How has development come to the point that 16GB of RAM is not enough to smoothly develop a simple website?

Where have we lost the way? 🤔 🙄

which tools though?

If you need more than 16gb of ram, you are not building a simple website.

A simple website is a html file and a css file

I think you might be getting viruses 😂

Docker, PHPStorm, and Chrome

"Resources are cheap; optimizing is expensive."
Aka bloatware.

You may want to check your PHPStorm config.
JetBrains and Chrome are a deadly (not in a good way) combination in my experience, especially if you use their debugging tools.

Ionno, vim and firefox run happily on 4gb

I thought jetbrains was cool until VSCode became a viable alternative to literally every one of their products.

A text editor is sufficient. You know why that's out of fashion? Because most frontend devs have no fucking idea what they're doing. Instead of LEARNING basics like proper HTML and CSS, they use "abstractions" made by people like themselves who have no clue either. That's what got us junk like Bootstrap in the first place, and for frontend measures, that crap is still one of the lesser evils.

@Fast-Nop why do you refer to bootstrap as junk? I'm not doubting that, just interested in your reasons.

@Fast-Nop while the sentiment is appreciable, that's quite an exaggeration.
It's because I know exactly what I'm doing, that I prefer to use a tool which can autocomplete my well named variable, or function name.
It's also because I know the value of time that I prefer a tool that can let me know well in time (much before that expensive compilation) that I have a silly typo in that otherwise spanking new function I just doled out to my codebase.

@jesustricks Because it is misusing CSS so badly that it's obvious its creators havn't understood what CSS is for. Just look at the class names - it's all presentational shit right in the markup, which is no different from the dark ages of HTML 3 with crap like the center tag.

HTML is for the logical structure, saying what things are. The looks have no business in the markup at all, and smuggling that in via demented class names like
<div class="col-md-4 p-3 p-md-5 bg-light border border-white">
(right from the Bootstrap website) is just moronic.

That's how websites end up with half a meg of CSS junk. Another thing is stupidity like having a nav UL and giving the same "navitem" class to ALL its LIs - failure at understanding how CSS selectors work.

Don't get me even started on the frequent abuse of jQuery for shit that doesn't justify even the presence of JS.

@jesustricks Also, this crap blows up the DOM size for no good reason, and then DOM traversal in JS becomes slow, and then you suddenly "need" a JS framework with shadow DOM which introduces more bloat to deal with the fallout from the previous bloat.

@jesustricks And finally, all the shit in the CSS itself is in PX, which is a completely broken way of handling web content EXCEPT for things that are natively PX based, like images. But page breakpoints in PX, WTF?! That doesn't even make sense. Could someone get these people out of their print workflows?

@jesustricks Oh, also nice one, just seeing that - on the Bootstrap homepage itself, they jump from h1 directly to h3 because they havn't even understood what heading levels are for. Fuck this is so stupidly basic shit.

And then advanced idiocy like "aria-role" crap for which there is NO reason except as hot-fix to prevent an immediate lawsuit. You can ALWAYS use the correct elements and style them as desired.

@Fast-Nop well can't argue much with any of that.

is there a css library you'd actually recommend?

I have god awful design skills so when I do a website and write some css, things look like garbage.
Whereas a css framework already avoid the bad design decisions.
So I don't think I can't not use a css library.

why do you think `aria-role` has no reason? my take is that Macbook facilitates support with voiceover being easily integrated with chrome, while with the rest of the OS' you're fucked.
I agree in that it's a lawsuit free card.
I'm not a macbook user so the one time I implemented it I couldn't fucking see it in action.

how'd you fix the overuse of classes problem? I noticed the `@apply` postcss plugin which seems to potentially help reduce css to only the classes you use. I'm not an expert in postcss so I wouldn't be shocked to find you have some criticism for it too.

@Fast-Nop your mention of h3 after a h1 is quite valid. it says right there in the mdn docs to not skip heading levels.

but amusingly is not reported as error by the w3c validator or lighthouse on getbootstrap.com.

@Fast-Nop agree with you on everything you said about Bootstrap, but not text editors.

Text editor nowadays is not sufficient and you can't compare it to a full fledged IDE - its full of tools, tools to ease you development.

We have been inventing tools since start of mankind to ease us life and help us solve certain problems, same as in IT. Failing to realize that just makes your life complicating and/or less productive in a long run.

Writing optimized, efficient and modular tools in the other hand seems to be a problem which Jetbrains and Google fail to understand though..

@jesustricks I think the concept of CSS frameworks is flawed. CSS is meant to style the structure, but that cannot be generalised from any structure. Also, doing first the layout and then fit the content in has it backwards because form should follow function. Content is king, not layout, because users come for the content and not the bling-bling around the content.

You could of course check out Google's material design stuff and re-use e.g. components. And Webaim's WAVE to ensure that shit is at least legible, which would put you ahead of quite some designers already.

Aria-role is only necessary if you're using the wrong semantic element and need to re-declare it for assistive tech. But why not just using the correct element in the first place? Except if a lawsuit is looming and there's no time to do a proper job, then it's a hot-fix until actually overhauling the structure.

@jesustricks For the classitis (which mostly goes hand in hand with divitis), I'd go from the structure and see what you have. If all children of a UL have the same class, then this should raise a red flag. Remove this class and put the style onto the container element via a CSS selector chain. I don't think this is something a tool will do for you. If you start from the structure and not from the layout, your natural good laziness will keep you from slapping on dozens of pointless classes and divs anyway.

Sure you'll need some, but divs and spans are the goto of HTML. Use sparingly and only with good reason.

@myss Of course a text editor is sufficient. With proper syntax highlighting, you don't need much more. Some people hate even that.

Of course you can get as fancy as you like with the editor - as long as it's basically just different ways to edit text, that doesn't impact the outcome, so that's something each dev should choose freely. For all I care even vi or Emacs, whatever makes your boat float.

Many useful tools don't come from the IDE anyway, but from the browser, e.g. the dev tools in Chrome.

@AlgoRythm Last time I tried VSCode took 4GB with PHP intellisense enabled. Way more than PHPStorm.

Add Minikube in there and you'll be in swap city 💥

@lamka02sk Honestly, I dunno what to tell you. I'm not even remotely close to 4GB, but I don't have the PHP intellisense installed.

NetBeans + Firefox on Kubuntu takes me a total of about 2gb of ram...

I just stopped worrying and now have 2 systems with 64GB just to see when it explodes...

@Fast-Nop while I do agree with you it became mandatory to be quick. Without understanding and willingness to learn, people turn to frameworks. Being or not being "a framework developer" is now a thing.
As for ram and performance in general, it is a chronic problem for a long time. Devs assume everyone have high powered computers so there's no need to optimize, if it works do not touch.
Such inertia is everywhere, even at my work and there's nothing I can do even if I actually fix something it is frowned upon because it was not a part of planned changes.

@nnee The thing is - stuff like Bootstrap doesn't make a dev faster nor more productive UNLESS he wants to churn out the cliche Bootstrap site like mocked on https://www.dagusa.com/ . Or unless he's clueless about CSS and that's why he is taking that garbage.

And jQuery, at least these days, doesn't either because it's less code AND better performance without it. Unless you have a dev who can't add two integers in vanilla JS. The low water mark is hit when he tries to add hover effects using jQuery - not kidding you, there are such idiots.

Arguably, the entry barrier is too low in this industry, and it shows.

Where I agree however is e.g. payment solutions. Tons of shit with proper VAT depending on country and even article, laws changing, safe processing, PCI compliance, authority interfaces because of money laundry laws, yadda yadda, that's something that should be bought.

@Fast-Nop that is possibly one of the best poopstrap sites I've seen.

If you need docker for development it's usually not that simple a stack. Else you can use php build in server.
What OS do you use? Docker on Linux doesn't use much ram on other OS it needs to run an entire VM. Sinking your first few gigs. Java allocates memory a bit differently on windows (so I heard when people complain about Android studio mem usage). And Chrome is still technically inferior to Firefox except in some JavaScript areas. Memory optimization is not something it's good at. Disabling add-ons you don't really need helps a lot.

@Fast-Nop as someone who is partially sighted and who's dad uses speech-to-text on websites every day I completely agree about the aria-role but aria needs to be better supported overall.

My dad gives up on using websites that are too complex because all he hears when he tries to navigate is "Button - clickable". No information on if he wants to click it or where he is on the page.

@cmarshall10450 Most of that would be easy if people could be bothered to use HTML as intended, i.e. semantic. Also, navigation must work without JS, which should be easy using anchors. And with proper link text of course.

Then it's very rare that you need any aria features at all. Maybe as nav title if several navigation landmarks are there, or as aria title for buttons that contain icons. Or sometimes aria-hidden for things that have no function but are needed for visual consistency, like a disabled navigation entry to the current page.

@Fast-Nop after 26 years of being partially sighted and my dad struggling with any Web page - nevermind using a mobile to navigate - it's improved a lot but I have come to the conclusion that people design for the mainstream. Overall design comes before the usability of others and the disabled are usually forgotten about in usability tests or not even considered at all, becuase there are either so few or "they can just deal with it"

JS and dynamically generated content is the worst for this. Server-side rendering may be fast but by the time the server has rendered the page the screen reader has cached what it will read.

@cmarshall10450 There's hope - Domino's got legally smacked in their face in the US last year because a blind user was unable to order a pizza.

And that was because the frontend devs were just as incompetent idiots as they are on average. Maybe it's time for companies to wake up and raise the entry barriers.

@Fast-Nop and Apple's VoiceOver is as good as it is now because the state of Maine took Apple to court over how accessible their software was.

But the accessibility legal issues started 20 years ago with an Australian trying to access the Sydney Olympics website but couldn't. It should be a lot better adopted by now.

The needs are very basic. My dad doesn't care about what colour you're using, the width of a column - just that he's in a column, in a form cell that tells him the label or on a button that will perform a certain action

I'm sure everyone has been annoyed at a form at some point but when every input tells you it's "input - editable" it's pretty useless and good luck putting in good info.

@Fast-Nop I don't think it's incompetence rather than being the pack of interest in learning such a niche thing. The bigger the company is, the less they care about their app being used by such a niche market

@cmarshall10450 It IS incompetence. Incompetence to realise even the very basics of HTML and misusing tags for their default appearance instead of their meaning. Incompetence to abuse JS to do HTML's job (and also CSS' job of course). Incompetence to even write valid markup at all. It's rampant in that industry. It's not even about targeting a niche market, it's just doing a proper job.

If average aircraft pilots were as incompetent as average frontend devs, we would see aircraft crashing routinely, and landing with no major damage would already be an achievement.

The state of frontend in general just ticks me off and makes me want to force these braindead idiots to lick a latrine until they can't tell shit from French fries anymore.

@Fast-Nop damn... sad, outrageous but true...

I'm pissed off at humanity at least as much as @Fast-Nop is at the state of frontend. This isn't me being edgy or emo. It's a (rather unsurprising) result after a lifetime of digging into various fields, companies, politics, etc. and almost invariably discovering that everything is a mountain of crap, lies, and corruption covered in whipped cream and sprinkles. And it's so common that it isn't individuals or any particular groups that are to blame. People by their very nature are lazy and corrupt. Everything from food to computers. It's all a freaking mess.

@Fast-Nop that “if aircraft pilots...” is one hell of a quote. These observations could make an entertaining and educational blog, assuming you don’t have one.

@cmarshall10450 How do I check if my websites work for visually impaired people? Is an Apple device necessary or can I do it with a regular browser on PC or Android?