[Why I love working with the web](https://remysharp.com/2016/01/20/why-i-love-working-with-the-web "Permanent Link: Why I love working with the web")

I do wonder exactly why viewing source was baked into the early browsers. I can imagine it was to do with debugging and keeping the technology and protocols open to help with adoption.

And oh my did it pay off or what!? I’m one of the earlier generation of developers that skipped on reading books and just learnt from all the mistakes and insights of other people’s code on the web.

For me, I had my major breakthrough in understanding JavaScript by grokking the [jQuery source](http://genius.it/ejohn.org/files/jquery-original.html) (back in the 0-1.x days, some 10 years ago).

Without view source I’m pretty sure I’d be a shadow of the developer I am today, even possibly I’d still be writing closed source Perl!

I was reading [Jake Archibald’s post](https://jakearchibald.com/2015/if-we-stand-still-we-go-backwards/) entitled If we stand still, we go backwards and it had me thinking about an analogy for complexity that I’d heard compared to the web before.

Back in the early days of photography, technology was, compared to today, rather simple. At a push, I can make a pinhole camera in a few hours (maybe…​).

A compact digital camera on the other hand is a whole different kettle of fish. I don’t know even if today a single individual is capable of building a fully working camera. But this is the cost and benefit of technical advancement.

I mean, heck, look at it, and that’s even after you’ve got all the parts made!


So, if you want to build browser optimised insane effects, work with the latest offline push technology and have it all fully mobile optimised: the job is going to be hard. Not "build a device that talks to space"–hard, but you’ll probably need to read a book or two.

That’s all assuming you’ve got the parts - to get the parts you need frameworks and build tools, or so you’ll be told…​over and over and over. There’s no doubt: the job is daunting.

This is not the only way - I assure you.

The web is still made up of HTML, CSS and JavaScript and works damn well in it’s vanilla form. This blog for instance, my primary presence on the web, was just HTML and CSS with a dash of copy & pasted JavaScript.

These days I’ve long ditched the Wordpress backend, and gone for a static site. One that I could easily code by hand. In fact, I wrote my own process that turns markdown files in to HTML, because that suited me. There’s no reason why I couldn’t use some GUI program on my laptop to transform the markdown to HTML, then paste in the header & footer.


It’s the web’s simplicity. Born out of a need to connect documents. As much as that might have changed with the latest generation of developers who might tell you that it’s hard and complex (and they’re right), at the same time it is not complicated. It’s still beautifully simple.

Anyone can do it. Anyone can publish content to the web, be it as plain text, or simple HTML formed only of <p> tags or something more elaborate and refined. The web is unabashed of it’s content. Everything and anything goes.

The web is a truly amazing place for developers today. There’s an amazing abundance of libraries, frameworks, plugins and utilities to make life much easier to do the super complicated stuff that some people were brave enough to roll by hand 10 years ago. Equally, if you want to write JavaScript and ignore all of the ES6 / ESnext parts, you can (and for the most part, due to constraints, I do too!).

If you sit back for a moment, and think about just how many lives you can touch simply by publishing something, anything, to the web, it’s utterly mind blowing. That’s why I love working with the web.

What about you?

Published 20-Jan 2016 under #web. [Edit this post](https://github.com/remy/remysharp.com/blob/main/public/blog/why-i-love-working-with-the-web.md)

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Ramon Carroll

0 points

7 years ago

It’s so true too. The web can be as complicated or as simple as you want it to be, and that’s one of the most beautiful things about it .Good read!


greenido

0 points

8 years ago

Good one Remy!\ I love the web and wish you see it get the elements (e.g. components, debuggability, offline first etc') that will make it (even more) powerful platform.


gibarto

0 points

8 years ago

Way back in 2002, I put up a website that was nothing but HTML and Javascript with a bit of embedded CSS. Eventually, I used blogger as a sort of content manager until they discontinued support for personal websites. That very old and creaky site is still around. The other day I redid the homepage using bootstrap, just because O’Reilly or one of them had linked a tutorial on their blog. It took less than half an hour to turn a mess of a page into a mess of a page that’s mobile ready. Yes, if you’re visiting a top-notch e-commerce site, you’re going to see more things going on than one person can manage. But if you just want to display your own voice at your own place, the web is still amazingly accessible, allowing you to start basic and build on what you’ve done or not.


Francis Kim

0 points

8 years ago

Web is my life!


Najum

0 points

8 years ago

Amazing read


Jorge MDR

0 points

8 years ago

I love it, that’s exactly why! It’s mind blowing that in a few minutes you are able to create some document that can be viewed almost everywhere. And the challenge (sometimes really stressfull) of having soimething new to learn and be part of everyday. I usually say that i’ll have amazing stuff to study and create for the rest of my life and even more hehe. You are right as well about the "freedom" of choosing the best tools that fit you JS or ES6, Sass or Less, Boostrap or Foundation or Inuit…​ and so on. I hate the pressure of 'ohh now forget about JS you don’t use ES6' i mean…​ obviosly it’s our work to be ahead of the game and to know whats going on in the web scene but we all have been using JS just fine for some many years. ;)


John McCarthy

0 points

8 years ago

Loved this, love the web!


Stan

0 points

8 years ago

"Equally, if you want to write JavaScript and ignore all of the ES6 / ESnext parts, you can"

But you can’t, and for some of the very reasons you list here.

Not only is building a web browser too big for any one person, but most pages you see in your web browser are too big and complex for any one person to have written. That means you need a team, either an intentional one, or an accidental one. (You didn’t build this comment system, for example.)

And when you’ve got a team, you’ve got other people who will pick a different subset of the languages and libraries and tools that they like and are familiar with. It might be a nice life if I only ever had to maintain the software that I wrote, but that’s not the world I live in.

Somewhere, someday, somebody on your team is going to add a thingy using a web technology that you don’t understand, and it’s going to depend on some other thingy you don’t understand, and then at 4:30PM on some Friday you’re going to have to debug it when they’re not around.

It would be great if the web were a land of simplicity where I understood everything or could just ignore the parts that I don’t, but it’s not.

Ah, well, when I want to escape into that world, I’ll always have Scheme.


rem

0 points

8 years ago

I never suggested you understand everything! Heck, none of us have (or should want to have) time for that!

But this "Equally, if you want to write JavaScript and ignore all of the ES6 / ESnext parts, you can" is actually me. I don’t use esnext at all. For a few reasons: I don’t like the extra step of a code compiler (though tools like Babel are outright amazing), and that I have to write code that works in lots of different environments.

I’ve worked on many projects, both in a team or alone, and so far, this has worked for me. In the work I do at the moment, some of the team uses esnext (because they’re running in node 4 env), the front end developer (singular) is using es5, and I’m writing es5.

Like I said, you can.

Or, you know, do what works for you too :)


JohnnyQ

0 points

8 years ago

mate. well fucken said


Adam Lofting

0 points

8 years ago

+1!

And to continue the analogy…​ learning to put together even a relatively primative camera like the Konstruktor DIY Kit will help you appreciate (and wield) the most advanced camera available today.


Caspar Hübinger

0 points

8 years ago

Just today I came across a line that I think adds a pretty good contrast to this post: “[surveillance is the business model of the web](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/01/the_internet_of.html)”. I read those things and try to avoid thoughts like “who the xxxx wants to code for a surveillance machine?”, because I, too, love working with the web—at least with the one we knew.


Marc Thiele

0 points

8 years ago

Lovely article, Remy. And many true words said. Agreeing a lot. Thanks!


cody lindley

0 points

8 years ago

A nice breeze compared to the climate of other opinions on matter as of late. Thank you


Ivan Wilson

0 points

8 years ago

Sometimes, complexity is an illusion. People are, at times, afraid of simplicity for so many reasons.


Stephen Cunliffe

0 points

8 years ago

I love the web too. If ever I need to create a program or utility - my first thought is can I do it in the browser…​ 'cause that’s where I want to use it.


Samiullah Khan

0 points

8 years ago

I think looking to those mega JavaScript Libraries and things like polymer etc etc made it hard otherwise as nicely said in the article; we just need HTML, CSS and JavaScript to create most handsome looking, most usable and accessible website.


willjmoore

0 points

8 years ago

Just been reading about the birth of the web (and other things) in [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Inn…​;](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Innovators-Inventors-Hackers-Geniuses-Created-Digital-Revolution/dp/1471138801) and the original choices of the web was the most interesting. One-way links, no in-browser editing of pages, no monetisation etc helped to spread the web very fast but had other repercussions later. A good read.

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