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We Need To Reboot the Culture of View Source (wired.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the good-ol-days dept.

theodp writes: Back in ye olde days of the information superhighway," begins Clive Thompson in It's Time to Make Code More Tinker-Friendly, "curious newbies had an easy way to see how websites worked: View Source." But no more. "Websites have evolved into complex, full-featured apps," laments Thompson. "Click View Source on Google.com and behold the slurry of incomprehensible Javascript. This increasingly worries old-guard coders. If the web no longer has a simple on-ramp, it could easily discourage curious amateurs." What the world needs now, Thompson argues, are "new tools that let everyone see, understand, and remix today's web. We need, in other words, to reboot the culture of View Source." Thompson cites Fog Creek Software's Glitch, Chris Coyier's CodePen, and Google's TensorFlow Playground as examples of efforts that embrace the spirit of View Source and help people recombine code in useful ways. Any other suggestions?

2 of 305 comments (clear)

  1. View Source for circa-1999 Google.com by theodp · · Score: 5, Informative

    Google.com Apr 22, 1999
    <center>
    <img src="/web/19990422191353im_/http://www.google.com/google.jpg" alt="Google! (Beta version)">

    <table border="0">
    <tr>
    <td>
    <form name="f" method="GET" action="/web/19990422191353/http://www.google.com/search">
    <center>Search the web using Google<br></center>
    <center><input type="text" name="q" value="" size="40" framewidth="4"><br></center>
    <center><input type="submit" value="Google Search">
    <input type="submit" name="sa" value="I'm feeling lucky"><br></center>
    </form>
    </td>
    </tr>
    </table>

    <a href="more.html">More Google!</a><br>

    <p><font size="-1">Copyright ©1999 Google Inc.</font>
    </center>

  2. Re:We need to go back to simplicity. by green1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    We're not talking assembly here, we're talking HTML. HTML is far easier to understand than the garbage most "developers" use these days, while keeping the page TINY by comparison. Assembler on the other hand is much harder to understand and program in.

    If you're writing a few lines of static content, there's no excuse to take as much as a few megabytes of code to do it.

    This is actually the opposite of your example, all the extra code makes it more difficult to write, not easier, and it has the added issue of providing ZERO benefit, and often major drawbacks. For instance, if you just put raw HTML text on a page, it will format to every browser ever made, it will nicely fill the window, regardless of the size. But instead, developers put in all sorts of extraneous code to format it to specific window sizes, and the end result tends to be that it looks horrible on all of them (don't you just love the pages that only allow you to use 1/4 of the width of your screen for content with the other 3/4 being vast empty space, and yet you have to scroll for days to find the bottom?)