I like the look of the new design (mostly, there's some cases where whitespace can get a bit excessive), but I still don't like the technology behind it. It's funny that modern javascript based sites were built to make things feel more interactive and snappy, but at least in Reddit's case completely failed at that and the old HTML based site feels way more responsive and fast, if a little ugly.
If there was an option to use the modern CSS with the old technology that would be the sweet spot for me.
In my experience as a pretty frequent Reddit user, Reddit is really bad at "forgetting" that you want the old design and flipping you back to the new one.
There's some natural experiments that show that this happens, and is successful, when funding dries up a little. The early to mid 2000s were marked by a huge amount of bootstrapped companies that were quite successful. But VCs can distort a market to a huge degree and have huge effects on the labour market and even things like sales by preferring insider deals and introductions that it can crowd out smaller companies who can't outspend the VC-led companies.
I've worked for startups that worked on genuine problems that had high customer demand, and there was still the problem of selling what the product could be instead of what it is. At least in my experience, it's omnipresent in B2B and has to be specifically handled regardless of how well your solution addresses a problem.
It's great for document formatting. For app layout, it's very easy for the cascading aspect to shoot you in the foot if you're not careful (which is why even the most purist CSS writers will tend to layer abstractions or rules on top of it, even if it's only convention based ones without technology like BEM.
I'd argue that it's impossible to have locality in all aspects. If your style, logic, and DOM are separated almost certainly you have a separation in domain - you're going to have styles, logic, and DOM concerned with "widgets" in your product and if they're separated by whether they are style or logic that means they can't be correlated by their "widgetness".
Really the decision comes down to whether it's better to separate based on style/logic/dom or on the business domain, and I think at least for web apps, separation by domain wins out in most cases.
Artists and DJs are a separate category than what the original article is talking about, and I'd agree that there's more need for creativity in those cases (although I have definitely seen websites for people in more creative fields that have thrown usability and legibility out the window in pursuit of annoying "gee whiz" overly designed sites.
The mechanic is a separate argument - the article is talking about uniqueness of design and creativity, not cleanliness / orderliness. These sort of Tailwind designs are exceptionally clean and orderly, they're just predictable and not unique. To apply the article to your analogy, I wouldn't particularly care if my mechanic had the same coveralls that most mechanics wear as opposed to some unique design of coveralls.
I like predictable UI even if it's a little "boring" because given the choice between utility and style, I'll choose utility every time. It is possible to make stylish things that also have very high utility, but it's a lot harder than favoring one, and I will always favor utility.
Take the author's example in this article - he calls out two things more than anything - a single sentence "pitchy" description of the product, and plan cards that look and feel extremely samey from site to site. I'd argue that both of these "downsides" are an upside for me as a consumer:
- Having a one sentence quick summary of what a product does allows me to make a quick decision about whether I'm interested in reading more about this product.
- Consistent plan cards lets me leverage my shared understanding of how plan cards work to instantly answer questions like what the monthly / annual pricing is like, what tiers are available, etc, that a bespoke presentation would require me to think about.
If I come to a landing page for a product, I'm more interested in answering questions like "is this a product I would like" and "how much does it cost" than appreciating the design of a page.
Physical controls are worth it for me. Having a press to talk button, track advance and volume controls on my steering wheel is a pretty nice quality of life feature. I could do without a screen if the car has that.
That is an amazing use of the technology, and for sure something that should result in a pretty successful company - but not enough to bet the entire VC ecosystem on.
I think anyone saying AI has no use is being willfully ignorant, but like every hype cycle before it since mobile (the last big paradigm shift), IMO it's going to result in a few useful applications and not the paradigm shift promised.
Allowing multiple versions of a library to run simultaneously is a design decision - there are definitely shortfalls to allowing this (increased code size, a relative nightmare to audit, increased tendency towards downstream dependencies opening vulnerability potential). Culturally with bundler it tends not to be an issue since the inability to run multiple versions of packages tends to reduce the number of secondary dependencies to only pretty core libraries, and encourages permissive version requirements for gems.
Do you mind sharing some details? This doesn't match my experiences at all really - while I think running into messes with NPM is sometimes a little overstated, the number of times I've needed to do something drastic like `rm -rf node_modules` is not insignificant and I've never had to do anything at all like that with Bundler.
The only problem I can really think of is working through issues when two gems require different irreconcilable versions of a library, and that's more of a fundamental ruby issue / design choice than a problem with bundler itself.
I wouldn't say "very" for me but it's definitely not as smooth as your average webpage. This is pretty edge casey use of HTML / CSS though, it's not surprising that browsers wouldn't optimize for it since this is more of a stunt than the best way to achieve this output.
This is cool! I really wish the authour formatted their HTML more nicely though - it's fine through the inspector but this is the sort of thing where I instinctively reached for "View Source" and with the whitespace stripped it's basically unreadable.
Google did this early on with android - originally the Google devices (Nexus) were lower end, and high end devices were left to other manufacturers. They've flipped around recently, but I think the Nexus line was a decent enough idea at the time.
I mean, Apple does have a procurement process. If you're selling at the large team / department level or up (i.e. not individuals within Apple), you're dealing with "Apple" at least for the sale through security and contract reviews, etc.
All of his friends with VR headsets as well. It's an occasional toy sort of device for pretty much everyone I know. I realize that the plural of anecdotes isn't data, so if you have actual data I'm happy to see it!
If there was an option to use the modern CSS with the old technology that would be the sweet spot for me.