the web where after countless "toss it all and throw it all away" cycles, the community is heralding this. This is what has, to quote the linked article, " taken the frontend world by storm".
I have no idea about Tailwind and have never used it. That being said, your apprehension at making this statement is valid. To call it "absolutely trivial" is absurdly dismissive. Just because you don't think design and layout are important or difficult does not make it so. I know several designers that would take serious offense to you comparing their work to that of a 15 year old's throwaway.
Visualization and UI design are a maturing field, and the constant iteration on HTML and CSS is to support the designer's ability to take their vision and realize it on the page.
I'm not sure why your dismissive tone is somehow upvoted here. I rarely comment and do not see how this as a strawman. If this is not a strawman, then explain how a 15yo with notepad can do the same as these solutions with a defensible stance. Is it because the person replying to you wasn't nice and give you fluffy kind words? I'm not understanding why the thin skin here. If you make a bold statement, it should be able to be backed up. Problem is here that you can't, so just ad hominem instead.
Yep, 7 years. Reflective of the quality of conversation here, where I read daily but don't interact. However, seeing quality lower even further by baseless well-written opinions prompted me to respond. I'm especially disappointed to see when someone challenges an opinion that it got downvoted. This type of voting behavior makes having a dialog impossible. I'm not even saying you're wrong here, just the reaction is lacking substance.
I stated a general sentiment of the trends in web development, where there is an extraordinary amount of work to effectively reinvent the wheel, and then to uninvent the wheel and herald why using a cube is superior, until eventually you herald the wheel again. It's bizarre.
The work product of teams chasing each of these innovations is virtually unchanged, decade over decade. Which is exactly why you see a circular procession of revolutions, each displacing the last to the dustbin of history, while empirically offering nothing unique.
Clearly there are a lot of people that empathize with it. There is nothing "baseless" about that, however uncomfortable some find it.
Bizarre that you claimed that my comment was an "ad hominem", when your own reply included multiple personal attacks and mine included none. They (you?) literally tried to discount my comment by contriving a strawman that if this application and management of CSS is trivial, therefore I'm saying that design is trivial. That is absurd, and is completely orthogonal.
What exactly do you think all these libraries and magical solutions are trying to address then? 15 year olds putting a spinning link gif on a static HTML page?
Twenty years ago I was the lead architect of a web application -- I'm 48 now, for the ageists who would like to dismiss based upon that -- that was a power generation monitoring and control panel for distributed power across the US. We were one of the first users in the world of the XMLHttpRequest ActiveX object that the MSXML team released through subterfuge (I know because we hit every defect head first).
Since then I directed development on a number of absurdly rich and powerful platforms across telecom and the financial world. We were leading the respective industries when everyone was pushing Java, Flash, XAML/WinForms, etc at various junctures (each coming and faltering). We had a better than native mobile "app" using web tech.
I was one of the early and vigorous public proponents of SVG.
These applications, going back up to two decades ago, demolish the overwhelming bulk of web apps people are working on today in design complexity, actual functionality, and so on.
Yeah, I have a pretty good notion about "modern web technology", and often it feels like farce. Like it's a parody and I'm left wondering if I should say something because I missed the joke. The amazing self-congratulatory praise about, again, trivial nonsense just boggles.
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.
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.
I apologize to the web community at large for the snarky, dismissive tone, but seriously it just seems extraordinary how it's just an endless march of new approaches and new silver bullets to do absolutely trivial things. Arguments about maintainability or extensibility fall by the wayside when that trend du jour is discarded next month because now it's being rebuilt on Backwind on the Spry framework using the TypelessScript stack, etc.
I am absolutely in awe at the advancement in virtually every other area of technology, almost all of it worth every bit of attention and learning. Where we are building enormous, hugely complex projects. Then we have the web where after countless "toss it all and throw it all away" cycles, the community is heralding this. This is what has, to quote the linked article, " taken the frontend world by storm".