[xp84]

There will always be a tension between those who want purely semantic documents and those who argue for a pragmatic allowance of layout to just be allowed in the document itself.

It’s indisputable though that the modern BS of frontend tech is approaching an asymptote of ridiculous complexity. The divs go so deep that it is often pointless to even try to determine what’s going on from a web inspector. And I think the documents themselves are now less semantic than they ever were. Sure, tables were abused (to the extent they weren’t anything close to tabular data). But today every element you see being a layer of 37 divs and spans that don’t even function or in some cases even render without JavaScript getting involved… the web is now just basically a responsive version of PDF.

[user3939382]

View Source on any major modern website and many (most?) others is useless. You get 15 lines with some cryptic webpacked JS references.

It must be that we now have a new generation of devs that have no experience with the beauty of the original web where others’ pages were legible and you could as a human easily read and learn from their source. I’m not saying there are 0 tradeoffs but there’s definitely a loss there.

[xp84]

My first time wading into web development was hopping into the source of the MSN.com homepage circa 2000 to see how their DHTML menu rollovers worked, and then stealing it. It was mostly CSS, but to support some browsers they had JS assist with what's being moused over.

That kind of thing is utterly impossible to replicate with a modern frontend build -- all the classes are generated by styled components and all the behaviors are attached with React or Angular. Best you could hope for is to find some telltale attribute that points you toward an open-source library. Or, hope they left their sourcemaps on.