Current web stack is very complicated, HTML and CSS DOM is a rats nest and that's a superficial example. Adding asynchronous rpc pushes that way over the top. Luckily HTTP has been through the production crucible for 30 years. What I see is not a cost center but a reflection of basic truth:
- UI and data representation is hard.
- Developers use the tools they know about.
But about micro-libraries, the first point isn't very important because this is a social problem. There is no standard library for NPM that does what people need. There should be a curated function library of this crap.
In my imaginary vision there are several, and people would look askance when you don't use one without an obvious reason. I very much sympathize with the desire to burn-it-all, but I like that I can use LetsEncrypt and am cognizant that there is a lot of thought and raw technological progress bound up in all this.
How people use them is another matter. But don't blame that on the technology.
And of course we should blame the technology: the sole purpose of a standard is to be used by people. If people struggle with it the standard is unfit for its purpose.
That is the state of things.
'People' is equivocal here. While complex, and (as you point out, in so many words) an evolved standard, the HTML/CSS/JS stack is arguably one of humanity's greatest achievements, up there with the invention of paper, or perhaps cuneiform.
It's imperfect, like all living standards, but it manages to be ubiquitous, expressive, and _useful_. And for those of us who grew up with these standards, they are second nature.
Like piano, mastering these standards gives you the ability to express complex UI concepts with grace and alacrity.
Don't smash up your parents' piano simply because practicing scales is a chore :)
QUIC is hilarious because they ended up fitting everything and the kitchen sink for any need in the proto, just because 15 years ago firewalls blocked this or that and the reimplementation with websockets of the thing that was blocked runs only in a browser.
> QUIC is hilarious
It's apples to oranges. QUIC is actually used _with_ HTTP/3.
Consider not mix transport level (QUIC) and application level (HTTP) protocols in the same comparison to oppose them.
Even stipulating a Wand of Internet Technology (WIT) that could produce the One True Stack (OTS), two things remains undone:
- fixing all the old stuff (or does OTS emulate it all?)
- precluding further drift (or does OTS end all that?)
What I end up thinking (maybe i'm wrong) is that node.js must be nuked out of backend and on frontend maybe some of the devs should use either a number of libraries under 15 and write custom code for the rest, or use a language that transpiles to JS like TS, flutter, nim, Go or what have you.
Maybe JS should be nuked out of tooling too, sometimes it's actively damaging and sometimes dead slow. Use something else if wrangling asset files are a problem.
If you want a DX where backend is frontend, you must use the only three mantained languages that can do that without trying to actively damage you or users, which are a Smalltalk (like Pharo), a Lisp (like Clojure/Clojurescript) or Java.
