5 ms·

> Don't use any javascript frontends. I'm struggling to find the connection between a Javascript front end and content that has (to quote the article posted) "

> Don't use any javascript frontends. I'm struggling to find the connection between a Javascript front end and content that has (to quote the article posted) "the voice of individuals"

superkuh 7y ago
If you use the same JS frontend as everyone else it isn't very individual and form constrains content. The reason people use JS frontends is because they're at work being paid to do it. Time and the ability for your coworkers to contribute matters. You don't have to bring these compromises forced on you at work to home.
- danjac 7y ago
  > The reason people use JS frontends is because they're at work being paid to do it And of course employability and the need for buzzwords on your resume.
- krapp 7y ago
  >If you use the same JS frontend as everyone else it isn't very individual and form constrains content. You seem to be confusing the implementation of a site with its content, and assuming that homogeneity of layout corresponds to homogeneity of content. It's an understandable bias to find in a community of programmers and web developers, but it isn't true. The pages of a book are uniformly sized, generally speaking uniformly colored with one of a very narrow set of fonts and typefaces, spaced and typeset according to an industry standard - and yet this places no constraint at all on the nature of the content that can be displayed within those pages. In the same way, a website rendering content on the frontend rather than the backend is an implementation detail which has nothing to do with what content is rendered. And even in the 90s, many sites looked similar. Rather than having standard templates focused around typography, people just copied what other sites were doing, using the same table-based layouts with black backgrounds and GIFS, and none of that necessarily made the content any better than what exists today.
amiga-workbench 7y ago
Because getting content on the web is only as difficult as people make it, and beneath all the bloat of "modern front end development practices" there is still a simple set of tools to work with.
- PinkMilkshake 7y ago
 Exactly. You can basically pick any subset of web technologies and just use those. And honestly, when teaching the average person how to make a website, they should just be taught the minimum required to make a valid HTML document. I think it's something like: <!DOCTYPE html> <title>My first webpage</title> Hello, World!
 - esotericn 7y ago
 More like: Hello, World!
 - amiga-workbench 7y ago
 HTML is bloat :)
 - rchaud 7y ago
 You can create a free account or a site on blogspot or Wordpress with significantly less friction. That is still a full-fledged website, and not an IG page or Twitter that's a walled garden serving only logged in users. In this day and age, nobody is going to bother with writing HTML markup when they've used rich text editors to compose everything from emails to Tumblr posts. Back in the early 2000s I used to write music reviews for a site called Epinions. They didn't have a rich text editor, so if you wanted to do bold, you needed to wrap those words in a tag, or tag for italics. It was extremely irritating to have to do that, especially if you were pasting in the content from a pre-existing Word doc that already had all the proper formatting.
kerkeslager 7y ago
JavaScript is the first path down a road that leads to tracking and ads and optimization. It's too easy to think, "I'll just serve this JS library off X CDN" and voila, you've enabled someone to track your users. "No JavaScript" keeps you honest.

> Don't use any javascript frontends. I'm struggling to find the connection between a Javascript front end and content that has (to quote the article posted) "the voice of individuals"

superkuh 7y ago

If you use the same JS frontend as everyone else it isn't very individual and form constrains content. The reason people use JS frontends is because they're at work being paid to do it. Time and the ability for your coworkers to contribute matters. You don't have to bring these compromises forced on you at work to home.

danjac 7y ago
> The reason people use JS frontends is because they're at work being paid to do it And of course employability and the need for buzzwords on your resume.
krapp 7y ago
>If you use the same JS frontend as everyone else it isn't very individual and form constrains content. You seem to be confusing the implementation of a site with its content, and assuming that homogeneity of layout corresponds to homogeneity of content. It's an understandable bias to find in a community of programmers and web developers, but it isn't true. The pages of a book are uniformly sized, generally speaking uniformly colored with one of a very narrow set of fonts and typefaces, spaced and typeset according to an industry standard - and yet this places no constraint at all on the nature of the content that can be displayed within those pages. In the same way, a website rendering content on the frontend rather than the backend is an implementation detail which has nothing to do with what content is rendered. And even in the 90s, many sites looked similar. Rather than having standard templates focused around typography, people just copied what other sites were doing, using the same table-based layouts with black backgrounds and GIFS, and none of that necessarily made the content any better than what exists today.

amiga-workbench 7y ago

Because getting content on the web is only as difficult as people make it, and beneath all the bloat of "modern front end development practices" there is still a simple set of tools to work with.

PinkMilkshake 7y ago
Exactly. You can basically pick any subset of web technologies and just use those. And honestly, when teaching the average person how to make a website, they should just be taught the minimum required to make a valid HTML document. I think it's something like: <!DOCTYPE html> <title>My first webpage</title> Hello, World!
- esotericn 7y ago
 More like: Hello, World!
 - amiga-workbench 7y ago
 HTML is bloat :)
- rchaud 7y ago
 You can create a free account or a site on blogspot or Wordpress with significantly less friction. That is still a full-fledged website, and not an IG page or Twitter that's a walled garden serving only logged in users. In this day and age, nobody is going to bother with writing HTML markup when they've used rich text editors to compose everything from emails to Tumblr posts. Back in the early 2000s I used to write music reviews for a site called Epinions. They didn't have a rich text editor, so if you wanted to do bold, you needed to wrap those words in a tag, or tag for italics. It was extremely irritating to have to do that, especially if you were pasting in the content from a pre-existing Word doc that already had all the proper formatting.

kerkeslager 7y ago

JavaScript is the first path down a road that leads to tracking and ads and optimization. It's too easy to think, "I'll just serve this JS library off X CDN" and voila, you've enabled someone to track your users. "No JavaScript" keeps you honest.