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I have been a software tester for a long time and I really fuckin hate these JS frameworks that try to reinvent the wheel but worse.
Like why is a fucking table now a bunch of divs? Why is a drop down (select) list a bunch of divs? With disappearing html blocks when you close the list?
HTML worked fine, why are we reinventing basic HTML but worse?
Because many of the frameworks, including Angular and React, were getting started while HTML and JS specs and the support of those specs were a giant hodgepodge MESS.
Why are so many things divs instead of standard components? Because for WAY too long, those components weren't standard. Some browsers didn't even fully support basic components or styling options that had been standard for years.
Why is everything a div? Because in many browsers, divs got the most feature support.
The frameworks seem nonsensical and dumb because they're covering up a LOT of even worse things.
Not to say a ton of nasty things cannot remain, or new gross things crop up, but at least this one has a history that's more interesting than, "they designed it poirly". Nope, a lot of the problems have no design at all, or might've been worse with a more "standard" implementation!
Tables and select boxes have been standard for ages across all browsers what are you on about.
I recently installed NoScript, and it's truly eye-opening the number of pages that "require" JS just to show me a page that has literally no reason to require JS. It's abysmal.
I feel like I was there at the genesis of this one. Originally, people used tables for layout because there was nothing else. Dreamweaver and similar wysiwyg editors that code-o-phobes used those days produced table hellish markup that looked reasonable to people on screens with fixed resolutions, but was absolutely abysmal as far as legibility and maintenance.
Then, over time, people righteously hated that and called it an anti-pattern. The original people that wanted semantic layouts and championed CSS in the early days had nuance, but the kiddos learning from them did not. So they thought it was "tables bad!" and they rushed off to please their senior devs by putting tabular data into complicated bullshit elements that were already semantically correct as tables.
I think that's a small part of it, the lack of nuance from new coders, but the origins weren't so cut and dry, IMO. It was really how poorly things were supported by browsers. Tables became used for styling because they were the only way to achieve some layouts that would have any hope of calculating correctly in the browser. JavaScript became used for active elements because html/css originally couldn't do anything dynamic or responsive. Many things became divs simply because they were the only building block that didn't come saddled with tons of preconditions and assumptions. etc, etc, etc.
HTML5 and ECMA2015 are when it started to turn around. Browsers finally got their shit together and supported a proper, useful baseline set of features that could cover most use cases, and the resulting standardizations made a HUGE difference. If it stayed going the way it was pre-HTML5, I wouldn't be surprised if we'd be wrestling with some popular framework trying to wedge a new standard in next to HTML in the browsers... Heck, that probably would've happened anyways if HTML weren't just glorified XML (meaning it's already nearly infinitely extensible)!