bmuon

As a frontend engineer who started 15 years ago, learning the box model required a lot of knowledge of the internals of the browser. The times of having to know things like quirks mode, abusing overflow hidden [1], how to break the behavior of float, etc are long gone. This is great both for us having to struggle less, and for the newer generations to be able to tackle harder problems than just layout and build cooler stuff.

Facebook has been working for a while on Ahead-Of-Time compilation for React. Interestingly, it looks like they thought the problem was too complicated and they gave up:

> To address this challenge we initially experimented with one approach to ahead-of-time (AOT) optimization — Prepack — but ultimately that direction did not pan out. Specifically, we realized that many AOT optimizations don’t work because they either don’t have enough global knowledge or they have too little. For example, a component might be static in practice because it always receive a constant string from its parent, but the compiler can’t see that far and thinks the component is dynamic. Even when we could make optimizations work, we found that they were unpredictable to the developer. Without predictability it was hard for developers to rely on them.

I'm gravitating towards GraphQL now because strict parsing is built into it, so there is no need for all this boilerplate.

What the push notification pattern is, is annoying. And it is specially annoying because of a prevalence of confirmation dialogs all over the Web with GDPR/CCPA, paid subscriptions, etc. But does it cause harm or monetary loss as the sneak into basket pattern? Or the opt-out unnecessary "insurance" that airlines continue to put in the checkout flow?

We do a disservice to ourselves littering the web with these constant asks. But it's not what needs regulation and enforcement.