Counter-argument: the cascade in CSS was a massive design mistake and it shows even more in this particular case.
With LLM-assisted development you spend more time reading and reviewing the generated code. The cascade in styles is nowhere near as readily apparent as something like Tailwind.
I haven't seen cascades be a problem since the days of monolithic, app-wide stylesheets, and no project I personally know of works that way anymore.
Just about everyone uses component-specific styles with a limited set of selectors where there are very few collisions per property, and pretty clear specificity winners when there are.
If the alternative to the cascade is that you have to repeat granular style choices on every single element, I'll take the cascade every time.
If you're arguing down that route, LLMs can bulk-apply style attributes exactly where they're needed. Every element precisely described, no need for CSS and style-sheets at all.
And then you'd wind up with a needlessly noisy approach, and then you will reach for Tailwind to do basically the same thing but in a more terse manner. ;P
They aren’t responding to thread roots extended comment, just the first part about the tone and rhetoric of AI proponents. Your comment isnt really a response to anything in their comment.
Map wasn’t really the thing that enabled all of those designs, even though it was certainly often used to build them.
We just didn’t have a million and one layouts and device sizes to handle back then and so you could get really creative with available space. Even CSS Zen Garden later on had designs that worked much better on the limited screen sizes of that era - which don’t work well today.
Flat design trends killed off the rest of it I think.
Video game sites back then were cool, yes. Now do video game fan sites.
These have in so many ways been replaced over the years by generic ad-ridden wikis but back in the day games often had crazy interesting fan sites for specific video games.
So many unique designs and layouts were done for those niche communities and so many of those designers and developers went on to do really cool things in the future. What an era.
Here's one from my old AOL days. We originally just used email, AOL message boards, and a scheduled weekly chatroom, but once the Web took over it merged into Starmen.net [2]
Since we're on a "reminsence about legacy Internet" trend right now, here's the opening to [1]:
"What most people forget to remember is that it’s not just about the game. It’s about the people, it’s about the newsletters, it’s about the discussions, the trivia, the polls, the websites, and the meetings. Everything that was a part of the club was a part of the community, and there was so much involved that it was almost too much to handle. Who had the time to be a member of some 15 Online clubs? I can distinctly remember sending out invitations to join Moonside and receiving replies along the lines of “Sorry, I’m already in like 5 of these things.” Now, I wish there were more clubs and to any of you who have one: I will readily join. The only last great, recently active club I can think of now is the EarthBound Gang, arguably the greatest Online EarthBound Club ever. In early 1999, a lot of the clubs started dying out. I know that mine began to slow down, only to be restarted in the fall of 99’, and again in the summer of 00’. But as a whole, the EB clubs were never restarted, which is a shame, because some of them were downright fun."
The problem is "fandoms" as a whole have now become such toxic hellscapes I'd rather just enjoy the game/movie/TV series myself and completely ignore what anyone else's opinion of it is.
I don't need things that bring me joy to be ruined by the most obsessive weirdos in the world.
That's easily solved by turning off comments or forcing every comment to be approved by an admin before it was displayed; much easier back then as there simply weren't that many people online. The "Web 2.0 read/write web" of XBL lobbies, Battle.net and Discord perverted gaming culture to a point of no return.
Sites back then had benevolent dictators that curated an experience for fans. I think in many ways it worked better than the democratized communities we have today.
It wasn’t so much “benevolent dictator” as it was “you’re in my house, so quit being a dick”. Toxic fans certainly existed but this approach usually led to them splintering off to create their own thing that’d inevitably wither away.
(You can perhaps substitute “wasn’t so much” for some form of “in addition to”)
While I agree with current "Top-Level Internet" as I call it, the blurb is referring to the '99-'00s era when we were still very much disconnected. Those clubs had a forum on AOL and that was it.
I think Discord is where the "New Internet" is forming, because that's where this generation of kids are hanging out. We were in the Nintendo chat rooms, and they're in the modern day equivalents. We just think they are on Twitch and Kick because that's where the grown ups are playing games, but remember there's a reason Roblox is popular.
I think there was also planetquake. Loved these sites and frankly, they are beautifully designed. It shows the age, but apart from not being accessible and not being able to scale, the UI was really structured and easy to navigate. I miss these communities.
I still have around 20 PSDs of all of the different Quake clan / gaming ladder sites I put together back in the day.
I think that's why these sites all looked unique. The design started with a blank image in Photoshop because you used to slice up the PSDs into images and stitch it together in code afterwards.
Today you can easily design a site without ever touching an image editor since it can be all CSS rules.
The generic, ad-ridden wikis are everywhere, unfortunately, because the terrible service they provide is free. However, there are also lots of passionate people who pay to host their own MediaWiki servers, and then communities that populate it with accurate information! I think they deserve special applause for providing a really cool service that we mostly take for granted.
..only after I started putting together the list, did I realize that a lot of them are hosted by the same individual or community (https://meta.runescape.wiki/w/Weird_Gloop). Interesting!
The wiki format has indeed become ubiquitous for fan sites, but many fan wikis are fairly elaborate and ad-free (-ish, at least). Often the case for popular gacha games at least, e.g. https://bluearchive.wiki/.
The problem is that Fand*m makes finding results from the decent wikis unreasonably hard, I end up having to use extensions like https://getindie.wiki/.
Also, Discord all but killed the concept of a video game fan site...
This is the fault of Wikia (now "Fandom") which jam-packs every wiki full of ads and auto-playing videos they'll helpfully reopen for you if you accidentally close them.
Along with Breezewiki, which was specifically designed to combat Fandom/Wikia.
An another note it's always struck me as extremely presumptuous that the company thinks it can just call itself "Fandom" like the word hasn't existed in generic form for nearly a century and a half before they ever did. The lack of willingness to fend off what should be unenforceable trademarks and copyrights is creating a snowball that's going to get too big to stop in the next decade.
Oh, on the other hand I'm actually totally surprised there was a new post on the homepage as recently as Dec 14th! Huge kudos to everyone still keeping the awesomeness alive.
I can think of at least one. gamefaqs.gamespot.com
gamespot itself is definitely different than it used to be but the gamefaqs subdomain has remained nearly identical to how it was in the late 90s early 2000s
I run several add-ons in the Heroku ecosystem and having dipped my toe into both Laravel Cloud and Vercel+Next...it's hard not to look at the generalized Heroku ecosystem and see it suffer in comparison.
I worry that Heroku is now in an uncomfortable middle position between much easier to use systems and much more enterprise devops systems like AWS.
With LLM-assisted development you spend more time reading and reviewing the generated code. The cascade in styles is nowhere near as readily apparent as something like Tailwind.
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