The 'HTML/CSS Project' That's Actually 99% JavaScript
Description
This image uses the popular 'we have food at home' meme format to critique the state of modern web development. The meme is composed of text and a language statistics bar graph. The text dialogue reads: 'Me: Mom can we buy HTML/CSS project', 'Mom: No we already have HTML/CSS project at home', and 'HTML/CSS project at home:'. Below this, the 'project at home' is illustrated by a language breakdown bar, overwhelmingly yellow, indicating 'JavaScript 98.9%', with a tiny sliver for 'Other 1.1%'. The joke resonates with experienced developers who have witnessed the evolution of frontend development. What should be a simple task of creating structure (HTML) and style (CSS) often turns into a complex, JavaScript-heavy application due to the prevalence of frameworks like React, Angular, or Vue. The desired simple, clean project is replaced by a complex beast, much to the developer's chagrin
Comments
8Comment deleted
That 'Other 1.1%' is just the README file begging you to run 'npm install'
Remember when “just HTML/CSS” meant index.html and style.css - not React, a GraphQL client, and 600 kB of hydration so the hero button can pulse once?
Started with semantic HTML, ended with 47 npm packages, a build pipeline that takes longer than the Space Shuttle launch sequence, and a bundle size that would make a 90s dial-up modem cry
The 1.1% 'Other' is the actual HTML - the rest is the build pipeline required to render a paragraph
Ah yes, the classic frontend evolution: starts as 'just a simple landing page with HTML and CSS,' ends up with React, TypeScript, Webpack, Babel, three state management libraries, and a package.json with 847 dependencies. The 1.1% 'Other' is probably the README explaining why you need Node 18.x and 45 minutes to run 'npm install' just to change a button color
Classic SPA economics: the 1.1% is index.html and reset.css, and the 98.9% is a client runtime reconstituting the DOM so our landing page can miss the LCP SLO
The pie chart that justifies tree-shaking: because 98% JS means your 'simple' site now needs webpack to diet
“We already have an HTML/CSS project at home” - a Next.js SPA where HTML exists only during SSR, CSS is a JS object, and the only truly static asset is package-lock.json