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Comment by janitor61 | Hacker News Reader

The frontier of web design is apparently digital Rube Goldberg machines, existing probably more for job security rather than consideration for the end-user.

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The all-but defacto use of javascript transpilers especially invokes the image of 'Rube Goldberg' machines.

When you don’t use transpilers, you have to write ES5 code. No-one wants that.

Even in 2020? Isn't ES6 standard now across all supported browsers?

that might well be, but just recently i got a crash report and it turned out the user had some "unsupported" version of Safari... and i'd rather transpile/polyfill than be that site that asks you to upgrade your browser to use it

(funnily enough, it actually parsed ES6 stuff fine, but was missing the `Object.fromEntries` method)

No. And "ES6" is itself a vague term. Browser support for features and syntax varies considerably and changes constantly.

Is ES5 really that bad that nobody can stand it?

On the contrary, it does seem like jumping through these kinds of hoops has become strictly necessary if you are building web apps you would like to be responsive.

Are you sure? Media queries handle layout changes font size has been proportional to user agent since the beginning the web. A little SCSS preprocessing makes writing complicated CSS a lot easier.

I didn't mean responsive in the CSS sense, I meant responsive as in the "not slow to load" sense, which is the point of this article.

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