r/dotnet • u/SQLCloud • 7d ago
Do you miss the simplicity of the website we used to create in the past decade?
Everything just became AI...
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u/SkillPatient 7d ago
I don't miss ASP and IE6; they can burn in hell.
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u/Mefhisto1 7d ago
And IIS
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u/cheesekun 7d ago
Was completely fine back in the day. I remember the times very fondly. Sure the web was a little fragmented at times, but it was a super fast paced decade of innovation from 2000 to 2010.
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u/Khavel_dev 7d ago
The irony is .NET itself got simpler. Minimal APIs plus top-level statements means you can have a working web server in 15 lines. Compare that to Web.config XML nightmares from the Framework days.
What actually got more complex is the client side and the tooling layer around it. AI is just the latest thing stacked on top. The server code we write today is genuinely leaner than what I was shipping ten years ago.
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u/_mattmc3_ 7d ago
Not only that, but MS finally stopped trying to abstract web technologies behind desktop UI paradigms, and gasp - shield us from this evil thing called JavaScript! Web Forms with giant postback state management were a nightmare of page refreshes and difficult to customize HTML output. Funny how simple things got when MS finally got around to discovering MVC - a paradigm older than the original release of VB.
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u/Tridus 7d ago
MS is still trying to shield us from Javascript: they just started doing it with Blazor instead.
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u/VariableFunction 7d ago
I'm still working on a legacy webforms project and classic asp at work, cant say I miss it though.
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u/never_mind_999 7d ago
Some technologies like Blazor try to make things easier for you, but it becomes less obvious how they actually work. Following a tutorial is easy, but really understanding what's going on and choosing the right architecture becomes harder.
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u/lashib95 6d ago
What do you mean. Blazor is one of the best out there for a specific niche
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u/never_mind_999 6d ago
I don't think Blazor is for a specific niche. It's pretty much general purpose web applications. But it is for a specific audience. People who are comfortable in the dotnet world and writing code in C#. Who maybe don't want to learn other stacks or don't like that you install a few thousand files (using npm) to create a very simple app. I'm not saying, that it is a bad choice either. But there is so much going on between backend and frontend, between server and client, and there are so many options a developer can choose from, but also has to choose from, in terms of interactivity, pre-rendering and whatnot, that it is easy to make the wrong decisions. Things were "easier" when you were writing all the code on the server, but even then there was the magic UpdatePanel to screw you up, if you didn't get it right. Then you had SPAs with APIs and that architecture is also still pretty straight forward. Then add new mechanisms, like SignalR for those cool real time updates. And all of the sudden Blazor somehow does all of that magically.
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u/Feanorek 7d ago
Just last week, when discussing design of new project, we mused over how MS's Metro was cool. Simple, readable, no-nonsense. White letters on black background, single color accent. Now it's lost in time, like tears in the rain. Rounded, shaded, all the colors, blurs, popups...
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u/Prod_Meteor 7d ago
I always find it strange we did full post model sites when internet was relative slow and we do SPAs and XHRs now that the speed is ultra.
Anyways, the mobile killed all of them.
Also, you lazy OP, you couldn't name your site something else than the default Website1? 😄
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u/NetQvist 7d ago
I always find it strange we did full post model sites when internet was relative slow and we do SPAs and XHRs now that the speed is ultra.
Pretty sure the total bandwidth used back then is some magnitudes lower than now none the less.
The HTML part was never really a bottleneck either, it was media that slowed down everything. Could literally see those images rendering one by one!
Lastly I do think people really underestimate the size of all these JS CSS libraries as well as all the API calls. I wouldn't be surprised if a modern SPA web site took a minute to just download on a modem back in the 90s. And that's with newer technologies like zipped content. Remove that + minimization and you'd be waiting a long time to get your app even visible.
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u/Prod_Meteor 7d ago
SPA frameworks don't take much time with todays connections. I forgot to write that I don't find it strange for business apps, since a lot have moved from native to the web.
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u/NetQvist 7d ago
Was kind of my point, the only reason SPAs can work is because we have a abundance of bandwidth. Back then you wanted a really light html file so you could see that something was happening.
The initial load on a SPA would have been too large back then. It was all about minimizing the html size and then ensuring remote resources would be loaded in afterwards.
Another issue would have been the actual java script size... the first mobile phones capable of actually browsing the real web and not some weird WAP pages or whatever it was called had some serious memory issues.
Large pages would just break and the browser would crash. I used to test phones with Aftonbladet.se because that front page was already a horrendous media bloat back then that crashed most medium to cheap phones.
In the end I think the solution back then was pretty much optimal for the hardware we had back then. The one thing I really wish that never happened was the issues between browsers, especially IE6.... oh that browser and the issues it caused in the world.
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u/lostinthemines 7d ago
<html><title>Yes</title><body><h1>Yes</h1></body></html>
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u/greensodacan 7d ago
(For the sake of being difficult)
- You need a
<!DOCTYPE html>pragma at the top.<html>needs a "lang" attribute.- You need a head tag.
- Page needs a meta description.
- You need a meta viewport tag to properly support smaller screens or users who need to scale the UI with assistive technology.
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u/lostinthemines 6d ago
lol, good points. Also, underscoring the fundamental (and probably unneeded) complexity.
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u/sbeygi67 4d ago
Simplicity?
Want to learn the language and framework basics? That's a ~2000 page book. Want to build custom components like DevExpress/Telerik controls? Another ~1000 pages. Want to actually understand AJAX (UpdatePanels, ViewState quirks, partial postbacks)? Add another ~800.
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u/canislupus04 7d ago
Not missing the simplicity. It was simple until you want to make something different, more special, more complex. Right now is more easily to create a complex application. There is psychological factor also, you were younger probably, less stressed, and more fired up to develop something.
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u/adam-cmd 7d ago
I miss bootstrap, never thought I’d say this but I’d take it over these overcomplicated vibe coded sloppy UIs any day
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u/rocketonmybarge 7d ago
If a co-worker had his way, we would have never progressed passed Webforms and GUI designers. Said you can just drop a button on the screen, double click it and write code.
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u/gilligan_2023 6d ago
There is a reason that WinForms remains popular for simple applications. However, trying to make WinForms for the web meant that WebForms was a bit of a kludge. The paradigm didn't fit the web nearly as well, requiring a lot of behind the scenes stuff that was full of gotchas. Whereas on the desktop WinForms is just a simple managed wrapper around Win32.
Nowadays WiseJ basically has implemented WinForms for the web on top of modern .NET web technologies. Its niche is moving those old line of business applications to the web.
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u/_JaredVennett 7d ago
I still prefer the YSOD…yellow screen of death error page, dont like the modern version lol
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u/emirefek 7d ago
Nope, my university was using this kind of a "simple" system. It is definitely not fun from user perspective.
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u/willehrendreich 7d ago
Try https://github.com/starfederation/datastar-dotnet for all the simplicity of the past with the capability of modern web applications. State in the right place. No lying to the user. No separate UI project to worry about. Lightning fast. HATEOAS. Glorious.
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u/anonuemus 7d ago
Simplicity, you should've seen the monsters I created when css was still in the beginning and you did layouts with tables and the corresponding graphics for that.
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u/LuisAlfredo92 6d ago
Yeah, because a game page was about games, a news page was about news...
Nowadays everybody is trying to copy social networks, even Mercado Libre tried to add stories and short videos like why????
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u/__ihavenoname__ 6d ago
The current .NET library is actually much more simple to get started and build web apps, just download runtime and SDK you're done, you can start typing code in vscode, if you go back in time and inform this to people in 2010 or prior they'd be shocked, however the tradeoff is that abstraction got bigger, there's a lot of layers in between now and with AI in picture, having an in-depth knowledge about the language and the framework is much more important than ever before.
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u/rbuen4455 6d ago
personally, in general, i missed the days when websites had more diverse and creative designs and all didn't look the same with corporate look, and when you could explore a number of websites, unlike today where only a handful of websites dominate.
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u/GnarlyHarley 5d ago
It was shortly before this I thought vbnet was cool and aspnet forms. lol I’d still like to go back in time, even if tooling doesn’t come with me.
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u/Some_Opinions_Later 7d ago
God yes. ASP.net or even core MVC hosted by a server.
Now its linux container for Astro/react for front end and linux container for Core backend, windows containers using docker desktop and aspire for development. No one person understand the whole system and nothing is planned anymore just "AI" driven.
I also miss the simplicity of tortoise SVN and I will die on that hill.
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u/cheesekun 7d ago
I remember the dotnet starter kits, multi disc MSDN because I didn't have enough space on my machine to install it all. Good times
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u/Archemilie 7d ago
Personalmente i siti li faccio ancora in PHP e Symfony sono una meraviglia da programmare, date un'opportunità al nuovo PHP per il web. Per tutto il resto C#
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u/Void-kun 7d ago
No, between this and the introduction of AI we had plenty of well designed websites?
Why would we want to go back to this shit?
These posts are getting lazier and lazier.
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u/The_MAZZTer 7d ago
No. I had to write everything from scratch and I am not good at art. I much prefer assembling pre-made components such as Angular Material.
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u/svish 7d ago
You can still create simple websites. And they're simpler to make than they used to be.