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A JavaScript-Free Front End

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Re: A JavaScript-Free Front End

#81

Post by detaro »

timw4mail wrote: post #36
onion2k wrote: post #14

Since I'm caching and gzipping everything, each subsequent pageview is around 6 KB; far smaller than the SPAs I've seen with equivalent functionality. That's ace. But my internet connection has a 2 second latency so I still have to wait an annoyingly long time every time I interact with your app. My connection is terrible too, so it drops every 10th request, and now I'm seeing a lot of broken pages. If only you'd wri…

I keep hearing offline-first trumpeted, but I have seen no examples of what that means. Terrible connections exist. But I fail to see how adding more scripting will always help with that. Service workers are definitely promising, but documentation for common use cases is still lacking. Even with a terrible connection, I would still trust a server-side app to load correctly on a refresh more than a SPA. If anything, t…

The neat thing is, an app using Service Workers doesn't have to be an SPA. You can use a Service Worker to just cache HTML as delivered from your server. E.g. I've seen blogs having a small service worker that just cached the last 5-10 accessed articles and added a custom error page saying "sorry, you are not online right now, but you can read the following articles from cache:"

Re: A JavaScript-Free Front End

#82

Post by winduptoy »

sbr464 wrote: post #46

Nice work, I definitely appreciate the focus on simplicity/speed. I just signed up to check it out. I noticed on the invoice page, on mobile, the number inputs (qty, price, etc) showed the full alpha keyboard on input. I think you can add a few attributes to optimize, without using JS also. Great work, thanks for sharing. This link has been helpful for me: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ux.…

Thank you! I had no idea that iOS required the pattern="\d" attribute. Those inputs require a decimal, so that pattern won't actually work (something like pattern="\d\.?\d*"). If I can get my hands on an iPhone to test that, I will deploy it shortly!

Re: A JavaScript-Free Front End

#83

Post by zanny »

twoquestions wrote: post #7

I gotta get better at CSS, I'm somewhat horrified by what I've done in JavaScript that it turns out I didn't need. Does anyone know of a good book on intermediate/advanced CSS to help avoid excess JS usage/complexity?

MDN already has a bunch of courses on css:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS

If you are already familiar with basic CSS skipping to the middle is fine. A lot of modern CSS is just discovery of what you can do since none of it is really all that intuitive, but I generally end up googling "how can I do X effect in CSS" and seeing what the consensus is.

Just as some examples, you can do responsive bars that move all over the page, change their contents, have togglable collapse menus, have dropdown menus in those menus, etc all in plain CSS, but you can't have multiple columns of arbitrary sized elements in left to right top to bottom order.

Learning CSS is really just learning the contemporary limits of what you can do and then ruining your lovely responsive grids and flexboxes with absolute positioned px garbage when you have to support IE as penance for your crimes.

Re: A JavaScript-Free Front End

#84

Post by mrec »

eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #51
ddoolin wrote: post #12

These are handy tricks, even in JS at scale, and I'd recommend their usage if you can (big if, business requirements come first for most of us). That said, I don't really buy into the no JS/purism movement for load/execution speed. For bite-sized apps or simple pages, sure. However, it's completely possible and not that hard to develop full-blown web application suites using full JS for everything (structure, style,…

Seems like once again people just need to pick the right tool for the job. The problem is that people get stuck into one framework and it’s familiar to them so it gets forced into a project it doesn’t make sense for down the road.

"people just need to pick the right tool for the job" is utterly useless advice, just as "you should do the right thing" is an utterly useless answer to an ethics question, because it doesn't help you decide what the "right" tool/thing is.

There are lots of considerations in answering that usefully. Fit for the particular problem domain is one of them, yes. But so is familiarity. And ease of hiring. And performance, stability, maturity, state of tooling, community, training resources and a zillion others. How do you balance all those? Wait, let me guess, "correctly".

Sorry about the snark, this has just been a personal peeve of mine ever since the Slashdot days, when any word salad whatsoever would get upvoted Insightful provided it contained the magic phrase "right tool for the job".

Re: A JavaScript-Free Front End

#85

Post by mercer »

stcredzero wrote: post #76

Slimvoice - A Webapp Without JavaScript is a series where I document how I rebuilt my app, Slimvoice, using as little JavaScript as possible. Here's a recurring story in the programming field. A new variation on technology is highly successful. The field starts using it enthusiastically, but doesn't keep track of the costs and cost/benefit. The new tech gets rather overused. Some people come out with optimizations. (…

While I'm not a full-on no-js developer, my move to the back-end and less javascript has been one of the biggest reasons why I've started enjoying my job again.

Unfortunately, at least judging by the many jobs I get offered, the market around me is still very much on the 'make everything a web app' train. I really hope the minimalist, or at least a less js-heavy approach actually becomes a new cycle, job-wise.

Re: A JavaScript-Free Front End

#87

Post by roebk »

It's perfectly possible to do some nifty tricks with CSS alone. The one thing this author has omitted is the impact this has on accessibility. Sure, I can open a modal without the need of JavaScript, but my focus isn't trapped within the modal and with no standard keyboard shortcut (ESC) to dismiss the modal, it provides a sub-standard experience for all users.

Be sensible and use JavaScript when it's appropriate. Please don't think it's cool to create some fancy JS-less widgets and forget about accessibility.

Re: A JavaScript-Free Front End

#88

Post by stcredzero »

mercer wrote: post #85
stcredzero wrote: post #76

Slimvoice - A Webapp Without JavaScript is a series where I document how I rebuilt my app, Slimvoice, using as little JavaScript as possible. Here's a recurring story in the programming field. A new variation on technology is highly successful. The field starts using it enthusiastically, but doesn't keep track of the costs and cost/benefit. The new tech gets rather overused. Some people come out with optimizations. (…

While I'm not a full-on no-js developer, my move to the back-end and less javascript has been one of the biggest reasons why I've started enjoying my job again. Unfortunately, at least judging by the many jobs I get offered, the market around me is still very much on the 'make everything a web app' train. I really hope the minimalist, or at least a less js-heavy approach actually becomes a new cycle, job-wise.

Funny, but the Smalltalk Seaside webapp framework was once criticized as old fashioned for this kind of server-centric, javascript minimal approach. And that wasn't that long ago.

Re: A JavaScript-Free Front End

#89

Post by KorematsuFred »

It is all about trade offs. We had a good application developed as a SPA and worked well. However we had a monetization flow where we took users credit card details and bunch of information. We developed this flow as a separate stand alone HTML pages and micro optimized, reduced css, used vanilla js and put it on CDN.

That did bump up conversions by good percentage points. It is all about choosing the right hammer and nail for the job.

Re: A JavaScript-Free Front End

#90

Post by mercer »

jonstaab wrote: post #58
timw4mail wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing offline-first trumpeted, but I have seen no examples of what that means. Terrible connections exist. But I fail to see how adding more scripting will always help with that. Service workers are definitely promising, but documentation for common use cases is still lacking. Even with a terrible connection, I would still trust a server-side app to load correctly on a refresh more than a SPA. If anything, t…

Henrik Joreteg ( https://twitter.com/HenrikJoreteg ) makes some pretty good arguments for PWAs. I've not had the chance to work on one, but when you start looking at mobile devices in particular, they do seem to be a good middle ground between the slimness of a document (web page) and the capability of a native mobile app. They're also not mutually exclusive with "no javascript" (if you do it right, which is a consid…

I'm very much on board with the promise of PWAs, but so far I've never found an approach that didn't feel too complicated/tedious. That said, I've not made serious attempts in at least a few months, maybe a year. Would you say the situation has solidified/standardized in the interim, and if so, could you point me to some resources?
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