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Comment by allover | Hacker News Reader

Why the drive-by attacks on good tools? This kind of stuff is tiring and just adds to the noise.

> No megabytes of css

Why would there ever be megabytes of CSS for such a site, apart from for ads, which is the main problem with modern 'content sites'.

> no bootstrap

Bootstrap can be tiny, and a big win in productivity/quality, so 'no Bootstrap' likely cost the devs in its lack of availabilty at the time. It looks far worse and is less usable on mobile particularly (but on desktop too) than it would be if built with Bootstrap.

> No webpack with plethora of dependencies to load, parse and execute.

Why is that even relevant? Who exactly is advocating for 'webpack with plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website?

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It's not that the tools are bad, it's that they are the goto for building sites. Sites that typically end up worse for having used them.

It's an industry wide issue that we keep trying to solve using shitty duct-tape and hacks, while not addressing the underlying problem.

This is just a reaction to that (and one that I agree with)

Edit:

> Why would there ever be megabytes of CSS for such a site, apart from for ads, which is the main problem with modern 'content sites'.

Dunno, but people keep doing it for some reason

> Bootstrap can be tiny, and a big win in productivity/quality, so 'no Bootstrap' likely cost the devs in its lack of availability at the time. It looks far worse and is less usable on mobile particularly (but on desktop too) than it would be if built with Bootstrap.

Bootstrap can be, but IME it typically isn't. Additionally, I constantly hear webdevs say it "makes mobile better", but I tend to disagree. I admit that this is purely opinion.

> Who exactly is advocating for 'webpack with plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website?

Pretty much every webdev I talk to. Admittedly not necessarily webpack but usually something similar.

I do understand that good tools being misused aren't bad tools, but, as a user, you can't expect me to be happy when I see those or similar tools when most of your industry is abusing them.

> Why would there ever be megabytes of CSS for such a site

Bootstrap, a theme for it, app css, a couple of 3rd party vendors, and we are over a megabyte.

> a big win in productivity/quality

Only if you are doing an SPA which mimics desktop applications. Which journalism sites are usually not

>Why is that relevant for such a site? Who exactly is advocating for a 'plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website?

Well no one, but sites still do this in the wild, while being driven by business decisions rather than technical concerns, which is understable surely, but look how nostalgic people are getting.

>> Bootstrap, a theme for it, app css, a couple of 3rd party vendors, and we are over a megabyte.

Who's doing that? And if they are adding dependencies without consideration of page-speed, they're to blame, and they'll never understand performance.

Bootstrap is not the problem. Hypothetical bad devs would have been making similar mistakes with flash prior to that, or whatever alternative CSS libs were available, and were being cobbled together piecemeal prior to Bootstrap.

> a big win in productivity/quality

>> Only if you are doing an SPA which mimics desktop applications. Which journalism sites are usually not

That is false. Bootstrap's primary use-case is as a CSS framework, not something solely for SPAs. From the early days it solved cross browser issues even for supposedly simple things like 'forms' for which there were no well-established conventions beforehand. Go trawl through the BS1 & 2 issue threads around form elements, and see all the things they fixed.

> Why is that relevant for such a site? Who exactly is advocating for a 'plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website?

>> Well no one, but sites still do this in the wild [...]

So those tools don't deserve the abuse/noise.

Nobody's picking on Bootstrap anyways.

> Who's doing that?

You either don't use the web since 2008 or something or are lying: nearly all websites start with this setup.

> less usable on mobile

To be fair, there really wasn't any "mobile" to speak of back then, so the developers couldn't even try to make it look good on mobile.

There was WAP, which was kind of the ancestor of AMP. It wasn't terribly popular then either.

I'll rather browse WAP pages again compared to modern "mobile optimized" sites. Huge fonts, huge pictures (sadly this trend came back to desktop, what's information density again), sticky toolbars with retarded social icons, ads that make a multicore mobile device with several GB of RAM to hiccup, etc. Desktop view was fine.

> WAP, which was kind of the ancestor of AMP

I feel like while they were inspired by some concepts from there, the biggest contributor to the idea (apart from the need of locking in people in one 'easily acessible' platform) was opera's OBML format/protocol which was really decent at the time and provided a lot of benefits AML is marketed for. Probably the only problem with it was the lack of any interactive javascript, and that where it failed to meet adoption. Oh, but well, it was really niche as well, that did nothing good too.

> Bootstrap can be tiny

Sure, but it oftentimes isn't

So it can be misused? All good tools can.

Meh. There are tools that can be misused on accident and there are tools that you have to go out of your way and have technical knowledge to misuse. And then there are tools where misuse is the default, and you have to have special or technical knowledge to use well.

So which specific tool are you laying this accusation at? Bootstrap, which has been refined into tiny Sass and Less modules, and which for people who use neither, has the customize link in its main nav?

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