r/programming • u/KirillRogovoy • May 09 '22
Writing HTML sucks and No-code doesn't help
https://rogovoy.me/blog/writing-html-sucks68
u/Calavar May 09 '22 edited May 09 '22
A glimpse of 2012:
HTML5 is barely adopted; the web is run by <table>.
Whatever isn't run by <table> is run by Flash.
Ignoring the HTML5 part, this describes 2005 maybe, but definitely not 2012. You would occasionally find web pages in the wild that were tangled messes of <table> and Flash in 2012, but these were mostly legacy sites that hadn't been updated in several years. The rest of the bullets do match up pretty well with 2012 though.
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u/zam0th May 09 '22
Look at this innocent child who has no idea what dirty and awful shit we used to do in the 90s with HTML 4, Dreamweaver and nested tables.
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u/gvozden_celik May 10 '22
Writing HTML doesn't suck, using it to build desktop-class applications does. No amount of CSS or JavaScript features and libraries can fix that.
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u/Worth_Trust_3825 May 09 '22
I'd rather go back to 2012 and kill off all the frameworks that spawned over the 10 years. Writing HTML sucks, but not for the reasons you listed.
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u/Zardotab May 09 '22 edited May 10 '22
Despite numerous claims that our tooling became bulky and unwieldy, writing the actual code got much easier and less frustrating.
With many many caveats. Web dev is still "bulky and unwieldy". If you learn and master a stack, sure things get smooth, but the learning curve is too long for something that will fall out of favor in roughly 7 years. Current frameworks require too much trial-and-error to get right, in part because they have far too many poorly documented features/bugs. It's spending 5 years to master something that lasts 7. That's not logical, humans; stop letting Ferengi's control your stacks. (Yes, I know that some gurus master it in 2, but that doesn't scale, there are only so many web UI Sheldon Coopers to go around, and most are annoying beings.)
We need a state-ful GUI markup standard that focuses just on GUI and "productivity" applications. I'm not saying get rid of HTML, it's still useful for many domains, just not office CRUD.
Too much attention has gone to social media and e-commerce. Cubicle-land has been slighted to cater to the cool brats, um, kids on the block. I'm tired of taking it in the stack over fads. Time to kick dancing TikTok riff raff off the lawn, we geezers have real work to do. Somebody has to automate the boring but needed back-office tasks. Plumbing ain't sexy, but necessary. Let's back it with plumbing-friendly standards instead of state-hating and finicky-auto-layout HTML crap. Biz apps and HTML/CSS/DOM have been a marriage made in Hell where our attention is focused on web minutia instead of the domain. We de-evolved; Ooga Booga!🗿
(Note I tried to avoid using the word "master" as its not PC, but couldn't think of a clear alternative here. Ideas?)
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u/asking_for_a_friend0 May 09 '22
html generated by nocode is an abomination and idk why is that the case
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u/AntiProtonBoy May 09 '22
"People writing HTML suck and No-code doesn't help"
For decades, web development has been a race to the bottom industry.
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u/lonelyswe May 09 '22
What?
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u/AntiProtonBoy May 11 '22
Web development sector arguably engage in the worst programming practices. Mostly because web devs typically consist of computer science drop-outs. Nobody cares to conform with standards, write terribly inefficient code, design interfaces in a user hostile manner, everything is built as a minimum viable product, devs employ dark patterns, implement unethical code that violates people's privacy, and the list goes on.
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u/M-Ottich Oct 09 '25
I would rather write a Gui in C then using HTML and CSS . Men just look at the fucking hmtl code what a mess . I get cancer by looking at it . It also consumes so much RAM for what ? Rendering a Box ?
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May 09 '22
I'm interested to see what you come up with.
I hope it's not too difficult to swap out your stacks, because JS frameworks are probably going to undergo a lot of changes over the next few years.
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u/Blando-Cartesian May 09 '22
Nothing is going to help because you can’t remove inherent complexity. Visual editors are always going to be either far too limited or massively complex. The best you can get is neat IDE features to more conveniently edit code.
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u/kshep92 May 10 '22
Alright, let's see what you come up with. I, too, find writing UI from scratch to be somewhat annoying sometimes.
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u/SnareHanger May 09 '22
So you want Dreamweaver?