I made a website for my uncle's tile business. Real, international business with an office in the UK. I made it with ~180 lines of CSS, ~30 lines of JS ~20 lines of GNU (1) m4, and 60 lines of make. Got positive impressions from everybody he works with and probably improved our sales. External JS included, the WHOLE website source weighs in at 150 kb without images, with multiple pages, a gallery with a lightbox and on a proper grid (github.com/ThisIsDallas/simplegrid), a custom Google Maps map via the API, a carousel, and a consistent colour scheme, all done in an afternoon. And once compiled, the product weighs less than the source.

I guess the problem is nowadays the designer folk gets to say too much on the development of websites and web standards. There is no prerequisite to become one. If you didn't study CS in depth, at the uni or by yourself, you can't do embedded, OS dev, etc., but mashing together some stuff from Github you become a web designer, no qualifications needed.

Here we have a website that talks about bloat and lists nine or ten tools that have well established, better, more generic counterparts. Generating a file from another via a filter program (minifier, m4, awk, coffeescript compiler...) is what make excells at. Replacing strings is what m4, awk and sed do since 1980's. We don't expect from the designer folk to know anything about the basics of computing. And they spend their time duplicating and triplicating and quadruplicating effort spent decades ago to end up doing the same thing, only worse, and when it comes to actual work, all they do is mix and match some libraries and add bloat after bloat, instead of looking to see what needs to be done, and doing it, using the tools already available and fit.

(1) Otherwise I'd have to implement a foreach macro, which would take some 10 lines more.

I'm not sure I understand why designers should know CS. Most of them spend their time in Photoshop/Sketch, not programming. Unless I misunderstand.

Also from your other comment you would like Ajax to not be used in websites?

> I'm not sure I understand why designers should know CS. Most of them spend their time in Photoshop/Sketch, not programming. Unless I misunderstand.

They also write a lot of JS and CSS that face the web. I didn't want to say that they should learn/know CS, but just some basics of computing, if they're going to write code that runs on others' machines (JS).

> Also from your other comment you would like Ajax to not be used in websites?

I would like the normal behaviour of browser widgets (links, buttons, forms) let alone. New widgets are OK with me, e.g. an interactive map, a carousel, a dropdown menu. You get to define the behaviour of these tools, but a button, a link etc. has an associated meaning with them.

Really? I've never met a designer that wrote js. Engineers should be writing the software. Js web apps are essentially the same as c++ win32 ( or whatever thick client side tech ) apps with some web semantics like urls preserved. I've seen designers write css, and I think the good ones do, but I've never met one that was happy to or was particularly skilled at it.

There is a recent inclination among designers to write JS and take part in writing front-end code. Youtube is full of their talks.

JS/Hypertext was not initially meant for engineering anyting, so it's not analogous to a combination of UI toolkit & proper programming language & a compiler.

Huh. Js has certainly evolved though, I mean check out how v8 compiles down to assembly and accesses object properties directly at a fixed memory offset: http://www.developerknowhow.com/995/why-the-v8-javascript-en...

Because otherwise you get a lot of designers who know print design but don't actually know how a web page works on a technical level. That gives you awkward (or flat out impossible to implement) designs that were made without any regards to how it actually works in a browser across various screen sizes and devices.