Solutionism

Software can be finished - Ross Wintle

There’s quite a crossover between resilience and longevity:

1. Understand the requirements
2. Keep scope small and fixed
3. Reduce dependencies
4. Produce static output
5. Increase Quality Assurance

Ten years ago today I coined the shorthand “js;dr” for “JavaScript required; Didn’t Read”. - Tantek

Practice Progressive Enhancement.

Build first and foremost with forgiving technologies, declarative technologies, and forward and backward compatible coding techniques.

All content should be readable without scripting.

If it’s worth building on the web, it’s worth building it robustly, and building it to last.

Developers Rail Against JavaScript ‘Merchants of Complexity’ - The New Stack

Perhaps the tide is finally turning against complex web frameworks.

The web is mostly links and forms | Go Make Things

In the same vein as that last link, Chris says what we’re all thinking:

Most of what we build is links from one page to another, and form submissions that send data from the browser to the server.

Make it boring — jlwagner.net

People are propelled by their interests, and web developers have a lot of space to be interested in all sorts of stuff. For you, it may be JavaScript ‘n Friends, or HTML and CSS. Maybe it’s all that stuff, but put aside your preferences for a moment and answer me this: what are you helping people to do? If the answer involves any remotely routine or crucial purpose, consider putting aside your personal desire for excitement. Instead, make boring things that are usable, accessible, and fast. Ours is a job done by people for people, not a glamorous rockstar gig.

Excellent advice from Jeremy who wants us to build fast, reliable, resilient websites …even if the technologies involved in doing that don’t feel exciting.

Central to that endeavor is recognizing that the browser gives you a ton of stuff for free. Relying on those freebies requires a willingness to not npm install a solution for every problem — especially those that are best solved with CSS and HTML. Those technologies may seem boring, but boring is fast. Boring is usable. Boring is resilient and fault tolerant. Boring is accessible. When we rely wholesale on JavaScript to build for the web, we’re inevitably reinventing things. At worst, our reinventions of rock-solid HTML features — such as client-side form validation  — break in unexpected ways despite our carefully written tests. At best, a flawless reimplementation of those features adds unnecessary code to applications, and depends on a technology less fault-tolerant than CSS and HTML.