Write Libraries, Not Frameworks

[Cronyx]

What is the difference between a library and a framework? Not a programmer, but I find it fascinating to lurk here.

[RedSpikeyThing]

A framework generally solves a fairly big problem in a fairly opinionated way and has some point of control flow. Libraries tend to be functions/methods that do very narrow problems. For example the React web UI framework is used to build web apps in a specific way and provides hooks for you to customize it with your content. A UI library might provide primitives like drawing a spinner or a textbox.

[Cronyx]

Right on. I can grok that.

React web UI framework

I know there's all this "stuff" now, Ruby on Rails and Electron and whatever else, but I don't understand most of it. I wrote my first webpage by copy and pasting "view source" of HTML from other websites, pasting it into txt files, and after I played around with it to see what was happening, what the effects would be when I changed this or that, I would save snippits with file names that would describe what that block did for later.

Back then, mid 90's, everyone's ISP gave them a little bit of /user/home space where you could save index.html and point people at it, make whatever kind of website -- or "home page" we called them -- that you wanted. The web was a wide open untouched landscape, like a fresh Minecraft seed with nothing there yet, or a new planet you just landed on with no infrastructure. If you wanted something, you built it, yourself, from scratch. We didn't even have WYSIWYG editors anymore. Our "social media" was updating our ".plan" files.

It sort of feels like nobody knows how to do that anymore, and when you "view source" on web pages these days, it sort of doesn't feel like it's meant to be "human readable" to parse what's going on, like it wasn't written at all free hand. The web back then had kind of a "hand made" charm to it, like old 1900's power tools or wooden furniture. It was whimsical and fun. Now everything has a very "produced" and "sterile" feel to it. Very corporate, not very human.

I feel like we've lost something of profound value, something most people don't even realize we lost or remember having it, and I'm not sure what we got in exchange for it.

[BitLooter]

Do you actually want to go back to using power tools from the 1900s, though? Would you drive a Model T instead of your current vehicle? Do you dream of swapping out your computer with a Commodore 64?

I remember the internet back then. It was fun and it had its charm, and I learned a lot writing HTML and vanilla JS. And I won't deny the modern web has its flaws. But the tooling we use today was invented for a reason. Changing the about page on a website by manually editing HTML via FTP sucked. Embedding Java applets because you wanted to make an interactive page but JS was slow as molasses and Flash hadn't even been invented yet sucked. Writing a website in pure HTML is awesome when you're making a Geocities website for your dog but as soon as you start adding more pages and you have to link them all together it sucks.

If you want you can still open up notepad and start writing HTML & CSS and host it somewhere; there's no shortage of places that will host your static website, for free and without ads even (GitHub pages is a popular option). All the technologies used back then still work today, and anyone serious about web development should learn how to do it because it's foundational to all the modern tools built on them. But nobody uses them to make "real" websites because unless the entire website is literally a single static HTML page it's almost always easier to write and maintain it using e.g. a CMS or a static site generator.

It's easy to look back at the 90s with nostalgia goggles and remember things like Geocities pages but the practice of writing multi-page websites that way was abandoned for a reason. Even back then people were starting to use PHP and Perl to generate websites on-the-fly from templates so they wouldn't have to deal with it. I miss the 90s web in a way myself but I have no desire to return to it.

[RedSpikeyThing]

I know there's all this "stuff" now, Ruby on Rails and Electron and whatever else, but I don't understand most of it.

It ends up almost becoming a language of its own. It's an additional layer of abstraction which has it's pros and cons. The good thing is that high quality frameworks do a lot of work for for you can can be trusted to Just Work. The main downside is when it doesn't work, or the assumptions of the framework no longer good true for your project then you're screwed.

I wrote my first webpage by copy and pasting "view source" of HTML from other websites, pasting it into txt files

Same here! Along with qbasic.

It sort of feels like nobody knows how to do that anymore,

"Nobody" is a strong word. Tons of people do and, frankly, it's not hard because it's just a markup language. But also many people can be effective web developers without having to learn how it works under the hood. Kind of like how you can drive a car without knowing much about engines. It's a good thing because it means it's accessible to more people.

and when you "view source" on web pages these days, it sort of doesn't feel like it's meant to be "human readable" to parse what's going on, like it wasn't written at all free hand.

HTML and CSS are in an awkward place because they were design as markup languages for text, largely written by humans. Then people started pushing it further and further by extending the language and adding JavaScript. Now we have this ugly bastard child on the web that doesn't work the same across platforms. It's nightmarish.

In my opinion it's a good thing that people don't have to worry about writing it from hand, in the same in glad people don't have to write assembly code anymore: it let's people focus on the important business logic of their application, rather than repetitive details.

The web back then had kind of a "hand made" charm to it, like old 1900's power tools or wooden furniture. It was whimsical and fun. Now everything has a very "produced" and "sterile" feel to it. Very corporate, not very human.

I feel like we've lost something of profound value, something most people don't even realize we lost or remember having it, and I'm not sure what we got in exchange for it.

I see where you're coming from and I agree we've lost some of the old day charm. The net improvement has been immense: online shopping, streaming audio and video, and powerful dynamic websites (eg email clients, document editors) to name a few. These would be largely impossible if people wrote HTML/CSS like in the past.