Complexity

One of the most influential design patterns in the development of Web 
technologies in the past decade has been captured in the Extensible Web 
Manifesto:
   https://extensiblewebmanifesto.org/

Key elements of that manifesto include:
* Focus on adding new low-level capabilities to the web platform
* allow web developers to iterate on [high-level features in Javascript] 
before they become standardized.

My sense is that the first item has been extremely successful, but the 
latter not nearly as much - while there has been a good amount of 
iteration on JS-based high-level wrappers to these low level features, 
it's not obvious a lot of the outcomes of this iteration has found a 
path back to standardization.

While this may be a sign that it's not needed, a message I've heard 
repeatedly over recent years (and one that might be worth backing with 
actual research rather than anecdotes) is that developing for the Web 
has become harder and harder, moving in the realm of "engineering" and 
complex toolchain to the detriment of being a platform usable by a wide 
range of makers.

It feels to me that an effort looking at the complexity of the platform 
and its impact on the developer experience would probably be 
informative; we would naturally want to start by understanding whether 
and how much of an issue it is, before discussing what approaches would 
help improve the situation.

Dom

Received on Thursday, 26 January 2023 13:41:20 UTC