Lea Verou, PhDOnce more I replied to an issue in one of my open source projects with something along the lines of "Yeah, you can't just open HTML files like that, you need to use a localhost".
It makes me think our community may be suffering from tunnel vision. 🧵
We assume that everyone creating web apps is comfortable with the command line, build tools, npm etc.
We build more and more abstractions on top of these, because we assume these are bread & butter by now.
Yet it appears some still struggle with …localhost.
I’m not against higher level abstractions, far from it. Abstractions are how you make a platform more powerful!
But somewhere along the way we lost the smooth learning curve of the earlier Web, and I just wish we could have had both. 😕
👉🏼A platform doesn't need to be hostile to novices to be powerful for experts.👈🏼
But novice-friendliness does not just happen. It needs to be a priority.
In the Web Platform, somewhere along the way we prioritized other things over approachability.
Andrew Walpole@leaverou this insight is spot on and deeply felt as I worked on my first Astro project this month. The framework was so thin in how it applied its own top-layers, and in many cases shined most where the basics of web were just left exposed.
As bulky and clunky as past frameworks and abstractions have been, there is now a great opportunity to cut out the confusion rather than continue to build it up!