Overengineered Anchor Links

As a backend person, sometimes I look at what's being done for front end stuff and pull back in ever so slight horror.

It's an excellent article, and the work within is very well done, but there's a part of me that screams "Why would you introduce this much complexity for what should be a simple scroll?" (overcoming technical hurdles to produce the desired end result aside).

Frontend is completely inaccessible to me.

From time to time I dip my toe in and try new things, but as productive as I can get with Astro, the illusion vanishes as soon as I have to understand any of the plumbing.

Fortunately, I can still party like it’s 1999 just fine: just yesterday, I worked on a janky brutalist web app (the same way I did back in 2002, cribbing from the O’Reilly “Dynamic HTML: the Definite Reference”) and “deployed” it with rsync to pico.sh. It’s practically unstyled and I didn’t even use jquery, but it works.

The thing is, backend stuff is largely solved. You need to store data? Here you go, here's a database. You need to process a bunch of strings for similarity? We got an algorithm for that.

But frontend stuff is messy. How do you tell a person what they're trying to do is wrong and they need to change their inputs? Oh, maybe we can highlight the input or we can pop a modal message. Haha, psyche! Users ignore that shit! Now what you gonna do, buddy?

Frontend is a mess because all you people are a mess.

Contempt for your users inevitably leads to bad products so it’s no wonder things are bad if this is the prevalent attitude among front end web developers.

Lack of concern or outright contempt for front end and the users is why front end development is a subfield in the first place, because backend devs can't or won't produce something people can use.

> backend devs can't or won't produce something people can use.

Where by people you mean management and sales, and by produce you mean add 150 different tracker scripts? :).

Snark aside, contempt for frontend dev and contempt for users are two different things; the latter has thoroughly infected the fields of UI/UX. It's most visible in webdev, because that's where most UI work happens. Second to that is mobile app dev, where it's just as bad.

Also, there are actually two somewhat distinct types of contempt for the user:

1) Paternalism - "users are idiots and need to be babysit at every step, or else they hurt themselves (or make us spend money on support)"; this one is pretty overt in UI/UX.

2) Exploitation - "users are livestock, the purpose of the site/app is to milk them as much as we can - whether it's taking their data, money, or both; the design must guide users to allow extracting maximum value from them before eventually discarding them"; this one is less talked about, even though it underpins many UI/UX patterns (not all of them known as "dark patterns").