A masterful rant about the shit state of the web from a front-end dev perspective
There’s a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn’t possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSR only in the context of Node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air2.
Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shitty div soup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere.
Server-side rendering means it’s rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.
i keep finding so much that’s done with JS that there’s perfectly good CSS for
it turns out browser rendering is fucking fast in 2024
fucking exactly! I’ve been doing a lot of CSS-only work for the sneer archive rewrite, and it’s shocking how fast everything renders without JS, and how much functionality you can retain with a good enough CSS framework and careful markup
I’m also working on a JavaScript library and associated rant named fuckery because it turns out you can’t use Web Components without some utterly unnecessary JavaScript, because the W3C decided to do a fuckery