Why Not?

Occasionally, I'll get questions about why I tend to use older, boring solutions over newer ones when building for the web.

Personally, I have little temptation to quickly adopt new features or to work on the cutting edge unless they have been approved by a standards group and consistently implemented across all browsers. My experience with polyfills and transpilation has permanently soured my feelings towards any use of tooling to circumvent that process.

I fear that many of the undesirable things that have happened in the industry over the last few years have been related to this thirst of change and feature stuffing over standardization. What I've realized is that many developers are painfully impatient and they are quick to force comparisons as arguments against a language and then they use that as an incentive to "fix" the problem on their own.

The rise of Node.js, and the tooling that followed, enabled many web developers to skip the standardization process and force their own opinions on how things should work.

The problem is that there are a plethora of opinions which only result in a mess of competing solutions. While standards bodies might move slowly, they more naturally come to aggregate solutions that more carefully balance where we're going with where we have been. That's why they exist.

I would urge any young developers to move forward with patience and pragmatism. Choose your battles wisely when going against the grain. Appreciate the value in web standards. Rather than kicking-and-screaming your way through parts that you find inadequate, have empathy for the people that came before you who helped navigate difficult problems and scenarios to define the standards that many take for granted today.

Written on April 10, 2025