How the Web Became Unreadable (2016)
Do you think this may be related to the rise of javascript and heavy front end, client-side frameworks?<p>To be clear, this is something I&#x27;m mulling over, not a hard conclusion, but here it goes...<p>Creating a simple, server rendered, text based web site may be exactly what the users need, but from a developer&#x27;s point of view, it can also be a career risk.  A rapidly increasing percentage of development jobs out there now require experience with a front-end framework.  As a result, developers need this experience, so they start adding front end frameworks in order to 1) gain that experience, and 2) document that experience in a real world project.  Remember, a project isn&#x27;t just a project, it&#x27;s an audition for your next project.  This is how tech recruiting works[1].  So developers may be adding new bells and whistles that are not only unnecessary[2], but actively harmful to their current project, largely because they are necessary to their resume, and it&#x27;s actively harmful not to have them there.<p>In short, one of the reasons the web is becoming unreadable is that web developers can&#x27;t create the resume they&#x27;ll need for their next gig by using the best tech for their current one.<p>[1] I&#x27;m getting long in the tooth enough to have seen this a few times.  Companies required &quot;EJB&quot;, it wasn&#x27;t enough to have experience with Tomcat and standard Java.  Later, Spring, Struts, Hibernate, iBatis were required.  These days, it&#x27;s ember, react, and other rapidly evolving JS frameworks.<p>[2] I want to be clear that I think many of these frameworks are actually pretty excellent, for projects that need them.  The problem is, if your current project doesn&#x27;t, you still have a strong incentive to bring them in.