Sure. But even that probably has more to do with businesses prioritizing features over quality, not programmers lacking character.
Much of it on the web also has to do with how much browsers can do. The number of CSS properties that can be applied, the ways different elements' sizes can automatically influence the layout of other elements, etc. These traits are what make the web such a powerful and attractive platform for user interfaces, but the complexity of the platform is definitely becoming a real issue that deserves attention.
A couple of points:
- NodeJS is server-only and usually has nothing to do with perceived performance of web apps
- The biggest offender of web performance is ads. They dump piles and piles of crappy JavaScript from dozens of different sources that all include their own copies of common libraries and have no incentive not to slow down the page.
- Beyond ads, the bottleneck is usually not even JavaScript, but layout (as in the paragraph above). Web layout is incredibly flexible and incredibly complex. Computing and rendering it all is slow, but it does serve a purpose. Not that it couldn't be improved.
Bad ads are a tragedy of the commons and I don't know what can be done about them unless Google or Facebook decided to throw their weight around to force them to be better.
I do wonder if a new web standard could be developed for using some constrained subset of the layout vocabulary, that would be cheaper and more straightforward to compute. The current version has to remain for backwards compatibility reasons, but it's trying to serve a bunch of different types of cases at once, and therefore doesn't do a great job at any one of them.
Much of it on the web also has to do with how much browsers can do. The number of CSS properties that can be applied, the ways different elements' sizes can automatically influence the layout of other elements, etc. These traits are what make the web such a powerful and attractive platform for user interfaces, but the complexity of the platform is definitely becoming a real issue that deserves attention.
A couple of points:
- NodeJS is server-only and usually has nothing to do with perceived performance of web apps
- The biggest offender of web performance is ads. They dump piles and piles of crappy JavaScript from dozens of different sources that all include their own copies of common libraries and have no incentive not to slow down the page.
- Beyond ads, the bottleneck is usually not even JavaScript, but layout (as in the paragraph above). Web layout is incredibly flexible and incredibly complex. Computing and rendering it all is slow, but it does serve a purpose. Not that it couldn't be improved.
Bad ads are a tragedy of the commons and I don't know what can be done about them unless Google or Facebook decided to throw their weight around to force them to be better.
I do wonder if a new web standard could be developed for using some constrained subset of the layout vocabulary, that would be cheaper and more straightforward to compute. The current version has to remain for backwards compatibility reasons, but it's trying to serve a bunch of different types of cases at once, and therefore doesn't do a great job at any one of them.