I'm tempted to take the opposite stance to the author. The web as a platform is wildly successful, and it's interesting to think about why.
Surely the "loose" standards encouraged neat hacks that at some point were encoded as best practices and then standardized. Maybe that would tempt us to want to "cut the cruft" but a) people probably thought that many times previously and b) backwards compatibility is probably more valuable than one would think.
To say that web as platform is wildly successful would be an understatement. It's so successful that probably like 95% people doing webdev don't even care about these discussions or have opinions about it.
I think that scale of "silent" users compared to proactive devs would be the most surprising number. Like for anyone who is "Rethinking DOM from first principles" there is probably like 10000s of randos editing ecommerce html templates, exporting results into tables and dataviz or making small uis for some internal system.
Great article! Does anyone know of a similar resource for MacOS?
I’ve been trying to use Tailscale together with my company’s enterprisey CloudFlare VPN and Tailscale rules never seem to evaluate, even with split tunneling etc enabled. Need to dig into those routing tables one of these days…
Funnily enough these "small" things are probably the biggest barrier for switching. I'm a long-time mac user and I asked for a Surface laptop at my new job to give me some variation. Luckily I was able to switch to a Macbook Pro after a year or so, not because of the mouse but because of Windows' awful font rendering.
I know, I know, some people prefer the Windows way of rendering, but I just get sad :) Great system otherwise, especially with WSL!
It's mostly a personal taste thing, but I find the macOS (and even Linux) font rendering superior to Windows, even on low-dpi panels below Full HD. On Windows, the letters are thin, have sharp edges etc. I've tried using the ClearType tuning utility but the results honestly aren't much better. The macOS system font also seems nicer.
Surely the "loose" standards encouraged neat hacks that at some point were encoded as best practices and then standardized. Maybe that would tempt us to want to "cut the cruft" but a) people probably thought that many times previously and b) backwards compatibility is probably more valuable than one would think.