> New developers are having an extremely hard time learning enough skills to be gainfully employed. They are drowning in this complex garbage and feeling really disheartened.
> We need to relearn what the web is capable of and go back to that.
> And it [the web] has only gotten better over time while retaining an incredible level of backwards compatibility.
I would suggest that "retaining an incredible level of backwards compatibility" might be one of the sources of this "complex garbage" the web world is drowning in.
The fact that so many people feel the need to reach for a framework makes me wonder if the web doesn't do nearly as much as it needs to do.
Maybe the web will always just be too big, too slow to change, and too bad at pruning out all of the bad ideas that accumulated over the years.
"But what about backwards compatibility? Don't we want all the old web apps to continue to work forever?" Yes, so ship the renderer with the app.
Sure, the current web is probably beyond being able to this, but I'm sure we'll eventually find a far better way to distribute software than the web, a way that makes fewer assumptions about the environment our code will run in.
At the time of writing this, the linked-to Google Sheet redirects to an html-only view with this message: "Some tools might be unavailable due to heavy traffic in this file." In this html-only view, while the user can still see the entire list of sheets at the top, in-document links to other sheets do not work, and some text overflows its cell and is not visible.
Most important information appears to be visible still, but those who wish to add to or edit the document seem to be out of luck.
What went wrong? Perhaps each Google Sheet has access throttling, not ideal for users of high-traffic docs like this, especially if the users have critical information to share.
And yet, what other tool should they have used?
We need collaborative, easily-shareable, WYSIWYG document editors for situations just like this, except of course, their access should not be throttled, and their content should be discoverable by search engines.
Do we need a new web? A web whose content is able to be directly manipulated? A web that is collaborative by default?
Perhaps some sort of Fediverse Google Docs/Sheets equivalent? Where each user can host their own copy (if they want) and the pub/sub algorithm ensures that it's all eventually consistent, if higher latency than something inherently centralized like Google?
> We need to relearn what the web is capable of and go back to that.
> And it [the web] has only gotten better over time while retaining an incredible level of backwards compatibility.
I would suggest that "retaining an incredible level of backwards compatibility" might be one of the sources of this "complex garbage" the web world is drowning in.
The fact that so many people feel the need to reach for a framework makes me wonder if the web doesn't do nearly as much as it needs to do. Maybe the web will always just be too big, too slow to change, and too bad at pruning out all of the bad ideas that accumulated over the years.
"But what about backwards compatibility? Don't we want all the old web apps to continue to work forever?" Yes, so ship the renderer with the app.
Sure, the current web is probably beyond being able to this, but I'm sure we'll eventually find a far better way to distribute software than the web, a way that makes fewer assumptions about the environment our code will run in.