I do roll all my own code (never touched jQuery et al), mostly because I can and I find it weirdly enjoyable. But threads like these do make me wonder if all these nice tools we have these days are really just a crutch for bad programming practices. I mean I know tech jumps exponentially with each iteration but I swear the performance gained by newer technology is just eaten up straight away by developers writing heavier code to accomplish the same things as before.
I know this all sounds hyper-cynical and I do like my compositing display manager with wobbly windows et al so I'm hardly in a position to moan about bloat. But I guess my rant is about how poor web markup is for expressing modern documents (let alone full blown web applications). Well that, and I just needed to rant because I'm stuck in a hospital waiting room at 1 in the morning...
An old DOS file manager [1], written in assembly. Super fast and responsive, tiny size -- a fraction of Norton Commander &co's, never mind any modern tools.
Whenever I have to deal with the insanely inconvenient cluster fuck that is modern file managers (OSX Finder!), I probably feel the way you do about "modern web development".
Hope your hospital visit goes well.
I hope your visit went well.
It's turning out to be quite a fun challenge, reminiscent of early web days when I'd muck about trying to shave 2k off a JPEG.
Hopefully notions such as "critical" CSS and inlining to reduce requests might encourage the re-emergence of lean yet visually pleasant websites.