centerDiv.js

div {
  display: grid;
  place-content: center;
}

We've come a long way...

The collective man-hours this would have saved people, if we had it back in 1999, would be staggering.
You misspelled nesting tables
- My man right here. Y'all ever want to code some HTML emails? Nested tables as far as the eye can see!

Obligatory https://justfuckingusehtml.com/

That was wonderful, thank you for sharing. When it's done well, I really enjoy this style of prose.
I had to resize my browser window in order to read that how dare you not simply read my mind and select my preferred column width instead

99% of users, probably
- You don't just zoom?

JavaScript frameworks are invented because pure HTML and CSS suck for dynamically loaded pages, and vanilla JavaScript suck in general.

Most pages don’t need dynamic loading.
- True
- My menus need to be dynamically reloaded!
Dynamically loading pages suck too.
JavaScript frameworks actually exist for two reasons, one, vanilla JavaScript lacks ease of use (does not suck and I don't care who disagrees) and two, people love over engineering the fuck out of technology. See: technology since the iPhone came out. We have advanced systems around the world spinning up processes to make up for the fact that touch screens are hard to type accurately on.
- jQuery got popular because Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and other browsers weren’t exactly cross compatible. Writing vanilla JS was risky business in that sense.
  
  It also supported AJAX across all major browsers, which meant the website could make API requests without reloading the entire page. It was super revolutionary to press a button and it only changed a part of the page.
  
  Then Angular and React took it a step forward and that’s where we are now.
- people love over engineering the fuck out of technology
  
  Exhibit A: 2.85 Million packages, as of mid-2023
- Immediate mode rendering and components seem to be why people use them. And you know what? The web should natively support those but doesn't (well it kinda bad components, but ehhh). Otherwise I agree, the frameworks are overcomplicated.
It's still Javascript.

I worked with some pretty dumb people who mocked me for years as the guy who couldn't design a UI to save my life because the product I inherited was designed by someone in the 1990s. it wasn't pretty but it was functional.

any time a UI request came in for the new product and I would try to take it, the PM would pull it and give it to someone else. "oh, their skillset is better suited for UI/UX." I was told.

I got fed up with it and designed my online portfolio. used it to showcase my work and skills even documented my process from mockups to design iteration and final products.

I then posted on linkedin my new portfolio and listed myself as open to connect. within a day the PM made a point to pull up my portfolio on standup and asked me where I got the template. told them, "no template. as you can see in the documentation I designed it from scratch using HTML5 CSS3 and JavaScript. I also included the js packages I used."

they were stunned and immediately started to shuffle some UI tickets my way. I just said, "sorry, my skillset is better served for backend requests."

I quit two months later after a few interviews that seemed to go well. I hated that shithole.

moral of the story? don't discourage people from taking on tasks they aren't obviously suited for. they might just surprise you.

I agree with your final take, but why would you want to take frontend tickets if you can also do backend work?
- Raw spite. If you're upset enough to build a whole LinkedIn profile, you've already mentally moved on to the next company.
- change of pace, mostly. I also like the challenge. when I'm not challenged at work I lose interest easily and can spiral into not doing my job. so it's nice to break up a long running project with some new bugs or tasks that are unrelated.

OP, I don't think you've correctly linked to the post (when I visit the linked webpage, the browser tries to download an ActivityPub activity instead of showing the post in the Mastodon web UI). Please replace the link with this one.

got it, my bad

Wait until you see what they do to avoid learning SQL or Regex or JSON Pointer or XPath.

Wait until you see when they refuse to learn anything but SQL.
- Not something I've encountered.
Ugh, i've had to write some Selenium tests where I had to come up with weird ass Xpaths because not a single fucking element had an ID and over half would spawn something in a different div
TBF to regex, it's completely unreadable. I love the magic that can be done with it, but by God, it needs syntax highlighting. Something may do this, but I've never seen anything that does.
- You get used to it sooner than you'd think. There are libraries to convert between regex and English. Maybe it deserves a Unicode code block like APL?

real ones learn dhtml

Do you remember the dhtmlguru? The site had the bronze man holding some kind of ball over his head and would magically move when you hovered over the navigation menu.