How AI drove Shopify back to clean code

E-commerce platform Shopify wants to make reading source code a thing again. And it has an unlikely ally for its back-to-the-roots approach: AI agents. The company is launching a new storefront theme for its customers, aka “merchants,” that it claims is completely understandable by anyone with even a smidgen of HTML knowledge. …

[Bebu sa Ware]

that #0000FF means ‘Blue’ in HTML

That's only one sort of blue and possibly not the most asthetic or aligned with your branding. ;)

Still it's a move in the right direction.

Html is simple enough but as a programming language it is about the level of an assembler. CSS and scripting is roughly like adding a decent macro facility to an assembler.

Having high level languages produce human readable output hasn't been a major focus in programming languages but in this context I imagine it is and will be.

[nowster]

Re: that #0000FF means ‘Blue’ in HTML

HTML already has a defined list of named colours, with "blue" being one of them:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/Values/named-color

[steelpillow]

Re: that #0000FF means ‘Blue’ in HTML

Indeed. I don't know how the current colour list goes, but there used to be some fairly wacky naming choices in there, and a nonstandard pile more that "most" browsers ran with. Some even rendered the same name in different shades. Then they went and added various kinds of decimal and other encodings. You can find pages, templates and stylesheets with all kinds of colour-code cabbage thrown in there by different scripts.

I invariably stick to the old #hex, with uppercase A-E. As our Vulture says, "It is expressive, local, and token-efficient."

[that one in the corner]

Re: that #0000FF means ‘Blue’ in HTML

> but there used to be some fairly wacky naming choices in there ... a nonstandard pile more

That is most likely just the old list of colour names from X11, which is still in all the browsers I've used (so far) and used in all sorts of other places: even the FastLED library for making blinky lights provides that list of colours. The names are very well known, a de-facto standard, and likely to hang around forever.

Now, if you wanted "wacky" names, petition to get the xkcd colour name survey added into HTML.

[steelpillow]

Re: that #0000FF means ‘Blue’ in HTML

That'll be the main one, thanks for the memory. ISTR the original HTML 1.0 colours were not quite in alignment. Also Netscape and IE disagreeing. Probably MS bastardised the X11 list to help lock us out of Netscape.

[just4this]

Re: that #0000FF means ‘Blue’ in HTML

"FastLED library for making blinky lights "

HTML had a tag for that too.

[just4this]

Re: that #0000FF means ‘Blue’ in HTML

I hear Blue and think of the number 4.

Poorly coded old DB application running on DOS let my fat fingers change the background and text colour both to number 4, Blue.

The kind of mistake you never forget.

[steelpillow]

So it's not just me, then

>[HTML is] simpler for both people and machines

>the leaner, less-verbose JSON

Back in the day I had JSON thrown at me because it was "so much more efficient and easier to understand" than crufty old SQL or HTML. Er, no?

Now the foot in the other boot is, or something.

However if Anthropic want XHTML, they'll have to whistle. It's too intolerant of code typos. At least HTML gets displayed so you can instantly see your cock-up, without having to ferret around with parser output and line numbering. And it's backwards-compatible with all my old stuff when I give an old page a makeover, too.

>without the need to create a virtual DOM

My, it took a long time for the penny to drop. You only need one because the code-salad spaghetti (or is that code-spaghetti salad? Flame wars have erupted for less) is no longer human-readable.

>Liquid now allows for logical capabilities such as Boolean expressions, infix operators with precedence, and literal arrays and objects.

And it's more human-readable than wikitext's templating language. Happy bunny.

[Korev]

Should we now call them Slopify?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slopify

I know someone who works at shopify. As far as their internal tooling goes, they can't wait to find another job because of all the low quality slop their coworkers hoist onto them.

[weirdbeardmt]

What’s worse

The article is barely devops and more blatantly a paid feature and not marked as such,

Or

That most of it appears to be AI generated.