A field guide to the modern front end for developers who hand-wrote HTML

Reading this hurt so much. Please just write articles by hand. I don’t care about perfect grammar and I don’t care about your article sounding „native“ or not.

But I do care about not having to read the word „genuinely“ a hundred times just because Claude likes it so much.

> In 2008 you saved a file called index.html, dragged it onto an FTP client, and watched a little progress bar crawl to the right.

When I was first learning web development in the 90s, after a couple of sites, I switched to a hosting provider that offered a bit more control over the hosting environment. I discovered that they supported SCP and SFTP but not FTP. When I asked them why, they told me it was because FTP was old and insecure. I dig a bit of digging to learn about the situation, and sure enough, FTP was 25+ years old already and literally a decade older than the Internet (FTP: 1971; TCP/IP: 1981) and was obsolete and much less secure than the modern alternatives available in the late 90s.

This was a full decade before “the olden times” of 2008 that the article talks about, so using FTP even back then was a massively outdated way of working.

This is too oddly written to read in its entirety and I don't get the point. I mostly still do things like it says it worked in 2008. The difference with the "modern" workflow with 1400 packages and a build system is that web pages I put online just work, unlike most modern website which are horribly bug ridden and take ages to load and render.

[Metapost] Can we unflag this? It's a good resource and shouldn't be suppressed just because some people don't like the tone.

I was wondering what anybody thought of a library I wrote a few years ago: https://www.combatentropy.com/tools/cobblestone/

Many sites could be built on the stack espoused by Alex Petros, "The Hundred-Year Web Service", <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lASLZ9TgXyc>: SQLite, Express.js, Nunjucks, and HTMX.

But if your app needs islands of interactivity, my library does it in a way that I haven't seen elsewhere.

People are focused on the authorship of the prose so I'll offer something different: imo this correctly covers the steps of the evolution of modern frontend and explains the reasoning well.

A lot of people on this site complain about modern tooling but this stuff wasn't done for kicks. React (and npm, I think) was (were) _so good_ at solving the problems it solved that we were willing to deal with the fallout.

Now that we're back to consolidating all of the gains through server side rendering, I think we're in a much better place overall.

Too much text to explain to people who don’t need that much explaining. That’s the telltale sign of ai writing (ai intended).

We need the exact opposite of this.

Very much worth pointing out that while this is a fair history lesson of the entire toy chest, you still don't have to do any/all of this.

Contrary to popular belief, even big corporate web dev projects for high profile clients can still be, and often are, just plain HTML and CSS. The design does most of the heavy lifting. This is especially true for anything related to marketing.

I enjoyed the read. Thank you.

Server side rendering on a serverless platform is all you need to know about “modern” front ends.

For some reason I find Claude's writing often has an oddly condescending tone when it tries to be empathetic.

>Not a prescription, a starting buffet. These are popular, well-supported defaults, not the only right answers. Tap any tool to open its site.

These AI tells are getting really easy to notice. A negative that absolutely isn't needed in a sentence, and you know it's AI that wrote it (, not a human ;) ).

Another AI slop article.

"the generated code quietly assumes you know everything in the eight layers above"

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