Why I like to work with the web. Remy Sharp

Remy Sharp is the creator of sites such as confwall , jsbin.com , html5demos.com , responsivepx.com , nodemon , mit-license.org , snapbird.org , 5 minute fork and jsconsole.com . I bring to your attention a translation of Remy Sharp 's article “Why I Love to Work with the Web” .

“Easy means boring. That's why I love web and browsers. ”- by

I like that my code can work anywhere and for anyone. This is actually a challenge. The web is an extremely diverse environment where everyone can browse anything as he wants.

Cool, of course, if the visitor uses a modern and powerful desktop computer. But it is also likely that he is browsing the website from a work computer using the old and built-in Internet Explorer 8.

Douglas Crockford once said:
“The web is the most hostile development environment imaginable.”

And he's damn right. This is the hostility that gives me access to the world. This is the "hostility" that I call my daily challenge.

This hostile environment inspires me. Make my page render everywhere. Write the code in such a way that everyone can see the page.

I am not saying that I achieve these goals every time. For example, for many years I tried to make jsbin.com work in IE7 and IE8, and somewhere in the process we lost IE8 support (for which I will try to take the time and fix it once).

View Code: Web Welcome Gesture


I'm still wondering why the ability to view the page code was built into earlier browsers. I can assume that this was necessary for debugging and keeping the technologies and protocols open in order to facilitate their adoption.

How much this decision paid off! I myself belong to an early generation of developers who did not read books, but only learned from mistakes and brilliant ideas in someone else's code.

In my case, the biggest breakthrough in understanding JavaScript happened when I tried to understand the jQuery source code (back in the early versions, about 10 years ago).

I am sure that it would only be the shadow of the programmer, which I am now, if not for the ability to view the code. Perhaps even, I would still write closed source code in Pearl.

Is it harder now?


I read Jake Archibald 's post “If we stand still, we move back” and thought about the analogy I heard about the complexity that was used to compare with the web before.

In the early days of photography, technology was pretty simple when compared to modern times. If necessary, I can create a pinhole camera in a few hours (maybe ...).

An ordinary soap dish is a completely different calico. I don’t even know if one person is capable of constructing a fully working chamber these days. But these are the costs and benefits of technological progress.

See for yourself: and these are all ready-made parts!



Therefore, if you want to create crazy cross-browser effects, work with the latest offline push-technologies and make it all optimized for mobile devices, the work will be hard. Of course, not as difficult as creating a device that communicates with space, but most likely you will have to read a book or two.

That's all, assuming you already have all the components. And to get these components, you need frameworks and work tools. There is no doubt: the work is difficult.

This is not the only way, I assure you.

No wonder: the basics are still here


The web is still made up of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and works pretty damn well in its vanilla form. Take this blog , for example : my first introduction to the web was just HTML, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript copied.

I have already abandoned the WordPress backend and switched to a static site. One that I can easily write by hand. By the way, I myself wrote a process that converts markdown markup to HTML, because it was so convenient for me. There was no reason why I could not install on my laptop a program with a graphical interface that would convert the markdown to HTML markup, and then paste it into the header and footer.

Why I like to work with the web




Because of its simplicity. Born out of the need to bind documents. To the extent that this could change with the latest generation of web developers who will tell you that the web is now complex and confusing (and will be right), it is not complex at the same time. He is still brilliantly simple.

Anyone can do it. Anyone can post content on the web: whether it's plain text or plain HTML, consisting only of
<p> tags, or something more complex and sophisticated. The web is not shy about its content. Everything and everything passes.

The web today is a truly awesome place for developers. There are an impressive array of libraries, frameworks, plugins, and utilities that make life very easy when creating super-complex things - about 10 years ago, some daredevils wrote them manually. Also, if you want to write in JavaScript and ignore all parts of ES6 / ESnext, you can do this too (and for the most part, due to limitations, I do the same!).

If you think for a second about how many lives you can touch by simply publishing something on the Internet, you will realize that it is absolutely stunning. That is why I love to work with the web.

And what about you?

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