Nothing Works Anymore… Except the Web

You've probably read this article before, or at least something very similar, because I'm hardly the first one to say it — nothing works anymore.

The fridge needs a software update. The car doors won't unlock without an app. Even the “smart” TV is too dumb to find the only WiFi network it's ever been connected to since I bought it a year ago.

And yet, somehow, the first website I ever built on Geocities (remember that?) back in 1999 will still render in a modern browser.

No package updates. No polyfills. No vendor support. Just the web doing its job, like it always has.

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Maybe my favorite feature of the web — the thing that drew me in, and still keeps me coding today — is its forgiveness.

Miss a closing tag? Meh. Put an invalid attribute on an element? Whatevs. Got your nesting out of order? No biggie. The browser just shrugs and keeps rendering, doing the best it can to make the chicken salad you were trying to get out of your… well, you know.

The web never asks you to be perfect (and thank heavens it doesn't, because I'm certainly not). The browser bends, but it doesn't break. It evolves, but it doesn't forget its past. And that flexibility — that tolerance for imperfection — is what's kept it going for decades, and what'll keep it going for decades more.

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But somehow, even with all that native power at our fingertips, we call it “progress” that we're now building websites that are slower, less inclusive, and less reliable than the ones we made 20 years ago.

Instead of good ol’ HTML, we've abstracted everything into JavaScript frameworks, dependency managers, build tools, CSS-in-JS, and “AI-assisted” everything — all in the name of modernization (read: buzzwords for the C-suite or shiny new toys for the devs). And then we wonder why our users hate us when pages hang, crash, or refuse to render at all — because we were more focused on the developer experience than the actual user experience. (Which, if you think about it, says a LOT about us, since we're frequently the ones who are complaining that "nothing works anymore.")

There's a lesson in there somewhere. I'm not smart enough to figure out exactly what that is, but the takeaway I'm getting here is:

The things that endure — the things that just work — are the ones that stay closest to the metal.

• Web components and browser APIs will outlast framework fads.
• Semantic HTML and proper ARIA will run rings around accessibility overlays.
• Clean, vanilla JS will outlive entire generations of libraries.

The web rewards developers who trust its built-in strengths — the ones who understand that “native” isn’t old-fashioned; it’s future-proof.

We don’t have to stop using frameworks or tools. But we do have to realize that every layer we add is another layer that can break. The browser, though, is amazingly good at not breaking.

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That's the thing I love about front-end development. You don’t need all the tools and the toys and the npm installs to do something. For beginners and veterans alike, it’s still awe-inspiring that you can type a few lines in Notepad, open the file in a browser, and see it just… work. It might not be pixel-perfect or completely valid, but it’ll render — and it’ll survive the next quarter century better than any of the “modern” tech we’re using today.

So… code, yeah, but more than that: The best things are the ones simple enough to survive change.

The web forgives. It adapts. It endures.

That’s not just good engineering.

That’s good design for life.

If only my TV was smart enough to understand that.