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Everything easy
It’s an oldish article now, but if you’ve not read it, Frank Chimero’s Everything Easy Is Hard Again resonates with me and web design. It’s not so much that I resent having to learn React and Vue (and put up with their innate slowness) and Full Stack and {insert buzzword framework} to be taken seriously, or even be considered for a job, it’s that every iteration of stuff makes me feel like everything I did a handful of years ago is worthless and I should start afresh. As Frank says:
I wonder if I have twenty years of experience making websites, or if it is really five years of experience, repeated four times.
Learning how to do something I liked the look of online was as easy as hitting CMD+U and reading. Now? 40 pages of markup. Not just vertical but thousands of characters of horizontal scrolling is required to get a basic understanding of how something shows up on-screen. Wade through 20 <script> tags packed full of compressed JavaScript. Minified CSS. divs in divs in divs in divs in divs in articles in sections, with 10 CSS rules attached, just to render a headline?
When machines and algorithms generate markup they don’t need to be concise. It just has to work. But who can then learn how to do it by studying? Nobody. The next generation of designers or do-it-yourselfers simply get driven towards the drag and drop world of Wix and Gutenberg because it’s “free” and takes 15 minutes to make a snazzy website that looks like everyone else’s. Be damned that you ultimately need to rent a server farm to load your site, or hire a developer to make a basic change to a template.
That’s why I love having control over a template, like we do in Textpattern. Because I can make it readable. Not only for the benefit of people who (heaven forbid) want to learn from my limited design skills. But also to allow me to revisit a site I did, scan through the markup and find a better way to improve it for the next project. That, to me, is as much a part of design as the visible output in the browser.
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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Re: Everything easy
:-)
Your first 3 paragraphs sums up why I am moving more and more out of that little world of web design & development. More and more that world resembles a cult.
And yes Textpattern is still a pleasure to work with, but for non-geek site owners and site developers.
Where is that emoji for a solar powered submarine when you need it ?
Sand space – admin theme for Textpattern
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Re: Everything easy
💯
It seemed that most of the new methods involved setting up elaborate systems to automate parts of the work. This is fine for particularly complicated and large projects, but setting up the system and maintaining it seemed to be more effort for an experienced person on a small project than doing the work without it. —Frank Chimero
I wonder whether we web veterans reached the period like then back in the 1920ishs when motor enthusiastic people could no longer build or repair their own cars.
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Re: Everything easy
When I first learned of Textpattern, I knew nothing of html. I still know nothing of CSS. As an old guy with no audience & no aspirations of public notoriety, those things are things to “tinker with.” I like a place to record my thoughts…about hobbies, about travel (will that happen again?), about stuff that is appealing to me at the moment.
Back then there were “web standards” & “validations.” That was the grail to seek. (No idea what the current fads are…haven’t used this stuff in years.) It looked to me like Textpattern could help me, the clueless, comply with those “standards.” Alas, in my case, style & fads overwhelmed simplicity. Giving into a pursuit of a certain designer-look has not aged well. I’m not the designer – just the judge. The process was “I like that; I don’t like this,” until the designer put something together.
Years later, that designer’s work needs attention. It needs simplifying. It needs to return to what Textpattern started out to be. A return to Textpattern marks my return to learning (a tiny bit) about html, css, about what’s important and what’s not.
The thoughts & the folks in the posts above reassure me that I’ve made the right choice to stick with Textpattern and those who know it well. They’re the folks who can get my site back to something simple to use. They can also help me learn how to stay on the periphery of all the fads that come and go in web design.
Thanks to those of you who stayed the course! It honors the guy that started all this.
“Well, I, uh, don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.” General ‘Buck’ Turgidson
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Re: Everything easy
wet wrote #332616:
I wonder whether we web veterans reached the period like then back in the 1920ishs when motor enthusiastic people could no longer build or repair their own cars.
For me, the barrier to entry is becoming so much higher than it used to be that it’s putting me off even starting something, which isn’t healthy.
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Re: Everything easy
gaekwad wrote #332620:
For me, the barrier to entry is becoming so much higher than it used to be that it’s putting me off even starting something, which isn’t healthy.
Exactly. Yet at their basic level, what do those megabytes of libraries and frameworks do? Build HTML and CSS code peppered with JS. Ugly and bloated code, to boot. That’s it.
Sure, frameworks can help speed up development by not reinventing the wheel, but at what cost, not only to users (time to download/view) but developers (impenetrable learning opportunities to further the web)?
I just had a chat with a Txp user about information architecture. About the value of separating content and presentation and using the power of Forms to farm content out for reuse so it can be changed in one place to effect an entire site-wide alteration. Not just now while whittling down the myriad templates that have grown organically over the lifetime of the site, but at any time in future.
Owning content in this fashion is taking the Lego of the web (HTML and CSS and URLs) and using the power of Textpattern context to map dynamic content onto the fewest number of templates, taking the drudgery out of managing everything. You don’t need a few MB of React code to do that for you. All you need is a rudimentary understanding of what HTML does, and how CSS can make it pretty.
Keeping abreast of the ever-shifting standards is a task in itself, but without a basic understanding of how content maps to its display in a browser, all the other frameworks that are built on top of that scaffolding appear daunting.
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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Re: Everything easy
Bloke’s just said some of this (he writes faster and more eloquently than me :-) but… FWIW:
phiw13 wrote #332615:
Your first 3 paragraphs sums up why I am moving more and more out of that little world of web design & development. More and more that world resembles a cult.
gaekwad wrote #332620:
For me, the barrier to entry is becoming so much higher than it used to be that it’s putting me off even starting something, which isn’t healthy.
I don’t think they have to be a barrier. The good thing is, you don’t have to embrace these new tools to make good, working websites. Valid HTML is still worth striving for, and HTML is also pretty forgiving so that you’ll still get results if you don’t achieve it. And it’s always improving too. HTML markup is way clearer than it once was, CSS is way more capable than it was, javascript is needed less and less for display purposes, and browsers are way more predictable and capable than they were.
Textpattern is better too :-) 6sigma can dispense with many if not most of the plugins on his site because that functionality is now built-in. At the same time the tag set hasn’t expanded vastly. His articles can still be brought into the present day, although written many moons ago.
Sure, that all requires learning new techniques – and unlearning old ways – but the medium is evolving along with how we use and view it and that comes with it. The underlying principles are more or less the same.
On that point, Chris Ferdinandi’s The Lean Web is still a good point of reference (see this forum thread).
Some other commentators have put this down to increasing industrialisation within the medium (as opposed to craft – Frank Chimero has another article on the grain of the web, too). I was reminded of this the other day when listening to an interview with Simon Collison (“Colly”) on Designer Discs (listen on Spotify to hear the music too). Colly has discussed that topic before, e.g. here or here (those articles have links to other relevant articles).
———
That said, I’ve found some development tools really useful, and sometimes I wonder whether some of these have in turn helped spur on developments in CSS or JS.*
SASS, for example, makes organising and segmenting otherwise long CSS files into several parts and using consistent colors, sizes, etc. across your CSS way easier (along with much more).
Now, however, new evolutions in CSS may soon make several key aspects of SASS largely unnecessary: CSS custom properties (e.g. variables) can now already replace SASS variables and are also much more capable (practical examples via codyhouse.co). Nesting CSS declarations, previously only possible in preprocessors, is coming to CSS. Another upcoming development, CSS cascade layers could potentially help avoid unwelcome collisions in CSS rules and make complex css naming schemes unnecessary (see Bramus van Damme’s recent talk (yewtu.be video) on CSS Café).
You don’t need SASS by any means, and one might argue it’s unnecessary to learn it now that CSS will soon do similar things. At the same time having used some SASS means it’s easier to pick up the concepts.
*it could also be that different people have been working in parallel on the same problem, but that tool makers can work faster than standards.
TXP Builders – finely-crafted code, design and txp
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Re: Everything easy
I like this discussion. We just lost power due to a significant ice storm. I could be offline for as much as a week(??). But, this time, it won’t be due to lost interest. Thanks to everyone for the help these past 48 hours.
“Well, I, uh, don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.” General ‘Buck’ Turgidson
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Re: Everything easy
jakob wrote #332631:
I don’t think they have to be a barrier. The good thing is, you don’t have to embrace these new tools to make good, working websites.
This is an interesting and valuable take. For my part, I got into doing server admin’ing for Textpattern a few years ago, mostly after I learned from scratch and iterated a lot to get to a point of peace that the way I do things was good enough for production (and would let me sleep at night)…I keep iterating to improve things, I can’t put it down, especially when there are tangible improvements in performance overall. It’s never ‘done’. I see Phil tweaking, improving, streamlining, eking out milliseconds of performance improvements…Oleg sprinkles some etcVoodoo© into tag parsers and I’m often baffled by what’s changed, but it’s objectively better than before…Stef finds ways to do things that I didn’t even know were possible, with workflows that I didn’t know existed. I read bug reports from Textpattern users that are so specific that I’m just impressed with the quality of r&d. My stuff is ‘good enough’, even with my overly-critical self assessment, but the bar is high around here, I won’t lie.
Maybe I just need to make more websites and stop getting in my own way.
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Re: Everything easy
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Re: Everything easy
Yes, I can connect to a DB in CSS
Outstanding.
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