GRRR when did web design turn into a convoluded hall of mirrors?

Ok, so updating my web design skills...

wtf.

Im tired of not remembering which nested f*cking language im writing in, when writing in a php file loaded using ajax thru jquery which of course uses javascript which only runs inside php if a certain variable is set. all of this is styled by css, and marked up in html5.


AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

This is exactly why I couldn't get myself very deep into web design.

My brother-in-law does this for a living, I don't know how he can stand it.

Use more Flash!

Don't use flash!
It's actually quite doable, if you can split it up in back-end / front-end and MVC or any other pattern.

On mobile, we develop frontend in html5 to display and parse websites, and use javascript with wormhole to communicate to C/C++ via XML.

Oh my god. I always knew why I didn't get into that web shit. ^^

When developing for mobile (via mosync for example) you can choose to do stuff in C/C++ only, but if you want to read in websites and alter them with C/C++, you'll need a html(5) parser available first of all. Luckily android and ios are capable of doing just that, and mosync has template projects that cover the parsing for you, you just need to catch the events that come in via wormhole in C/C++. But if you need to do a bit more than just receiving and sending you need to know javascript/html5 too in order to extent both frontend and backend.

Pfff.
Sounds more fun than creating some CLI Winforms app, docking unmanaged C++ code to it, add things with WinApi, hook some unmanaged static lib, pack everything into a DLL which then docks to A8 routing the engine output into the Winforms application which requires hacking the Windows message loops.

I learned so many things I never wanted to learn.
PHP, Javascript, HTML, CSS and everything mixed together with some SQL database? I have no fears... not anymore

it always has been like that and isn't that bad.

it only would be great if python webhosting were as ubiquitous as php webhosting since i would like to do more projects with django. python in the browser as an alternative to javascript would be awesome too but with jquery javascript is acceptable.

lol soooo relieved to not be the only person amused by this statement. doable is not the issue. maintaining my sanity is


@vent yeah i know its always been like that, but it slowly built into that. back when bandwith was a commodity people didnt need realtime updating stats without a window refresh linking to a mysql server. They went to a page and read a <td></td> table.

It's just... every language is good in something else. XML is a medium for transporting data, like JSON, so the model. Html5 is great for displaying stuff, the view. C/C++ works best for doing the logic stuff, the controller.

Put everything together and you have the MVC pattern.
Well not entirely but just to make a point. It's pretty clear to me, I don't understand too well whats so insane about it.

PHP + JavaScript [ + jQuery + ajax] + HTML + CSS3 + MySQL

web development in the 90s:
<table></table>
web development in the 00s:
<div></div>
web development in the 10s:
<script></script>

lol not really its more like


and that doesnt include the other page, and is highly abridged with no real code in it.


idk. its just a pain in the ass.

Or you make one big JPG in Photoshop, and pretend to have designed a fancy (static)webpage.

You joke, but that is exactly what I had to do for a client once. Granted, I sliced the image up and compressed each section with whatever was best for it. But it was still just static images.

Don't ask why he wanted it that way. I'm not sure he knew either. Maybe he read something like what you wrote and didn't get the underlying sarcasm.

I think the attitude of web design changes with the uprise of HTML5 + CSS3. There are three things to consider and kinda important:

1) on different browsers, pages will look different. Some designers go that way to accept this and create designs that in fact look a bit different on every browser, instead to enforce a pixel-perfect design someone drew in photoshop

2) you don't know on which device the page is viewed and what resolution or aspect ratio it has. Is it a huge TFT display? A smartphone? A mobile phone? An iPod? A tablet? Is it vertical or horizontal? --- I learned a new term, "responsive" layout... as I understood it, it describes that a webpage re-arranges and scales it's layout itself depending on the device a user uses

3) your website is a win, if it is suited for touch devices. So, why developing a page for each device, if you can have it for all devices at the same time? I have the impression that this is possible today.

Because of these reasons I quit with learning how to make websites. Making my last portfolio was a pain in the ass and I "just" did a static website. For my next website I'll hire someone or buy a template and customize it or alike. I can not afford the time to become an expert on these technologies to compete in this hell, just for the sake of saying "I did my website alone!"...

it's no big deal to achieve pixel perfect layouts. browsers aren't that bad anymore. form elements can still be a bit annoying sometimes and IE still doesn't support some new css stuff but there are workarounds like PIE.

responsive design isn't something new. it was very common that pages adapted to the browser window width in the 90s. now it's a bit more fancy with css switching but i don't know yet if this just is a fad.

for tablets you just shouldn't use hovering menus because you can't hover with a finger. no big problem either.



what i hate about web development is all this social media nonsense. having to insert hundreds of like buttons and widgets, having to do facebook apps and iframe pages...

or if customers want apps for everything even if a mobile website would do perfectly fine.

My eldest brother once designed a system for work that (on his boss's request) used a web interface to manage. When he was finished, the CEO of the company then asked, "this is an app, right?"

-.-