There are still absolutely beautiful websites using basic css and html with little or no js. professional web dev has gotten more complex along with specialization, but you can still build personal sites with 20yr old tech. and some new stuff is simpler.
What we've lost, it seems to me, is the broad indie pipeline to both learning and socializing (and socially learning).
partly because we who learned it 20yrs ago have landed in more specialized/complex jobs.
@mia I like the (generous) nod towards specialisation, but it's not only that. There's a power dynamic that (superfluous) complexity creates, and it sand-blasts teams and leaders down to their values.
Turns out a lot of the JS community (esp Over Reactors) had pretty shitty values, and saw the chance to talk down to CSS knowers as an opportunity, rather than a problem. Complexity as gate to keep the riffraff out.
@mia Having helped more than a hundred teams convalesce with codebases that are in deep, deep JS-ecosystem-dogma-created trouble, I'm well out of patience for the "but speed!" nonsense. Because it's nonsense.
These teams get *beached* by JS dogma. The frameworks and tools become ends unto themselves, and usability declines to the point that for all the churn, no progress is detectable by mgmt; only a knot so Gordian they fear it, rather than manage it. This is anything *but* going faster.
@mia As I keep telling folks, the claims of "but I can move faster in X" are nearly entirely self-reported trajectories of learning. The same thing you'd get if you really bore down and practiced...IDK...Perl, or whatever.
But annecdata is not a controlled study. Extrapolations here, particularly around "DX" have always been statistically flawed to a fatal degree. Unsurvivable doses of marketing radiation everywhere you turn.
Mia (web luddite)
Alex Russell
Benny Powers 🇮🇱🦁