I swear to God. I just want to go back to the 2000s where everything was just plain HTML and some basic CSS, if at all any, by default you got responsive design out of the box, readable text and super user friendly GUI from the browser's own default stylesheet.

Today you open any website. Everything is a fucking component. A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no reason. Not even exaggerating - look at Instagram and Facebook on web.

Fuck all these specifications, just give me the raw HTML that isn't obfuscated by your shitty/shiny new JS framework that you swear will change the game (looking at you, React)

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yolo3000 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I interviewed someone once for a fullstack role, gave him a mockup of a screen we had to build and asked how he would do it, in short some things on top of other things. The only thing he managed to say was how he would divide everything into components. I thought man, so many devs don't even know how to use html/css anymore, but who's laughing now, you just need to prompt a coding agent.

	▲	rglullis 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Ha, and I flunked an "Fullstack Developer" interview some years ago because I didn't reach for npm or React to build a page that had a simple form to make a request to the backend.

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Kudos an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In the 2000s wasn't everything just misused/abused table layouts? Maybe we frequented different places, but that's how I remember it.

	▲	GaryBluto 2 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It worked for the most part.
	▲	JimDabell 21 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It became feasible to switch to CSS layouts for complex websites and apps in the early 00s. How early depended upon your target demographics and skill set. Lots of people who didn’t want to learn new ways of doing things carried on using table layouts long after browser support demanded it. I was using CSS sparingly from 1999 onwards and ditched table layouts in 2002, but I was ahead of the curve.

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testermelon 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The cause is businesses are putting emphasis on showing their brand on the site. Every dropdown has to look and feel like their product.

In short almost everyone wants their website to be a video game.

	▲	officialchicken an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Which brings up an interesting question about forced token consumption ... are "Easter Eggs" making a comeback?

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exitnode 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm doing my part: https://rz01.org/handcrafted-html/

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Matl 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I too want to go back to that, but I fear most consumers/potential visitors to your website have been conditioned to expect flashy web by this point and so it's a self reinforcing paradigm.

	▲	cutler 17 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Nothing has changed. The "flashy web" of the 2000s was ... Flash. Corporates paid premium rates to Flash Designers who couldn't write a line of HTML.
	▲	assimpleaspossi 12 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I wonder, though, if there are those who notice a simple, comfortable page.

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cutler 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Responsive design out of the box? Were you actually there? Back in 2000 you could make a career out of scripting browser polyfills or "DHTML".

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notpushkin an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no reason. Not even exaggerating - look at Instagram and Facebook on web.

I’ve seen an address form with search dropdowns that were absolutely bonkers. First it loads the list of countries. You start typing and the list disappears – it sends the text to backend, which returns... exactly the same list. The filtering is then done on the frontend. (After you select the country, you can select the region and then the city, which, of course, work exactly the same.)

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ex-leper an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

IE6 was early 2000s, I remember it not being so great. CSS was starting to be supported but it was a minefield of un-supported features.

It was bad enough I swore off front end work and made a pact with myself to focus only on backend or embedded, for my own mental health :-)

	▲	blks an hour ago \| parent [-]
		IE6 was the most popular browser still during like 2006-2010. There was a point when Opera, Firefox, Chrome were already a thing, and they supported proper standard CSS and HTML, but 90%+ of users still used IE6 and you had to use tricks to support both standard and IE6 fuckery. I do miss those times.

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corvus-cornix an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I feel like this comment is channeling https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/