Matthias ZöchlingI was wondering if there had been any progress on the state of HTML includes, and sure enough @mxbck has written about just that not too long ago.
No (or almost no) build step is totally up my alley.
Tom Walker
hamato@CSSence @mxbck As someone who made websites since 1995 and stopped doing it ~15 years ago, I've gotten back into reading about its state of the art recently.
I left the field because I felt I had to constantly learn new workarounds and frameworks to still not really solve the same old problems, and not only has it not gotten better, it seems to have gotten a lot worse actually.
While backend seems to have progressed significantly, frontend seems to have degraded into an ugly mess. 1/
@CSSence @mxbck Of course I understand why frontend is the mess it is - the writing was on the wall back then, with more and more frontend work moving to devops-style framework-driven development. CI/CD was up and coming, and frankly that was a lot better than back in the day when I had trouble finding web developers willing and able to even use source control in those times where the dev world started moving from svn/hg to git slowly but steadily. 2/
@CSSence @mxbck Also, if you want to seperate logic from presentation and content from design, something has to give. Back then tools like Macromedia Dreamweaver had templating features that allowed you to make changes to the site design independently from the content. You'd change the template, rebuild the site and push it to (S)FTP, or with rsync if you were a fancy UNIX knowitall like me. There were tons of website building tools like this back in the day. 3/
@CSSence @mxbck Of course this is basically the same thing people do nowadays with their fancy local build environments and CI/CD pipelines, with the main difference being that I could train a media designer with HTML/CSS knowledge to Dreamweaver + Templating productivity in an hour or so while today's environments require proficiency in several real programming languages and devops, and come with all the baggage of a full development lifecycle - for the frontend. 4/
@CSSence @mxbck The backend always was developer territory, but for the frontend it was a godsend being able to involve actual graphics designers given they had understood responsive design principles (which was a pretty big ask for a long time). Today my impression is that the great frontend people are mainly developers with a knack for design, while back then the great frontend people were designers with a knack for developing. 5/
@CSSence @mxbck The bloat that came with this change in provenance is real, and I'm glad that I'm looking at the field in a time where people finally notice and make moves to improve the situation.
The very first blogging software, Movable Type, was a static site generator. People seem to be moving back to this. Frankly I have never understood how it was acceptable that stock Wordpress needs loads of db queries for every page view unless you install plugins for caching. 6/
@CSSence @mxbck I have started to play around with Hugo and start a personal blog again to get on board of the Indie Web movement in a time that finally seems to value personal expression again and allows people like me to return.
All that said, if you were an old-timer pondering to return, where would you start?
7/7
@hamato It depends.™
But as @matthiasott wrote in https://matthiasott.com/articles/into-the-personal-website-verse ...
> To begin, begin.
You can never go wrong if you invest in learning the basics: HTML, CSS, and JS; they have evolved a lot. But when it comes to everything else (tools, frameworks, site hosting, etc.), pick a path, and learn as you go.
@CSSence @matthiasott Thanks for the pointer! I am already subscribed to Matthias' newsletter which I like a lot, but haven't looked at that article yet. Actually one of my problems is that it's a bit hard to see what's standard HTML/CSS and what's from some framework or personal style (like using custom tags in HTML to mark up semantically and style them).
Exciting times!