It seems the trend points to slower and slower websites with more JS bloat. I also notice a increase in JS-errors causing entire sites to malfunction, recently this happened to large apps like Teams and Float
New reddit is painfully slow to login. So much javascript for a simple dialog to load it's absurd.
Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
41–50 of 313 posts
Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
#42No, the SPA hype has warn off and people realize that although these new technologies exist, they are not always needed. If you are building a web app, use React or similar. If you are building a web site, use plain HTML+CSS w/ supplemental JS. Sometimes your project can be split in half. Do the landing page, signup, login, privacy policy, etc. in plain HTML. Maybe don't embed all that stuff in your app and you would…
Of course the reasonable answer gets downvoted. Stay strong! And remember that you're not a good developer unless you write everything in vim compiled for an OS that you wrote for yourself in C, backed up on a trusty old 2MB platter drive via a series of rsync scripts. I heard the concept of version control was originally conceived and canned by IBM in 1967, because it was found that version control would eventually…
I'm used to the downvotes on here unfortunately, it's easy to tell which topics will do it, the group think here can be thick...
Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
#43The kinds of people who care about performance in the backend are exactly like the kinds of people who care about performance in the frontend. There's a variety of techniques that make sense in both areas to create a snappy, seamless experience. You need experienced engineers to create performance no matter what your domain is.
We've gone down the route of creating SPAs to largely replace experiences that would require desktop applications (it was only 5 years ago that I had to download an executable to do my tax return, now I do it with an SPA). Rather than create an SPA for a blog or a simple marketing site, we've largely replaced traditional "heavy"[0] infrastructure (PHP, Apache, MySQL just to display static content) with static JavaScript-generated sites. Many of these can simply be hosted on a CDN because they have no database and often no need for complex routing.
Pretending that SPAs were part of some dark ages is just silly. Horses for courses. If your application requires what I've dubbed "heavy" architecture (above) then by all means! Such infrastructure allows a high traffic service to be highly available, but is not required to serve a single .html file.
[0] When I say "heavy" I'm mainly talking about the attack surface and maintenance required. WordPress is great for serving a blog but has been the target of many hackers due to the amount of security vulnerabilities it has had over time.
Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I doubt I'll ever voluntarily use one of those frameworks for web dev. > I do, however, like this thing called, Svelte. Svelte is just another one of “those frameworks”, except with a vastly smaller community: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=svelte%20i...
It's better than everything else because people have never heard of it. When did software engineers become hipsters?
For example, what happened to CoffeeScript? https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0hjc5m0&ge...
What happened to Ember? https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0s8...
Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
#45This is something that I see espoused by "web traditionalists" for lack of a better term. Sure, there are a lot of web developers who are not optimising for performance but I think the difference is that it has simply shifted to the frontend where it's more noticeable. The kinds of people who care about performance in the backend are exactly like the kinds of people who care about performance in the frontend. There's…
Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
#46> The Dark Age - Somewhere on this path to render pages on the fly (SSR) and render pages on the client (SPA) we forgot about the performance of our webpages. We were trying to build apps. But the web is about presenting content first and foremost! Pfff - That's completely wrong. SPAs are all about performance. If you want to built a highly-interactive site, it makes sense to do the computing where it's consumed -- i…
> But Gmail showed us that web 'apps' are useful. And we really have come full circle. Gmail performance, at least on Firefox, is awful.
Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
#47It seems the trend points to slower and slower websites with more JS bloat. I also notice a increase in JS-errors causing entire sites to malfunction, recently this happened to large apps like Teams and Float
Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arguably if you are publishing content on the net you are giving it away. There are mechanisms to charge for it.
> There are mechanisms to charge for it. Only above a certain price point. Our financial system nor our consumer culture support micropayments yet. This effectively limits the web properties that can charge users to a small fraction, so unfortunately "just charge money" isn't the widely-available solution I wish it was yet. Hell, it's more viable to charge users for your mobile client than the backing service. It's k…
Why should I subsidize your failed model ?
Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
#49Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
#50We are not going back full circle. We are facing new challenges and realizing how complex web development is. 1- There is no simple CSS start point; unless you don't want to be responsive, support mobile/tablets, add a print stylesheet. Then you have thousands of line. Time to add a pre-processor like Sass because CSS was not designed for such complex use cases. 2- There is no simple HTML either. Are you going to mem…
Did you want to make a box with rounded corners?
We can do that now...
It's intuitive and easy to understand. Try that 20 years ago. You're designing that in Photoshop, slicing up images for each corner, placing them into countless HTML table cells, messing around with all the table and cell heights, widths, paddings, margins, and borders, and struggling to get IE to render it correctly. That could have easily been an hour of work, and it would have resulted in a mess of images and inflexible code. Now, it's one line of code and 10 seconds of work. Did you want to fade the color of the border to red when the user hovers over the box? We can do that with two lines of CSS now. Good luck trying to achieve that in the past.
What do you mean thousands of lines for a responsive/mobile CSS layout, and no simple HTML?
https://www.w3schools.com/html/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_re...
There, it's a site with a header, footer, navigation, three columns, and it's responsive. 36 lines of CSS and 36 lines of HTML. Add 5-10 lines of CSS to reset spacing at the beginning, and that could literally be an entire responsive website.