Modern front-end Web development makes me feel old

March 7th, 2024

Modern front-end Web development makes me feel old

Juan Diego Rodríguez — Smashing Magazine

Web Development Is Getting Too Complex, And It May Be Our Fault

Front-end development seemed simpler in the early 2000s, didn’t it? The standard website consisted mostly of static pages made of HTML and CSS seasoned with a pinch of JavaScript and jQuery. I mean, who doesn’t miss the cross-browser compatibility days, right?

Chris Coyier — CSS-Tricks

The Great Divide

Let’s say there is a divide happening in front-end development. I feel it, but it’s not just in my bones. Based on an awful lot of written developer sentiment, interviews Dave Rupert and I have done on ShopTalk, and in-person discussion, it’s, as they say… a thing.

Nolan Lawson — Read the Tea Leaves

My talk on CSS runtime performance

My main goal was to shine a light on all the heroic work that browser vendors have done over the years to make CSS so performant. Much of this stuff is intricate and arcane (like Bloom filters), but I hoped that with some simple diagrams and animations, I could bring this work to life.

Nikita Prokopov — Tonsky.me

JavaScript Bloat in 2024

I was a bit out of touch with modern front-end development. I also remembered articles about web bloat, how the average web page size was approaching several megabytes!

So all this time I was living under impression that, for example, if the average web page size is 3 MB, then JavaScript bundle should be around 1 MB. Surely content should still take the majority, no?