GitHub's React rewrite is going just great.

[krinkle@fosstodon.org]

GitHub's React rewrite is going just great.

If only HTML had a native way of creating tables, where columns could be evenly distributed. Imagine that!

#github

[krinkle@fosstodon.org]

The worst part is that they're using CSS `display: table-cell`, which suggests someone somewhere *almost* understood this once upon a time.

But, the pseudo "table" and "table-row" element classes have since changed to Flexbox, which defeats the purpose, and cancels out the CSS layout for the table-cell.

This is a typical of code-generating LLM (like Copilot) that might "improve" or "modernize" a component by applying Flexbox.

[zlatko@social.zlatko.dev]

@krinkle I don't think it's an LLM's fault.

I mean, sure it is likely. But people have been doing this kind of stuff even before.

I think a large part of the problem is that many many many web devs - practically all of them today - do not know HTML at all.

They started learning programming by picking up the first course they saw, which is usually some react code. They only see js/jsx (well, ts/tsx nowadays) and just regular functions, and rarely are called to inspect the result of their work. Nobody cares, if it works why bother?
So LLMs went and learned from those kinds of examples as well.

I mean, how many courses online did you see "how to make a nice HTML table?" vs "how to make a nice table in react and {whatever}-ui library"? Maybe before there were more, but those are a decade old and therefore "less relevant" for training purposes.

Only in edge cases (like the one in your screenshot) would someone need to go figure out a problem.

So now you go, spot this issue, someone reports it and you can:

• a) fiddle a bit with CSS (or have an LLM fiddle) to add more of it to fix the column layout and deliver the fix in an hour or
• b) argue with your product person that you need 2 weeks to rewrite this whole crap into a simple html table. (because now everyone depends on whatever generated those faulty columns).

Or maybe c) fix a bug on only your part of the product where relevant by hardcoding a html table, and then having eve part of the product look differently as people did a different fix.

Does that make sense?

[_davd@mastodon.social]

@krinkle @sir_pepe The epidemy of modern web dev 🤪

[afilina@phpc.social]

@krinkle HTML tables are so 1998 </sarcasm>