[bunderbunder]

That is the nominal motive, but I think that the real motive is that it makes it easier for average developers to pile on more complexity.

Back in the day we just accepted technical constraints that didn’t prevent us from doing anything mission critical. So the UIs weren’t paragons of personal expression, probably there was only one database which didn’t have any scale out features at all, and nothing scrolled infinitely. And I do think that tended to make things easier to fit into your head, because the number of distinct APIs and module interactions you needed to understand was much smaller.

But also none of it was integrated with Alexsirtanapilot, so everyday life was an endless misery.

[overgard]

Yeah, I think a lot of what web tech makes possible/standard in a UI is actually frequently things that add a lot of complexity with little actual value. Animations, a widget that looks different from the thousands of other widgets you use daily that do the same thing, non-standard behavior, etc. Computers are ironically much harder to use now than they were in like 2000, and it's not that they're doing things that are fundamentally way more complicated, it's just a lot of bullshit that isn't entirely neccessary

[bunderbunder]

Yes. Just this evening I had to help my mom. She was convinced a web form she needed to fill out was broken.

The problem was a required input control was so heavily styled that it was genuinely difficult to recognize it as interactive. Possibly impossible for my mom, whose eyes aren’t what they used to be.

And, in place of traditional validation design language, they decided to just make the submit button invisible until the input validated.

The worst part is, someone is probably quite proud of the extra day or two they spent making sure that UI was broken.