The Frontend DivideUX Designers vs JavaScript Specialists

[00:00:06] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the No Script show about modern web design, where we look at what we can build today with minimal software and skills.

Today we are revisiting a five-year-old debate. Summed up in Chris Coyier 2019 CSS Tricks article, which was called The Great Divide. It talks of the then growing concern that front-end developers were becoming divided into two distinct camps. Those who primarily specialize in HTML, CSS and focus on UX and accessibility, and those who primarily specialize in JS libraries and frameworks like React js and focus on component design, IE, the CSS in JS movement, which took off five years earlier.

As it’s another five years on, we’re looking at what’s changed. David, are you a concerned frontend developer?

[00:00:54] David Waumsley: Yeah. I love the way you bring me another. Yeah. we, neither of us would call ourselves developers or designers and that, but, I think, we fall into that category, because we primarily make designs, work on webpages.

We deal with the. HTML and CSS. So yeah, and we do a little bit of, what I didn’t include in those notes there is that would include a bit of JavaScript as well, for end developer, but generally like us, somebody who’s not really a programmer, but somebody who can modify a simple JS framework or PHP framework like we can.

So should we, talk a bit about why we’re doing this topic today?

[00:01:37] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Let me pop the, pop the screen on. There we go. Nice graphic there. Sums it up perfectly. So this is the front end divide. Off you go. I’m gonna wind you up and say Go David.

[00:01:51] David Waumsley: we’ll talk about just why we’re doing this topic because it’s the last one that’s, people who just watched this show.

The no script show will not be aware that it’s also going out on the WP Builds platform as well. And this is the last time it’s gonna go out there. So we thought we’d do a topic which is relevant to. What’s going on in WordPress at the moment and the article as well was created, the Great divide you talked about is by Chris Coyer, who’s always been a big fan of WordPress and has a Evergreen book, which he did with Jeff Star called Digging Into WordPress.

And really fascinating I think about it, is in that article which came just a matter of weeks after the new Gutenberg project was launched and the block editor came into WordPress in that he attributed the. Of the traditional HTM LCSS, first frontend dev to kind of WordPress that was WordPress prohibit.

It still is effectively, so, we listed that, but it’s quite interesting as we’ve gone on, things have changed there with the block editor where it’s more of a, CSS in JavaScript and you need. If you want to get into the real customization of it, you need to get into that kind of side of it. So I thought it was, we’ll talk a little bit about that later, but maybe we’ll just cover what’s happened in these five years.

[00:03:14] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That sounds perfect. just for those that are listening and what David’s just said is true, this is gonna be the last one that goes into the WPE builds feed. So if you’re listening over there and you’ve enjoyed it and you’d like to continue listening, I think we’re gonna probably shake up the kind of content that we’re creating.

So we’ve been doing these and then David’s had his, add-on videos, if you like, which compliment what we’re doing. But I think for the, next. Period of time we’re gonna concentrate on YouTube. so the podcast itself may take a bit of a pause, the audio only content, nevertheless. If you wanna keep up on what we’re doing, go to no script show.

So that’s the URL no script show. And, everything that we do will be put in there. So maybe that homepage will take a bit of a, maybe it’ll be changed in some way to reflect the new video content. but also if you wanna find out what this episode is all about and you wanna see the show notes, this is episode 14, so go to no script show.

Slash 1 4 14. Okay, there we go. Right over to you again.

[00:04:19] David Waumsley: Yeah, let’s talk about the divide. actually just before I do that, I’ll just say Future me is gonna record, so that, which hopefully will be on the front of this, which I’ll explain what we’re doing next. But generally that’s another WordPress inspired things.

There’s a lot of stuff there where people are showing their work on building an entire design or something, and that’s what we hope to do with the content. When we focus on the YouTube stuff.

[00:04:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so is the YouTube stuff then the idea in the future is to, create a fairly lengthy video, which is, I don’t know, it’s here’s what we’re looking at, here’s what we’re gonna do, and here’s how we did it, kind of thing.

So it’ll be a walkthrough. You know what, we’ll have an idea of what we wanna do, whatever that may be, and it’ll be top to tail. From start to finish with some takeaways at the end and maybe some, I don’t know, downloadable bits and pieces that you can take away Exactly. And do what we did. Yeah.

That’ll be nice. That’ll be a change. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Sorry, I keep, interrupting and reiterating everything you’ve already said. So the great divide, what’s behind it? Yeah.

[00:05:20] David Waumsley: a worry I think. all the traditional folks, started to worry about. Five year, five years previous to this article, really we saw React come out that changed things for how you would traditionally go about web design for those standards people.

So I think there was a worry for some over gatekeeping and also gender bias, which is something neither of these things are really thought about. Maybe the gatekeeping side. But, if you now have to be a programmer. It before you can start to do front end, which was traditionally something that you could do without knowing a programming language, HTML and CSS are still what’s outputted, but it’s declarative and something which I. Traditionally, more women have done because it tends to be something that, for one thing you could do that if you wanna be a programmer, there may be seven years of training to become somebody who’s skilled in that HTML and CSS.

a lot of young women will have careers where there’ll be younger. They might wanna have childcare, things that they want to do, they’ll have children or something like that. So women have often traditionally adopted HMR, and we only need to look at the leads that we have now in CSS. Yeah, all the people we talk about, most of the people will look into, I would say.

Tend to lean towards women. for the people you mean the thought leaders

[00:06:49] Nathan Wrigley: in the sort of CSS space? If you were to look at a list of the great and the good in CSS and what three C are doing. Yeah. I mean we’ve shown in the previous episodes a lot of the content that you’ve brought to my attention has been done by women, which is interesting.

[00:07:07] David Waumsley: Yeah, so a couple of people have spoken on this. There’s a great article by Rachel, Andrew, and also one by Hayden Pickering, which is mentioned in this as, in, both of ’em I think referred to other people’s work or that, so it is quite an interesting thing to think about. if you have to make it complex to make a start, you’ve lost that route into web development for, and it’s, it has worked out that it’s excluded more women as a result of that.

[00:07:36] Nathan Wrigley: It’s, it was definitely a lot easier when we began. ’cause obviously, both of us have been doing this for about 20 years. The, barrier to entry was almost zero you could, be as, honestly, I think I could have understood absolutely everything that it was possible to understand by reading just a handful of books, not even long books.

CSS was fairly straightforward. There was really, nobody was using JavaScript, so it was HTML. A little bit of CSS and you could, understand all of it. And of course, now fast forward to 2024 when we were recording this. Gosh, it’s no longer a pamphlet that you’ve got to read. It’s now a weighty tome and that does make it more difficult to, get onto the bottom.

successfully get onto the bottom rung of the career ladder. Yeah. And make your mark. ’cause, in order to make your mark, you’ve gotta understand all of the bits and pieces so that you look professional.

[00:08:29] David Waumsley: and I think, with women, they, have often gone to jobs where the communication is a key thing.

And often in a, in admin communications with audiences, they would be updating content and that would be in HML, which is a fairly easy language to understand and communicate and focus on that. If, you have to do that via JavaScript, it becomes a lot more difficult. Yeah. So it’s that. And I think the other concern that comes outta that is the worry that.

A web standards would, start to fall because, and I think there’s an element of truth in that because as JavaScript became the thing to do, really it’s JavaScript libraries and. Employers, I think saw the opportunity to have somebody who’s trained as a full stack developer who could do the front end and the backend and they can save costs.

Yeah. But the problem is then people are gonna train with JavaScript first, and it’s gonna be a secondary consideration, H two ML, and CSS. you end up with the standard slipping, the output actually gets a bit worse because the concentration is the more difficult stuff, the JavaScript.

[00:09:41] Nathan Wrigley: If you could rewind the clock back to, I don’t know, let’s say 1990 or something like that, right at the beginning when the, internet was taking off and, a handful of people had the internet.

Do you think, it would’ve been a better idea to just not come up with JavaScript to just get rid of JavaScript altogether and just have CSS or do you think that was a good time, or would you have preferred it that what we’ve got now coming in CSS came I don’t know. 15, 20 years ago.

[00:10:12] David Waumsley: Oh God,

[00:10:12] Nathan Wrigley: that’s,

[00:10:13] David Waumsley: such a good question. It’s interesting, isn’t it? ’cause it’s always had a difficult position. JavaScript. Yeah. It came out the same week as CSS and, it’s always been the way I think we’ve got it in the notes there, that whenever something is commonly needed, it goes into the just, declarative languages.

It goes into css. So more JavaScript. it’s in competition always with JavaScript, right? But then, when we’re looking at this era, this excitement that came out 10 years ago from now. We couldn’t do that sort of stuff. No, it wasn’t envisaged. That’s right. So it’s pushed us forward, but I think the same concerns as we’ve talked about before with flash, it goes a little bit away from the, normal order that the W three C see the web developing JavaScript is something that goes over the top as needed.

We, it’s there to tell the browser how to behave where we really want. It’s something where the browser knows. To take instructions from you anyway, so Yeah, no, we got derailed there. Sorry about that. Yeah, no, It’s a, it’s a good point. And I think the third thing I’ve put down the worry that might have come outta this is the code complexity.

It’s something that Jen Simmons alluded to when we’re talking about her introducing intrinsic design and that bringing a cost to the environment and users. This isn’t true for WordPress because it doesn’t output the React, but if a load of JavaScript has to. Be outputted as it was the case, then it actually slows down the performance, which became a big issue.

And of course, it’s just a lot of code that we all have to consume, yeah, It wasn’t needed for the result,

[00:11:48] Nathan Wrigley: j JavaScript was always, for me at least anyway, it was always the most difficult part of the job. Trying to do things in JavaScript was always tripping me up.

I could easily, work with PHP. C-S-S-H-T-M-L. But the JI dunno why I just found JavaScript much more difficult to handle and manage. Constantly seemed to be in a state of flux. and then there were shortcuts. You remember jQuery came along and everybody leapt on that. ’cause suddenly it was a little bit more human readable and easy to comprehend.

so yeah, I think, there’s definitely something about that. it was too complex for me to become an expert. Anyway. Okay, so should we move on to this? Why does the divide exist part then? Okay. Yeah. So I’ll just read out the first one and you can interject as necessary. So you’ve got five points here.

The first one being HTML and CSS not meeting the, and then you’ve got in brackets perceived component based design needs of the time. What were you thinking when you wrote that one?

[00:12:45] David Waumsley: yeah, I think generally it was seen that particularly CSS, couldn’t, You were managing the cascade all the time and it was getting in the way, which is really the next point.

You might as well read the next point. ’cause I think they get together. I

[00:13:02] Nathan Wrigley: Shall I go? Yeah. Okay. So the next one would be, CSS, not seen as easy to scope for large scale team project work. So that sort of speaks for itself. But yeah, link the two together.

[00:13:13] David Waumsley: Yeah, that’s really it. It’s the, I think really from 10 years ago we’ve been trying to control the cascade, the and, because it’s difficult with teams to get your name right, to organize your CSS because it’s worked on the basis of a page, it cascades down, so it should allow us to write less CSS, but when we get more little components, which we want to, then we try to flatten out the cascade.

Which we’re moving. So I think that was the big issue for people. It, didn’t seem like it could scale.

[00:13:48] Nathan Wrigley: yep, Okay. So the next one then was browsers not being trusted. Better to use js to tell them what to do. And I think the key phrase there is tell them what to do. It’s like hitting a knot with a hammer or something, isn’t it?

Just do what you’re told. We can’t do it the way we’d like, so we’re gonna do it with JavaScript.

[00:14:05] David Waumsley: yeah, exactly. And when he couldn’t do things, because, not all the browsers were working together, you’re waiting a long time to be able to achieve some of the things that you.

Thought you wanted to do with the web and so in a way you use JavaScript to tell the browser what to do. And I think that’s shifted a bit, which we’ll move on to.

[00:14:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, that’s definitely changed, hasn’t it? Okay then. So the next one, is all about marketing. So this is companies like meta.

And Google. and you’ve put here that they seem to have lost a little bit of their push promotional aspects. I don’t know if they’ve still got the same number of, boots on the ground developing, but things like React and Angular seem to, yeah, I, don’t really know whether they’ve lost popularity amongst developers, but they, there’s certainly less conversation about them around the place.

[00:14:53] David Waumsley: I, honestly, I don’t think React could be any more popular, for. which we’ll move on to. It could be considered legacy in this day and age. Yeah. Over this time, in terms of this takeoff, because when you’ve got somebody like Meta and Google behind these new JavaScript frameworks, they’re going to have more marketing.

It’s gonna have more of an impact on people than say the W three C, which is all about setting standards, which is, it’s academic. It’s not easy to read. So the appeal of being able to do something now. Created those. I think both of ’em have lost interest in those as companies behind them, but they’re still open source, so they’re supported by people.

And industry still like the idea of a full stack developer who can save them some costs and people are still learning because that’s what people will employ them to do, so. I think, react is extremely popular, but I, guess if you’re on the cutting edge, you probably see that. it has changed over the time, so yeah.

[00:15:56] Nathan Wrigley: Do you think that these companies, the likes, certainly Google seems to have a lot of, skin in the game when it comes to open source. I attend WordPress events and Google have great big sponsorship areas and they’re obviously trying to talk to developers. You never see meta in the same way.

maybe they do attend events, but they’re, they don’t seem to be. Part of the broader, no open source project. So that’s also interesting. And also the fact that you, are relying on these companies to supply something of. Which might be the bedrock of your projects. And obviously, at the moment it’s, there’s no hint that Meta or Google will go away, but they could, it’s not inconceivable that, Facebook will come far less profitable.

And so things like I. The, sort of the financing that they put behind projects, like React will just disappear. So yeah, the standards based thing seems to be the arrow that Google are following at the moment. in the WordPress project, they’re sponsoring a lot of people to do, I don’t know, performance related things and things like that.

Okay. And the last bullet point. the amazing real time user interaction JavaScript brought. Ooh, that was nice. Yes,

[00:17:08] David Waumsley: exactly. there’s just things you could do in your browser that you couldn’t do before with HTML and CSS, so you understand why it took off so much. So that’s true that there’s a great quote, I think

[00:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: by Rachel Andrews here.

This is a great quote. Yeah, I’ll read this out. Rachel Andrews, who we’ve mentioned various times, she, she made the following observation, which is lovely. And I quote, CSS is simultaneously too easy to bother with, yet so hard. It needs to be wrapped up. It needs to be wrapped up in a ball of JavaScript in case it scares the horses.

That about sums it up really, doesn’t it?

[00:17:44] David Waumsley: It does. There’s a, actually on the same article that’s taken from, and there’s a link there at the very bottom of it. and again, we have to put it in its timeframe. It was back in 2019 when she’s talking about that first wave of, JavaScript. But she did issue a, and I’ve heard it said with other people that actually in WordPress as well, because if you are a JavaScript developer, you go, what’s wrong with you?

To be a front end developer? You need to know JavaScript. What is wrong with, she makes this, Complaint at the end though, saying, don’t think for one minute I couldn’t learn this stuff and that I’m old hat and I’m defending my old ways. get over yourself if that’s what you think. But she does say that a 22-year-old her might have just run away if it was JavaScript she had to learn.

[00:18:29] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And I, yeah, it’s quite

[00:18:32] David Waumsley: interesting. So just linking in with that gender side of it. Okay. So should we talk about what’s changed over the last. Five years is, this divide getting smaller?

[00:18:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think, go on. Sorry, I interrupted you. Go first.

[00:18:46] David Waumsley: No, it’s fine. I’ve just put this into two sort of sections.

Technology has changed quite a bit. So CSS, that’s rapidly been, refactors, particularly with Rachel, Andrew again, she’s, with bringing grid and so much else that she’s done with that. And as. As it always happens, that’s starting to take on some of the things that JavaScript traditionally did, including interactive stuff now.

So

[00:19:15] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, it really does feel like it’s a bit of a, I don’t know, Renaissance is probably the wrong word because we never really had a time where it did these things, but it definitely feels like CSS is gonna become a really credible. I don’t know, career path, I don’t think anybody at the moment, there’s probably a handful, but it’s not in job descriptions it’s saying, the only thing that we need you to be good at is CSS, if you’re a developer.

But I can see that coming with all of the different bits and pieces that we’ve mentioned over these past 14 episodes. I can see a point where you would hire a developer who’s only good at CSS because it does all the heavy lifting maybe not all of it, but it’ll do a heavy, proportion of that lifting, yeah.

Interesting. Okay.

[00:20:01] David Waumsley: Yeah. I think Rachel Andrew’s point as well about, being simultaneously these two different things. Too simple to bother with and too complex and I think it actually, it’s become more of that because it’s always been something that the designers have gone to for styling. I.

But also it’s become almost a programming language as well, right? In the sense that we’re making everything fluid with calculations. It’s doing all the maths. We can create games with CSS only, so you can be both. You can be somebody styling and a bit of a programmer within a. Just CSS as well,

[00:20:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think you summed it up much better than I did. The idea that you could build a game in CSS, it just seems so weird, from, our old selves from 10 years ago. But it definitely is moving in that direction. I think therefore, you’ll become, I. More credible as a, I don’t know if you’ve, got that skill, I think you can put that out into the market and in, in the future that might be the only thing you need.

Okay. The second bullet point then was brows. Oh yeah. we touched on this earlier, but browsers working together to speed up progress. That’s probably, I. The most profound thing I think, with the browsers working together, everything’s accelerated and rather than all trying to compete with each other, just this common sense approach of let’s work together, it just accelerates absolutely everything because you’re not trying to work on four different ways of doing the same thing.

Now we’re working on one way of doing the same thing. Makes it easier for the browser manufacturers, but it makes it easier for people like me to use it. ’cause there’s just the way.

[00:21:36] David Waumsley: We can’t catch up with it as well because so much has come out and is supported in all the browsers. It’s interesting ’cause this thing that we’re going to do is very much based around the fact that you can have a very fluid, breakout sections in your web design, not just fluid typography.

And it’s interesting, CSS grid makes this possible with grid lines. And, we’re almost going eight years since that’s been supported in browsers and calcs been around about the same length of time, but suddenly it’s taken all of those years for people to realize, oh, I can put these two together and make something really fluid and about, I can think of about five people who have independently had the same kind of idea.

[00:22:14] Nathan Wrigley: why is that, do you think, if it’s been in there for absolutely ages, what is the reason? Is it just that these, there are these personalities and suddenly there are people who are at the top of their game putting out content and, joining with the W three C and Mozilla and all these other organizations.

How do you explain the fact it never took off in the way that it could happen? I just think

[00:22:36] David Waumsley: it, it’s always behind, we’re always behind what people are seeing. Yeah. So when. Even back to Flexbox, which made it very difficult for people like you and I to learn at the time of responsive web. But our mental, approach to everything wasn’t fluid thinking.

So once you start to suddenly go, oh, you start to put things together, it’s interesting how, it takes years for people to put it all together and start thinking about design or web design in a different way. Stop thinking of it as a replica of print and start seeing it as this squishy thing.

And then you think, Ooh, this calc makes it squishy. And oh, we’ve got these lines in grid. We can do something. It’s interesting, I think,

[00:23:21] Nathan Wrigley: I think also, we’re not, it’s not exactly for want of a better word. It’s not the most sexy topic in the world, is it? What brows have shipped. But, if you think about it, if you think about the iPhone.

apple make a great deal of Foss about an a, a feature, which is either pointless or, not much better than the previous version. And they spend their billions of dollars advertising it and shipping the units obviously, ’cause there’s a profit motive in there for them. And I understand that, but none, this isn’t really the same, is it?

And yet it’s profoundly impactful. We’re gonna be able to do an awful lot more. But it’s not, it’s, not that interesting. It’s never gonna make the mainstream media, you imagine opening up TechCrunch and seeing an article about some aspect of CSS that’s been on, it’s not gonna happen. But, you’ve got a new menu item in the, an iPhone.

Woohoo. Everybody gather round. So we do have a bit of a problem with that. as an industry, I think marketing it because it’s not that interesting. Yeah.

[00:24:20] David Waumsley: Yeah, exactly. And I think another thing that’s major on this one is web components. So this is, yeah, basically, it’s an odd word. It’s just standard stuff really.

We are talking about. HTML and CSS with JavaScript control in it, but in a different way. Everything standards rather than third party, component Yeah. Based libraries and frameworks. And, I think that really does change things. Chris Coyer, who we’re talking about with the Great Divide article.

Who’s a big WordPress fan. most recently he’s that would be his dream that WordPress start to move away from react and move towards, web components. And it may well do it because a lot of people are, they’re becoming interoperable. So if you like your view or react or whatever is your way of working or something, you could start to convert these into web components so they’re not dependent on the initial library.

So I think that’s where I think the divide is getting smaller. There’s a kind of move. With the JavaScript people who may have only gone that route, where they get back to CSS or

[00:25:27] Nathan Wrigley: h TM l that kind of links perfectly to the next bullet point, which you’ve Described as JavaScript or JS fatigue, JavaScript, fatigue.

Yeah. And the, fact that you might have to maintain a, I don’t know, a gigantic set of. Complex dependencies. That’s interesting as well. I, don’t, really follow this too closely, so I’m gonna be guided by you there. But do you’ve sensed that a bit, people, I don’t know, fed up with how complex their projects have become and all of the different things.

my understanding is things can get very complicated very quickly and that obviously is a bit of a pain in the neck.

[00:26:00] David Waumsley: Yeah. I think, what it is, obviously it’s been something that’s radically changing. People move from platforms ’cause they think that might do. Things better. Obviously the, platforms have changed because they’re controlling the browser and there’s some downsides of that.

Obviously, the big downside, and again, it’s not the WordPress thing with this one, it, when you use React to output, NASA’s an example of a site like that, Yeah. It had initially, before it went onto WordPress, it was on a React system which had to output so much stuff. That it took sec, it took so many seconds for you to see anything.

It was just a black screen, gosh. To get its interactivity, And people made jokes about it saying, is it supposed to represent the darkness of space or something? Blank space? No, it’s just slow. Yeah, it’s So there’s a lot of change in how it might work and how it might control, but then I think the other thing is.

The big plus about it is that you can borrow these libraries to put in your different components and stuff. when you’ve got a lot of that, you end up with a whole bunch of dependencies. So you end up with big organizations going. Oh my God. One developer stuck in this, which is a repeat of this one somewhere else, and then we’ve gotta maintain this and update it.

So I think, but that’s my understanding of it. ’cause of course it’s beyond my skillset. Yeah, Me too.

[00:27:18] Nathan Wrigley: But, as, an industry, we do love nerding out, don’t we? We do love like overcomplicating things. Yeah. In order to just try the, latest thing and this really is in order for that divide to get smaller, I guess a proportion of us need to say enough.

We don’t need all this complexity, just let go, move away from the JavaScript. yeah. And let’s just keep it simple, but yeah. Okay. J JavaScript.

[00:27:42] David Waumsley: Exactly. It’s a fundamental of the W three C, isn’t it? The, it is the rule of lease power. It’s keep it simple. Stupid. Yeah. in web terminology. And we always forget it.

We always make things complicated.

[00:27:53] Nathan Wrigley: Oh gosh. Yeah. We love it. And talking about it as well, the, the next one’s my favorite. The cascade is back. I can imagine a, superhero wearing a cape, with a big slogan that Cascade is back, with things like at layer, at scope and where Yeah. and you’ve put here a move to doing more with less code, just like we mentioned a minute ago.

[00:28:17] David Waumsley: Yeah, so I think, there’s a, we had just on the CSS side of things, you would have things like tailwind, JavaScript, people like that. ’cause they didn’t have to deal with the intricacies of CSS. They could component by component or utility by utility make it work. But it’s very bloated code to do that and you don’t really understand.

Cascade or how CSS works. What’s great about it now is that you have got a way of controlling that with outlay and its scope, so you can make it scope and it affects people as well, people who use Ben, which is, very popular again, as a way of flattening out the cascade. But again, it means that you are writing more code than it’s actually needed.

But if you still have difficulties, you can still put things in a layer and have it separate. You can flatten out the cascade that way. So I think that has a big impact. Yeah, it’s only just supported and scope isn’t fully supported yet, we’ll, if you

[00:29:11] Nathan Wrigley: thought the cascade is backwards, good.

Hold your horses. Here comes web assembly, to the rescue. so this is, honestly, I think this is gonna be fascinating with maybe even the future. Let’s find out. you put a new web standard with more power than js. I don’t know about the intricacies of how it works, but I’ve seen projects built upon it, a lot of them, and it’s pretty profound.

What’s gonna be happening in the browser in a browser near you soon.

[00:29:41] David Waumsley: I’m gonna have to get used to seeing Wasm because that’s just, oh, that’s what it’s called. Yeah. yeah. yeah, it’s fascinating just the idea that now you can take any programing language and make that work on the web and work in the browser.

And again, there’s lots of examples out there, people using this now, but, WordPress is one of those examples with its playground where you can actually spin out a work in. install of WordPress. Yes. and use it. I’ve been playing around with it, so I think yeah, it’s fascinating what you’re gonna be able to do.

Of course. This is what I’m gonna learn at all. I’m not a programmer. This is gonna be for the real nerds.

[00:30:22] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. But you are gonna benefit from it. We all will benefit from it, and it’s gonna be. It is gonna be pretty profound. I think the, playground example is the one that’s closest to my heart.

’cause obviously, doing WordPress things and this is the ability to basically click a button and you get a version of, you get an install, a complete WordPress website in the browser. I. it’s not on any complex server. It installs, I think it’s my SQL lightened anyway, you, we don’t need to get into how it does it, but in the background, it installs all the bits and pieces that you need inside the browser.

And at the moment you click close, you close the tab, and it is all gone. But in the future, they’re gonna make it persistent. And that’s amazing. imagine, honestly, I can’t imagine what’s gonna be possible because I think it really does need experts to get in there. But the ability to have, even on your phone, a running application inside the browser, it feels to me as if the promise of a Chromebook suddenly becomes much more realistic.

throw away your Mac, throw away your pc, you only need a browser. And, We’ll see. See how that goes. But it does look like the most, one of the most exciting things on the horizon at the moment.

[00:31:35] David Waumsley: Yeah, I should put link into actually a Google chat about that. ’cause it gives examples including WordPress, but it gives other the ones where it’s running the chat application and all sorts of things and game in running on the web.

And I do think that’s why the, divide between sort of your H-M-L-C-S-S and your JavaScript library. People is gonna change because I think most of them with the programming languages will start moving towards web assembly where could do even more than JavaScript. So I think, yeah, that kind of changed things there.

There’s a little small section we could talk about, which is just the use of demands have changed a little bit. People. I think we, now I hear more and more people who will stick their browser into read mode. So the design that you created for them just disappears so they could read the web and,

[00:32:20] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, do, my browser.

I use Brave and I haven’t put the setting on, but there’s this reader mode where you, let’s say you go to a website, any website, and it detects that it’s a text-based thing, and then it switches on. But it does it by itself. Really, I didn’t tell it to do it, and I often have to switch it off because, the, reason I want to go to that website is often to look at the design and to enjoy that experience.

But more and more the browser is making that decision for me. I really ought to go and find out how to switch that off. ’cause in my case, I do enjoy looking at the design, but for a lot of people, I think, I think it’s a utility thing. You go to a recipe website, you don’t need all the, faf and the adverts and all of this, that and the other.

You just wanna see what are the instructions, show me them in text, nice and clear and easy. And the same would be the, true elsewhere. Yeah, I, do wonder if we’ve got a bit carried away with, with design on the web and, a proportion of people want it just plain, simple, easy.

[00:33:22] David Waumsley: Yeah, and we want also the web to be everywhere.

on things that might be on our fridge is the example that I think Jen Simmons used, to describe that. And I think that’s where we’re looking at things different. And our frustration with CSS has often come from the fact that we’re trying to mimic this print design that we’ve had where we have to think, it’s just, ultimately the message just to get through there, the styling.

it’s up to the user and users now are changing their behavior. The reading, it’s interesting ’cause we mentioned the reading mode before and just after we mentioned it, it seemed to disappear from chromium browsers. Oh. But it’s back again because I use it a lot, So you

[00:34:03] Nathan Wrigley: invoke it though, you make a deliberate choice.

Yeah. Yes. I’ve, messed something up in that case. ’cause for me, it often happens and I have to switch it off and it happens dozens of times a week. I, I read quite a lot of WordPress, the articles and for some reason. the browser makes that decision for me. And then on other websites it doesn’t, so it’s curious.

Anyway, you just click a button in the URL file and it goes away. Yeah,

[00:34:25] David Waumsley: actually, yeah, there’s the three dots on a chromium browser and if you scroll down to more tools, then you should find it there. Okay.

[00:34:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, I’ll go and fiddle. Maybe I have accidentally done that, but I think you’re right. I think, I think maybe we are getting fatigued.

there, there seems to be a groundswell of. maybe that’s describing it too vociferously. But there, there does seem to be a proportion of people who kind of wanna have a different relationship with technology. they want less technology in their lives. They want the technology to be a bit slower.

They want, I don’t know, their mobile phone to be less a part of their, four o’clock in the morning doom scrolling cycle. And, maybe more straightforward, simple design is, is a way of achieving that. Yeah. Let the, print people have the complex stuff and on the web list. Keep it simple, stupid.

[00:35:11] David Waumsley: Yeah, exactly. people want the information on their terms. Yeah. And I think that’s it. And also there’s a move towards this. much faster loading sites, greener sites that are better for the environment and accessible and valid. they need to be valid code, which again, it’s one of these things that start to slip a little bit when somebody just learns JavaScript and doesn’t learn.

HTML, which, there was a survey, the first survey interesting was done. Was it the end of last year on HDML, the state of, HDML, fascinating because you think it’s so simple that you know everything, and you go through this survey and you realize, I know about 40% of what’s here. Yeah,

[00:35:54] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, yeah.

That’s, that is interesting. Also, I think in the past, the, idea of delivering the web faster was just, let’s throw more energy at it. Let’s buy bigger servers. Let’s put more. I don’t know, carbon into the atmosphere so that we can speed things up. And that’s definitely changing. In other words, let’s have a smaller server and a, less bloaty website with stripped down HDML and really keep it simple, keep it valid, and that’s the way to do, sus I’m gonna call it sustainability.

I know there’s more to it than that, but, You get the idea. So yeah. Okay. That’s interesting. So they’re the user demands. And then should we move on to this WordPress divide section?

[00:36:36] David Waumsley: Yeah, we’ll talk a little bit about that because it’s affected, obviously people like us who I think I. Back 10 years ago.

So we, that really is the time when not only React came in, but I think Page builders came in. Yep. And we were dealing with the responsive web had just come out. We’ve got Flexbox come in and for me that’s when I slipped out of doing my own HL and CSS moved into builders and Right. I think a lot of us.

Did that. So when Gutenberg came along with a, an alternative, builder, then that was a big issue and still is an issue that remains for the third parties. Or you go in with Gutenberg, but I think more recently as well, which I alluded to with Chris Coyer as well, is that from last year on. Certainly with Matt Mullenweg making a big push towards moving to block themes.

That is, for somebody like him who’s always been a PHP, developer creating themes, then that’s a massive change there. So there is this sort of division playing out, I think in WordPress at the moment where if you want to, and it would seem sensible to use the block editor as a sort of page builder for someone like me who makes those sort of sites.

That would be logical, but it’s not quite, does all the things that you would want it to do, right? You can’t get full control over your HML and your CSS, and in order to do that, you would either have to make your own components learning react, so there’s a bit of gatekeeping, or you would at least need to.

Do CSS in JavaScript with JSON. So that’s a bit of a block. So I think it’s a, fascinating thing that’s going on at the moment for me. my solution was just to concentrate on, while I don’t know what tool to use when I need a tool, I thought I’ll just concentrate on the HT ML and CSS. I can build plenty of sites with that.

Until tools settle down. So I think, oh,

[00:38:33] Nathan Wrigley: that, so hang on. Wait, Are you looking if at the, if the perfect tool, like page builder e kind of tool, WordPress or otherwise came along that delivered. What you considered to be, I don’t know, let’s air quotes good HTML and CSS and it was something that you could control more.

Would you immediately flip back into that wizzywig kind of tool or are you now like really into VS code and writing it out line by line?

[00:39:00] David Waumsley: I think that’s what’s happened. I’ve that, but there is gonna be the, I think it’s an interesting thing. So as you can see, the people in our kind of peer group were the page builder people and they’re split where they have to go.

And obviously it makes much more sense to go with the block editor because it’s gonna be looked after by, that is WordPress now. Yeah. Yeah. like it or not, that’s what it is. And it’s developing all the time where all the third party builders have this one issue that in order to be successful, they have to pull in.

The DIYs and be a wizzywig for those. So as a professional tool where you need to control the HTML and CSS, it doesn’t match. But there are them. And there’s been those growing number of builders, which are different to the ones that we started with. yeah. Which are. Aiming at those, which is like oxygen, bricks.

And, we had quickly, which has disappeared, and, at those, and even the add-ons, if you like, the ones that put an extra H-T-M-L-C-S-S layer on top of Gutenberg, like generate press. so they are all a little bit developer focused, but for me, I think that’s, they’re in a really awkward position because they are building on top of their competitor and also they have to, because they are commercial, yeah, they have to bend to what people ask for.

And as it grows in popularity, it’ll attract more people, I think, who will ask for it to be made easier to do It’s likely to go. Away from being a developer’s tool as time goes on.

[00:40:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think the mission of WordPress is, this, it’s a phrase which crops up a lot is democratizing publishing.

And I think it really is difficult to, get the perfect balance on that seesaw. on the one hand you want it to be, the, perfect mechanism to output. Perfect. H-T-M-L-C-S-S or what have you. And for developers to be able to get in there easily in a UI and change it so that it’s, so that even non-expert people can use it, but at the same time, yeah, exactly.

That you need non-experts to use it because you are democratizing publishing. So on the one hand, you’ve got developers, you must accommodate them. On the other hand, you’ve got the just. Mom and pop who don’t know anything about HTML, they’re just typing stuff out and click publish and, oh look, that looks nice.

and I, think that’s really difficult circle to square it. it’s an impossible circle to square. You’re never gonna satisfy everybody, but it’s a hard, tightrope to, get right.

[00:41:33] David Waumsley: Yeah. And I, it is interesting because when we talked on WP builds before about this, I think my, thinking on it changed a little bit in the sense that I think it was inevitable.

I. At about 2014 when React came out, that WordPress would need to go that way. Yeah. ’cause it is democratizing the web, so it does need to appeal to people who, and traditionally it has, who don’t have any coding skills. Yeah. So I think it’s got to prioritize those. So I think when Chris Coyier says he would like.

In his article, he talks about how we would like WebPress to spend more time on the developer experience, the how you, you build your own kind of theme in and stuff like that. I don’t think they’d be able to do that. ’cause the priority is always going to be the, UI for the non coders. So I think it, there is, there’s winners.

I think the winners are all of the people who want to, do more than what they could wanted a Wix like experience on an open source project. Are getting more of that. The other winners are the people with big teams who can manage to create their own components, and then they’ve got this ability to create a CMS for high paying, customers who Yeah.

Yeah. Can pay for that. And they’ve got a team. The losers are probably people like us who just need to make a simple HTML and CSS site. And you think, yeah, I’m not sure if the page builders or Gutenberg do that as HTML and Cs. Get a little bit easier to manage.

[00:42:58] Nathan Wrigley: I’ve always considered us to be losers, David.

kinda it’s about, it sums it up perfectly. okay. So yeah, there we go. Have we reached the end of that one? Think you’ve got some links on there. you’ve covered off all of those links, so haven’t you there the things that you’ve mentioned throughout the episode. Yeah. Yeah. I might stick some more in if I remember.

We’ve forgotten some, but yes. Okay, so that was, episode 14. no script show. No script.show/fourteen if you wanna check out the show notes for that. But also, just a quick reminder, we’re gonna be, this will be the last one in the WP Builds feed. So if you wanna keep up to date with what we’re doing, which will be, I think YouTube for.

A bit or less audio, more video. ’cause I think really, given the nature of the topic we’re talking about, it’s nice to see, yeah, the results. And we’re gonna, we’re gonna make some actionable content for want of a better word. yeah, I think we’re done for today. Are we? Yeah, we are. Yeah.

All right. In which case, I’ll see you on the next one, although I don’t know if that’ll be 15 or what. I dunno how we’re gonna work it out. But I’ll see you somewhere on the internet on a video. See you later, David.