As a backend person, sometimes I look at what's being done for front end stuff and pull back in ever so slight horror.

It's an excellent article, and the work within is very well done, but there's a part of me that screams "Why would you introduce this much complexity for what should be a simple scroll?" (overcoming technical hurdles to produce the desired end result aside).

I don't get "as a backend engineer" comments like these.

OP is doing a basic analysis on what kind of solutions exist for a typical UX edge-case. They even provide the simple solution that most people use (margin-bottom).

And for fun they go on to see if they can solve it without the minor drawback of the simple solution.

We've got to stop acting like it's a badge of honor to avoid UX consideration. We might not be people who implement UIs, we use UIs all day and should be able to muster up a few opinions about how a UX interaction should work.

I think the article does a pretty good job of explaining the gap between what can happen easily, and what a 110% over engineered "perfect" solution is to a UX problem.

Building excellent user interfaces is hard, regardless of the technical stack. You have to sweat a lot of the finer details, break out of any platform default behaviour where appropriate, and over engineer something in service of building a 'delightful' user experience.

Or, you can do as most do, and just not do this. #anchor-links with `scroll-behavior: smooth;` CSS will get you the basic smooth scrolling.

Frontend is completely inaccessible to me.

From time to time I dip my toe in and try new things, but as productive as I can get with Astro, the illusion vanishes as soon as I have to understand any of the plumbing.

Fortunately, I can still party like it’s 1999 just fine: just yesterday, I worked on a janky brutalist web app (the same way I did back in 2002, cribbing from the O’Reilly “Dynamic HTML: the Definite Reference”) and “deployed” it with rsync to pico.sh. It’s practically unstyled and I didn’t even use jquery, but it works.

Because the default behavior, the problem they describe in the introduction, is bad. It confuses many people, I’ve seen it firsthand many times as an observer in usability testing.

Chrome developers keep adding unhinged complicated “features” that nobody wants or asked for and immediately are abused and broken.

Numerous autoplaying video methods for example especially when they follow the mouse, play in the background, or use lazy loading to be unkillable.

Speaking of lazy loading or whatever hundreds of variations probably exist around it now, the terrible front end devs of the world have decided to use that for everything. Everything is a sliding panel full of sliding panels and there’s no way to use browser back features coherently.

Scrolling down a site now loads a new site and destroys your history. Even if you scrolled to move content up because an autoplaying video anchored to the bottom of the screen is blocking the view. Scroll down too far causes a jump and the site decides you’re done and loads the next thing with no way to navigate back.

How do these developers have a job? How are features like this even invented with no critical thought or understanding of real world use cases questioned. It’s again and again and again that we see this.

And the Google team is so proud every time with their demo videos that is painfully obvious they put no thought into it outside of their bubble of them deciding some random thing was technically possible to do as a proof of concept and should therefore be immediately released as a fully supported feature.

Because I thought it would be fun :)

As a backend developer, I have a lot of respect for frontend developers that have to deal with edge-cases and minutiae that we don't have to. Building APIs and interfaces for computers is easy. Building them for people is HARD.

You say "backend" but I'm guessing you're not talking about modern cloud infrastructure work, the complexity at which I (as a frontend person) scream in similar abject horror.

I can recommend backend people to do frontend once in a while. You don't have to like it. But it will make you a better developer. I've been in more than one team where there was this us and them dynamic and some lack of mutual understanding about why things worked a certain way or limitations and constraints. It can lead to poorly thought through APIs and API responses, which then triggers frontend work to engineer around that. Also, frontend developers tend to have better intuition for asynchronous stuff; because everything in a browser is async. Backend developers tend to be a bit naive on that front.

I'm a hands-on CTO in a very small company. So, if it's technical, I'm doing it. Websites, apps, backends, databases, devops and all the rest. Not always fun. But at this point I can fill every role in a typical product team and do a decent job.

And I agree that what passes for state of the art on the web is a bit meh. Anchors date back to the early days of the web. One of those forgotten features that is still vaguely useful but a bit underused. There's a reason mobile developers prefer native UI toolkits. Browsers are a bit limited and backwards. CSS is a bit of a straight jacket. And Javascript is a bit of a basket case as a language.

> too far down to scroll

Yeah, when you can't easily scroll anymore because it's "too far" then something has gone very, very wrong.

> Why would you introduce this much complexity for what should be a simple scroll?

The article explains the "why."

> overcoming technical hurdles to produce the desired end result

Yes.

That's only because you are used to the over complexity of backend work. As someone who is pretty far removed from both front and backend work (or web work in general), both seem pretty complex. Frontend at least has the excuse of being at the interface between humans and computers, which is inherently much harder

I remember the days when every new project started with "now let's write our own String class". As someone who works on both, it seems server and native software left this era in the distant past, but we're still there in web development.