While performance is also a important factor, I think accessibility is a huge concern these days that got to the point that it needs to be addressed.
There is a huge number of sites that are broken on mobile, and because they don’t rely on proper mechanism to decide which version(mobile or desktop) to deliver but on the screen size, it’s impossible to switch to desktop version to temporarily overcome those issues. It got to the point that my business internet banking site suffers from these issues and I had to find a notebook to be able to perform the operations I needed.
I think that there was some people on the forum that were trying to bring some component libraries to phoenix that respect accessibility standards, but I’m not sure they succeeded.
It is intentional, to drive you to mobile apps to reap your privacy even easier
It is negligence, because the more users coming from desktop, then more attention will be on desktop, and the U/X disparity will drive even more users to the desktop. It is a positive feedback loop.
As a user, I gave up on mobile already, because: 1, my eyesight is deteriorating. 2: the sites that are optimized for the mobile often have a questionable motive. As a developer, I give a halfhearted effort on the mobile.
Those are very valid reasons, but at the same time I think one of the deciding factors is too much custom built UI, especially when it comes to the one that has JS interactivity. Maybe I am also getting old, but I think a lot of companies/products that are alike could have used the same UI with different text and nobody would care less.
Back in the day when wordpress was used by left and right by everybody, all the structure of UI was the same and everybody was happy . Nowadays I open medium (where the whole point of the site is to present a text article and maybe some code snippets and images) and I have to load 20 custom JS files.
In our case “getting old” means “starting to finally see patterns and understand how minimalism is superior in literally every way”. Technical simplicity, lightweight resource usage, and people like the UI and the UX more. It’s an universal win.
Most of UIs we have today I could have coded with a custom-tailored XML that I have authored and used some 18 or so years ago that translated to Java Swing function calls. We are talking border elements and their absolute pixel offsets from the edges of the canvas and then everything else had relative pixels (or em) offsets from their adjacent elements. There were rules like “this element is always 6 pixels on the right of this other element, or overflows to a new row but in that case insert a new break so no other elements can go there before a new break was inserted” etc.
It was somewhat complex and ugly but IMO it was still better than CSS but hey, we all love our own stuff so I am ready to admit bias.
Most of today’s UIs are just fine with semantic HTML and CSS (a la TailwindCSS) and either LiveView or HTMX. 99% of everything else is needless. Very, very few interfaces need the complexity. Gmail comes to mind as being mostly justified.
Hey thanks for dropping a link to my talk! As far as concurrency, they are improving support for concurrency within components for WASI P3 which should come along this year. However, this is some support already (pollables). And and as far as calling into components from Elixir and vice versa, this is fully concurrent using OTP processes in wasmex.
. Nowadays I open medium (where the whole point of the site is to present a text article and maybe some code snippets and images) and I have to load 20 custom JS files.
