Friday Night Manifesto for Better Web Development Over time, all software gets bigger and does not necessarily get better. Current web development tools and processes have made a web that is too hard to build, debug, and support. A myriad of tools is suggested. Web applications evolved out of static web pages. Not recently, but almost immediately in the 1990s. The need for dynamic web apps is nothing new. But, as happened with other software, as computing resources and network speeds increased from the mid 1990s to the mid 2010s, they got bigger and more complex. Security vulnerabilities are rampant, and given the importance of the web in global communication and commerce, is more dangerous than ever. This is not acceptable. Larger and more complex applications mean more security problems.Larger and more complex applications cost more, in every way. The world is now seeing the birth of the 2nd generation of Internet technicians and programmers, who need a dozen different unproven tools. In many applications, you can’t simply just read HTML source and make any sense of it. Or you need a build step(s). Text into text. Into text. Web components do not enjoy widespread use. You can’t easily reuse components like dropping them on a form without expensive and opinionated overhead. New frameworks proliferate, because many are not satisfied with what’s available. People will say, the needs have gotten more complex. But unnecessary complexity has outpaced requirements complexity for years. Every new tool to learn is a barrier. New technologies are promising, but HTML CSS and JS are fundamental to the web. Maybe they’ll be replaced but not soon. This is not acceptable and needs to be reformed.
