| > some abstract concept of artisanal purity As opposed to what, some abstract concept of ordinary users? What the sales department wants? The idea of craftsmanship isn't that abstract to me. Performance and cacheability aren't abstract at all, that a website can get reloaded many times even for just one reader, and usually shares memory and CPU and HD cache with many other tabs, is also a really obvious observation. Stuff that makes a noticeable difference even in isolation makes a giant difference multiplied with a triple trillion, I've done the math. > HN basically has a front page post decrying the state of the modern web every day... That doesn't mean there isn't a problem. There's also articles decrying environmental destruction every day, not on HN but in general - should that make one care less? Would you say that biologists and climatologists are more concerned than the "ordinary person" means the ordinary should be heeded? I'd be surprised to see scientists in a science forum talk like that. Web development is an "art", maybe like architecture is art, and we are the artisans. If having any sort of ideals to strive towards is "abstract" to us, that says more about the people involved in web development and how much genuine excitement and care for detail was destroyed by money and marketing, but not much about web development as an art form as such. Does a flood of crappy action movies say anything about the state of the art in movie making, at all? And yes, the "average audience" maybe likes them, but who cares? If they got something else instead, there's nothing they could do about it, and it would be better for them. I don't care if that's arrogant, but don't call it abstract :P > I don't see that happening though. That is like talking about sports or the weather, even if its true, it's pointless. The question is rather, what do we think should happen, and how can we make it happen. |