My personal solution is to use the platform – modern JS and CSS are great.
The complexity is sometimes required, but in most web projects, these tools are actively harming the user, and also the long term maintainability, they eat into the business bottom line as well.
If I need to, I can stitch the files together, mangle variables, manipulate the AST or whatever I need to produce a bundle and my tiny script that I invoke with `make` will still be less than 1/10 of average config files for the mainstream tooling.
I made an experiment for years – write the code for the thing I‘d use a dependency for – sample an image size, build a "data model" abstraction, your own reactivity, a build script, backup solution, a cron job, release script etc. etc. etc. and instead of pulling my hair out I learned something useful each time and I can come back to a working and documented code that’s easy to improve and has a straightforward call stack.
There are plenty of ways a site can be built with less complexity. Going to the extreme, write any interactive code in plain old JS and ship it along with your HTML and CSS.
You could use a bundling step if you prefer, its pretty trivial to setup a basic bundler that wraps up multiple JS files. Heck, writing everything in TS and outputting a single file would do the trick.
also, my solution is to be the engineer who understands these layers and gets a job to look into them – and it pains me to see that in 95% of the cases people just used whatever was lying on the table and not thought for a second they could go on MDN and find out there is a native API for their purpose.
I used it to block Twitter's ad bugging me to pay. Funny thing is I can't use the paid version since it's not available in my country. However, the popup kept bugging me
I remember saving my lunch money to visit the internet cafe after school. Learned so much from how the internet works to getting my first email account. There's quite a few around here in Accra, Ghana.
The biggest pro to choosing the likes of Svelte (or Vue, htmx, long list of newer frameworks that have learned from React/Angular's shortcomings) is how few footguns there are.
That's really the big thing. I know everyone loves to believe they're masterclass programmers and falling for such traps is beneath them, but after seeing some of these masterclass programmer's react repos... it's very clear why the react docs is filled with many disclaimers and notes (which kudos to the react team for phenomenal docs).
I tried Next.js very briefly and I initially found this concept really nice. However I bounced back and gave up on the framework for some related reason. I felt like I gave up control to much, maybe due to the routing model. Feels like some common problems were made much harder because of it.
I implemented it in a bookkeeping app I’m working on. It works nicely but the documentation is very poor; I had to constantly refer to a third party example.
30 seconds browsing the site at the domain vole.wtf, where the newest piece of content (found clearly promoted on the homepage) is "Penga - the penguin physics game" with slogan "How many penguins can you rescue?", should be enough to inform you that this is a comedy site, not a gender politics manifesto.
And then who gets the privilege of goin' back and keeping all these silly censor lists up to date everywhere when the standard of "acceptable words" changes? And how to handle "regional" curses? All just sounds like more hassle than it's worth to me.
Society in general, and often an authority in particular. For example if you were a radio broadcaster, your employer might warn you about using particular words:
Seems I found a bug. I can't use the spacebar to pause a video in full screen mode. I tried another video on the developer page and I face the same issue.
