That previous tweet about the internet of the late 90s got me reminiscing down memory lane about web development in the 90s / early 2000s... (see how many of these you remember)

Front end code used to render *drastically* differently depending on browser and there used to be more even distribution of browser usage. In my first job as a web dev in 2004, we would tear our hair out over IE and Firefox rendering quirks.
https://t.co/FQFLeOvGK5 became the definitive place to look up the answer to the question “why the fuck are you doing that, internet explorer?”
Digg launched in 2004 and had the first mainstream implementation of an Ajax button. It was an epic watershed moment and front end dev became exponentially more fun and innovative from there. Starting with things like Prototype.js leading to Jquery etc.
Early 2000s, mobile phones still had slow downloads and poor rendering capability. You didn’t build “mobile first” or “responsive”, usually you would just build a shitty, basic version of your main site and shove it on a mobile sub domain to be forgotten and ill-maintained 😅
Speaking of maintenance. I worked at a web dev shop in the late 90s before subversion or git were a thing. A coworker irreversibly overwriting your code with their own was actually a thing that could happen. The horror...
In summary: things are so much better for devs now 😅

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A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.