* Webapps don't need to be installed
* Webapps work on all platforms without vendor lock-in
* Webapps aren't trusted and get sandboxed by default
and a bunch of minor victories along the way (you can right click -> inspect every webapp, APIs generally exist and have entered the cultural lexicon, cross-site SSO exists and works).
At the same time, a lot of the UI tooling and APIs feel like we went back 30+ years. Everybody is still reinventing the pop-up menu button (aka “select”). I really thought this was a solved problem in NeXT by the early nineties.
Was true of what I was doing in 1988 too.
Advancements to CSS have made front-end way more reasonably than they were in the 90s. Stuff that took weeks to figure out with tables can now be done so quickly with `display: flex` and the whole grid system. It's beautiful.
If we had `display: flex back` in 1998 I probably wouldn't have stuck with FE rather than dive into the backend.
Of course those solutions don't solve the transition between desktop and mobile layout (since that wasn't a thing back then), but more some modern frameworks solve that well (like whatever MS calls UWP right now) without forcing everyone to reinvent a way to do infinite scrolling without running out of memory
fyi folks, Flash is also based on ECMAScript! just because the mid-90s tooling built by Macromedia triggers your nostalgia doesn't mean it was better!
float: left;
"Tables ought to be enough for everyone."
There we go! Nailed 1998!
I disagree. Since I started programming some 20 years ago, I relearned web (and especially JS) every 5 years or so. And each time I was pleasantly surprised at how much simpler / elegant / clean things have become.
> that they feel slower to me as a developer and as an end user.
that's true though.
It possible (and even simple!) to make web-apps that are almost just as fast, but no one does that (at least not in the main stream).
The web has developed immensely since the 90s.
If some UI you use is slow it's certainly not because of the excellent frontend/web technologies we have today.
There are certainly many things to complain about regarding the state of the web but the frontend technologies are not to blame.