Modernity

Today I installed the newest version of nginx and configured my website to use http/3 and QUIC. I also configured cloudflare and set up IPv6. This definitely makes this website significantly snappier.

I have been thinking a lot about "modernity" or at least modern software. I think that in almost all cases software and software standards tend to become better over time. I know this might sound like a pretty obvious conclusion but I think not many people see this as the case.

There is of course some amount of cruft that gets accumulated over time in software and in software standards. There are also obviously some cases where software has become objectively worse, particularily in the case of commercial or proprietary software. However, in almost all cases (such as in the case of the web and the internet as a whole) standards tend to get better over time. For instance, the CSS standard has definitely accumulated cruft due to compatibility reasons, but the language itself is more than the standard.

The only thing that truly matters in terms of elegance is the set of features that is widely used by the public and considered "CSS."

CSS in particular is also pretty damn modular so I don't see any serious reason to be concerned about it's complexity.