Comment by LinuxAmbulance a day ago
As a backend person, sometimes I look at what's being done for front end stuff and pull back in ever so slight horror.
It's an excellent article, and the work within is very well done, but there's a part of me that screams "Why would you introduce this much complexity for what should be a simple scroll?" (overcoming technical hurdles to produce the desired end result aside).
The issue is that UI/UX is in a terrible place. Your comments would be valid if this was 15 years ago.
UX is in the gutter with extra clicks and terrible workflows in almost every website. UI is a catastrophe of mobile first, but not really, but sort of kind of we want power users but we need regular users, and all our UI kits look like total ass that is incompatible with so many other things.
This website is a great example. The webpage doesn't load instantly and instead forces the user to wait for text to appear. Great UX engineering guys, make the user wait!
Let’s not act like backend dev is much better. They’re two sides of the same coin.
The entire web stack – backend and frontend – is a mess because the nature of the web is cumulative development over two decades, leading to a pile of abstractions upon abstractions that by some miracle remain mostly interoperable and backwards compatible.
As a full-stack engineer who also studies UX, most UI solutions span from a desire for originality, aesthetics, etc. and not improved experience.
Which is what I loved about this article - it demonstrates a sizeable effort resulting in a UI implementation that is just not much better than having callouts / figures in the text- and then admits it.
More people use computer applications effectively now than at any previous point in history. You might want to check your priors and consider that taste does not inform usefulness.
I think the article does a pretty good job of explaining the gap between what can happen easily, and what a 110% over engineered "perfect" solution is to a UX problem.
Building excellent user interfaces is hard, regardless of the technical stack. You have to sweat a lot of the finer details, break out of any platform default behaviour where appropriate, and over engineer something in service of building a 'delightful' user experience.
Or, you can do as most do, and just not do this. #anchor-links with `scroll-behavior: smooth;` CSS will get you the basic smooth scrolling.
Frontend is completely inaccessible to me.
From time to time I dip my toe in and try new things, but as productive as I can get with Astro, the illusion vanishes as soon as I have to understand any of the plumbing.
Fortunately, I can still party like it’s 1999 just fine: just yesterday, I worked on a janky brutalist web app (the same way I did back in 2002, cribbing from the O’Reilly “Dynamic HTML: the Definite Reference”) and “deployed” it with rsync to pico.sh. It’s practically unstyled and I didn’t even use jquery, but it works.
The thing is, backend stuff is largely solved. You need to store data? Here you go, here's a database. You need to process a bunch of strings for similarity? We got an algorithm for that.
But frontend stuff is messy. How do you tell a person what they're trying to do is wrong and they need to change their inputs? Oh, maybe we can highlight the input or we can pop a modal message. Haha, psyche! Users ignore that shit! Now what you gonna do, buddy?
Frontend is a mess because all you people are a mess.
Contempt for your users inevitably leads to bad products so it’s no wonder things are bad if this is the prevalent attitude among front end web developers.
There's a difference between contempt (i.e. "users are stupid") and realism, though. And realism can range from "users don't want to troubleshoot" to "some users are near-violently anti-tech and won't read errors", depending on context.
The unfortunate truth is that if you're doing B2C or even B2B outside of tech companies, the second one will often come up...
Bad devs exist. Bad users do too. Thing is, you can't usually fire the bad users.
I agree with you
It reminds me of an online store in the beginning of 2000s
To buy a product, you had to drag&drop the product image over the shopping basket icon. It took me quite a while to figure that out, and I bet they lost a lot of customers.
[Edit: I acknowledge that a PM or manager may have forced the developer to do this, but it's just one example of many]
Sometimes the developers have to take the blame, instead of blaming "stupid" users. Some take that attitude to frameworks as well. If the users complain, they haven't understood how to use it correctly. Just look at the "how to make a todos in 5min" video on YouTube to be convinced of its beauty
I wouldn’t call what they wrote as “contempt.” It seems to me, to be cynical realism; something I tend to exhibit, myself.
I like people. I really do. I especially love the users of the software I write, and go well out of my way, to craft the best UI possible.
But I am constantly being blindsided by knuckleheads; some of whom, are really, really smart, educated, and inquisitive people.
I write iOS apps, and spend many, many hours, testing and tweaking. Right now, I am completely rewriting an app, because I couldn’t get the UI right, at the final stage. I realized my fundamentals were borked, and that I needed to go back to the ol’ drawing board, as Wile E. Coyote would say. Many developers would have shipped, but I have the luxury of being able to redo it (I have done it before).
It’s a cool trick, and one that I’d probably use, if I was dedicated to Web design, the way I am, to app design.
contempt for users is the unavoidable consequence of having users.
I don't have contempt for users. I have contempt for single-issue developers who have never stepped out of their little corner of software who act like front end should be easy because it's "just" some scripting.
> Frontend is a mess because all you people are a mess.
As a backend guy who considers himself extremely fortunate that nearly all of his users/customers are technical, this got an audible chuckle out of me.
> The thing is, backend stuff is largely solved. You need to store data? Here you go, here's a database.
That's like saying "You need user interaction? Here you go, here's a frontend."
I think the biggest problem is that HTML and even HTTP weren't developed with those use cases in mind.
Before WWW was a thing we already had user interfaces and the fact that current users frequently prefer those ancient, text user interfaces over modern ones tells a real LOT.
Well, part of that is a business need (your app/website/whatever is an extension of your brand, which is a very important part of making money). The other part is there are actually many valid ways to style a button, or have some kind of hover animation, or some kind of navigation bar.
Sure, there are some guidelines and best practices, but there are just infinite ways to display information to people. You can't just look at a technical specification for how well X/Y/Z performs because design is subjective and humans are all different. Whereas none of your users will complain if you use Redis (or similar) for caching something on the backend.
It's interesting that you used "wants" in the first sentence and "needs" in the second.
Not saying that you're totally wrong, but I think this difference is not necessarily a deliberate decision by individual engineers, or caused by personality or skill level.
The employee market demographics surely play a role, but this is about concretions, not generalizations.
There is no lack of (often poor) generalizations when it comes to the skills and requirements demanded by BE and FE roles, respectively.
Not wanting to dismiss your idea / the grain of truth. But IMO you are falsely generalizing.
Also, there are not only FE devs claiming to be "full stack" when they don't know HTTP basics.
There are also BE developers with similarly daunting knowledge gaps.
Or in other words, in both worlds there are juniors masquerading as seniors and the other way around, depending on the organization.
Is it really necessary to highlight the heading at all?
I’m a passionate frontend engineer, but I do think we are often busy “asking if we could”, and ignore “if we should”.
Worth noticing, on mobile you can’t even read the conclusion in the “it’s beautiful” demo, because the navigation covers it.
I understand that it is just a demo, and that issue could be solved independently…
But I think it also points at the observation that when you try to do these kinds of unusual things, you open yourself to unintended consequences.
And while you can mitigate those consequences one by one, my experience is that you generally won’t have a chance nailing them all, unless you are also minimizing their number… by not getting too fancy.
> Is it really necessary to highlight the heading at all?
You should be able to take a given UX and ask yourself if it can be improved.
A table of contents that tells you where you are on the page is useful.
Here's an implementation: https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.3/components/modal/
On desktop, the table of contents on the right shows you which header you're on.
All I know is the default browser behavior for anchor links within a page has real usability issues when you have anchored headings at the bottom of the page.
You are correct though that there are many cures worse than the disease, but it is a real "disease", so to speak.
> All I know is the default browser behavior for anchor links within a page has real usability issues when you have anchored headings at the bottom of the page.
Yes, you click on the link and the text you were supposed to have jumped to is in the wrong place.
But the "solution" here takes this very problem and expands it to cover the entire sample article instead of just the bottom of the sample article. How is that an improvement?
Chrome developers keep adding unhinged complicated “features” that nobody wants or asked for and immediately are abused and broken.
Numerous autoplaying video methods for example especially when they follow the mouse, play in the background, or use lazy loading to be unkillable.
Speaking of lazy loading or whatever hundreds of variations probably exist around it now, the terrible front end devs of the world have decided to use that for everything. Everything is a sliding panel full of sliding panels and there’s no way to use browser back features coherently.
Scrolling down a site now loads a new site and destroys your history. Even if you scrolled to move content up because an autoplaying video anchored to the bottom of the screen is blocking the view. Scroll down too far causes a jump and the site decides you’re done and loads the next thing with no way to navigate back.
How do these developers have a job? How are features like this even invented with no critical thought or understanding of real world use cases questioned. It’s again and again and again that we see this.
And the Google team is so proud every time with their demo videos that is painfully obvious they put no thought into it outside of their bubble of them deciding some random thing was technically possible to do as a proof of concept and should therefore be immediately released as a fully supported feature.
It is fun! The person you're responding to isn't wrong; front end is a little horrifying. But it's kind of like a jungle in that the scary beasts, swamps, poisonous plants, and the harsh elements are accompanied by incredible opportunities to experiment, explore, discover, and appreciate beauty.
Backend presents some awesome opportunities too, but I absolutely love weird problems like the one you're solving here. It's in the realm of simultaneously necessary and totally unnecessary. This is where interesting stuff happens!
I can recommend backend people to do frontend once in a while. You don't have to like it. But it will make you a better developer. I've been in more than one team where there was this us and them dynamic and some lack of mutual understanding about why things worked a certain way or limitations and constraints. It can lead to poorly thought through APIs and API responses, which then triggers frontend work to engineer around that. Also, frontend developers tend to have better intuition for asynchronous stuff; because everything in a browser is async. Backend developers tend to be a bit naive on that front.
I'm a hands-on CTO in a very small company. So, if it's technical, I'm doing it. Websites, apps, backends, databases, devops and all the rest. Not always fun. But at this point I can fill every role in a typical product team and do a decent job.
And I agree that what passes for state of the art on the web is a bit meh. Anchors date back to the early days of the web. One of those forgotten features that is still vaguely useful but a bit underused. There's a reason mobile developers prefer native UI toolkits. Browsers are a bit limited and backwards. CSS is a bit of a straight jacket. And Javascript is a bit of a basket case as a language.
> Why would you introduce this much complexity for what should be a simple scroll?
The article explains the "why."
> overcoming technical hurdles to produce the desired end result
Yes.
That's only because you are used to the over complexity of backend work. As someone who is pretty far removed from both front and backend work (or web work in general), both seem pretty complex. Frontend at least has the excuse of being at the interface between humans and computers, which is inherently much harder
I don't get "as a backend engineer" comments like these.
OP is doing a basic analysis on what kind of solutions exist for a typical UX edge-case. They even provide the simple solution that most people use (margin-bottom).
And for fun they go on to see if they can solve it without the minor drawback of the simple solution.
We've got to stop acting like it's a badge of honor to avoid UX consideration. We might not be people who implement UIs, we use UIs all day and should be able to muster up a few opinions about how a UX interaction should work.