Notices by Alex Russell (slightlyoff@toot.cafe), page 3

But world-historically rich programmers didn't want to hear about it, and browsers let them get away with UX murder.

Frontend's Lost Decade is now a threat to the value of the web to businesses and users. A collective failure to cap JS emissions that has destroyed value at shocking scale:

https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/

These folks can't be serious thought leaders because they aren't in touch with reality outside the privilege bubble.

It's fine to ignore them. They haven't been right for a decade, and I think that's long enough.

Anyway, just a reminder to hire people to solve problems with HTML and CSS, not too make them with JS.

There have, of course, been good reasons to lean on userland abstraction – Safari sandbagged platform advancement, much the way IE6 used to – but repeated warnings didn't cause a change in developer behaviour.

The pushback to this sitrep in 2016 was *furious*:

https://youtu.be/4bZvq3nodf4?si=A7MLssnnn-GKnv8c

Ever since, the frontend community has poured its investment and attention into minor permutations of the same 2008-browser-centric frameworks and approaches.

It isn't working. We lost an entire decade on one great branch mispredict. The trends that used to deliver for "everyone" only continued for the rich.

For the rest, Moore's Law meant first-time access through hand-me-down CPUs and networks as prices fell. 2014's A53 Core still shows up in new budget phones today.

A decade ago, a tribe of JS partisans took the web by the reins, forked HTML and JS syntax, and yeeted userland abstractions into the critical path because "a better user experience".

This was premised on the idea that everyone's CPUs/networks would get faster the way their top-end phones did.

They could not have been more wrong.

JS-first web development has been a planetary-scale exercise in the rich making life harder for the less well-off.

https://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-javascript#bytesJs

https://infrequently.org/2022/12/performance-baseline-2023/

It is *intense* just how badly the JS/React brainworms have infected the frontend community.

Every single NYT story page has *both* a 437KiB (1.5MiB unzipped) *and* a 474KiB (1.7MiB) JS file, to display ~50K of text. It isn't ad bloat. It isn't tracking. It's this sort of bunk:

@robertvh by the same token, Pinafore was a single (excellent) webdev...soooo...

@robertvh I mean, when you buy into hype-ish tools like expo, you have 2+ problems

First thoughts on Bluesky: y u no PWA?

Like, Elk can manage it. Pinafore managed it. Mainline Mastodon managed it! If the goal is decentralisation, why would you put app store gatekeepers in charge?

And if funds are not infinite, why wouldn't you centralise effort on the web, particularly now that iOS Push is out?

PMs should read everything Alex Komoroske writes, and this post is no exception:

https://medium.com/@komorama/the-iterative-adjacent-possible-af3e7038357d