Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Backwards Compatibility in the Web, but Not Its Tools

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

As I've been building CList I've been religious about not building it on frameworks or libraries. Why? Because in the world of Javascript, everything depreciates almost instantly. "Oh, you used the apollo CLI in 2022? Bam, deprecated, go learn how to use graphql-client or whatever, which has a totally different configuration and doesn't support all the same options... Finally get things running, watch the stream of hundreds of deprecation warnings fly by during the install." It's worth reading the article and HackerNews comments as well. Also this. "The frontend ecosystem is kind of broken right now... People that are learning the current tech ecosystem are absolutely not learning web fundamentals. They are too abstracted away. And when the stack changes again, these folks are going to be at a serious disadvantage when they have to adapt away from what they learned." The same problem exists for AI. ChatGPT constantly wants me to implement a framework in order to insert a button.

Today: Total: [Direct link] [Share]


Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

Copyright 2025
Last Updated: May 12, 2025 12:54 a.m.

Canadian Flag Creative Commons License.

Force:yes