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Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

paramaggarwal.substack.com

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Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#51

Post by muglug »

torgoguys wrote: post #45
chrysoprace wrote: post #43

This 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…

SPAs being the darks ages is over-the-top, but being an SPA when other web architectures could better serve the user is a dark pattern . That tax app doesn't need to be an SPA. JavaScript powered interactions make the experience nicer for the user, but that doesn't mean it needs or is improved by being a single page.

I think an SPA can be much more user-friendly than a traditional series of server-rendered pages.

Email is a great example of this - GMail, at launch, had much better UX than existing server-rendered applications like Hotmail.

You can find bad UX everywhere - in SPAs and server-rendered interfaces alike - but there’s nothing implicit to SPAs that reduces usability.

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#52

Post by benbristow »

qznc wrote: post #22
camccar wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New reddit is painfully slow to login. So much javascript for a simple dialog to load it's absurd.

As long as old and compact reddit are still there, I'm fine with it. Twitter on other hand has no lightweight version, unfortunately.

Twitter's redesign is one of the most performant SPA's I've seen in a while. It's really smooth and nicely designed too. A lot better than their previous webapp.

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#53

Post by jonnycoder »

5cott0 wrote: post #49

If SPAs are the dark ages then what do you call the IE6/7 jQuery days?

The Wild Wild West!!? I remember doing jquery/ajax calling an API and while it was easy to churn out spaghetti or long js file code, it was still easier to read and pick up a few years later.

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#54

Post by chrysoprace »

torgoguys wrote: post #45
chrysoprace wrote: post #43

This 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…

SPAs being the darks ages is over-the-top, but being an SPA when other web architectures could better serve the user is a dark pattern . That tax app doesn't need to be an SPA. JavaScript powered interactions make the experience nicer for the user, but that doesn't mean it needs or is improved by being a single page.

No, it doesn't need to be, but it is nicer. There's quite a lot of complexities to my country's tax law (as with any country's tax law, really) and it's heavily simplified by giving you highly dynamic choices. Trying to use my country's immigration site, which has some JavaScript sprinkled on but is largely static, is a largely inferior experience.

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#55

Post by panphora »

popup21 wrote: post #8

Wouldn't do it any other way. I dipped out of web dev in 2015 to run an ecommerce project. I stopped tracking all the latest js framework news. I settled on a barebones CSS rule set. I stopped choosing SPAs as the starting point for mvp ideas. I shelved Wordpress and moved some content sites over to Netlify and just recently started using a nifty desktop ssr cms instead of Hugo, Gatsby, etc. I was regressing to the e…

I made a web app framework [0] for people like you (and me). It lets you use static HTML to build a web app.

Data attributes store data in the page and add dynamic features (like CRUD functionality and drag and drop sorting) very easily.

Plus, the whole thing is server rendered with Handlebars, so the front-end JS part isn't even required for 95% of visitors (it's only necessary if you're an admin who can edit the current page).

I wrote it because I missed the simple days of jQuery and REST APIs.

[0] https://remaketheweb.com/

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#56

Post by spectramax »

satya71 wrote: post #35
chmod775 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But Gmail showed us that web 'apps' are useful. Gmail is terrible. It's slow and most people prefer the static html version.

Somehow everyone I know is happy with GMail and find a full-featured email client incomprehensible. I can't stand GMail's slow UI.

Try FastMail. Its beautiful and refreshing. "Old school" in everyway.

If anyone from FastMail is reading this - do not change your design or UI framework...like ever. The moment you start slowing things down with animations and bloat, that's a slippery slope...

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#57

Post by stevewodil »

amluto wrote: post #30
x3haloed wrote: post #23

> 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.

It's of course perfectly fine using chrome, which may or may not be indicative of a serious problem for the open web

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#58

Post by hyperdunc »

nefitty wrote: post #44
x3haloed wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's better than everything else because people have never heard of it. When did software engineers become hipsters?

It seems like a lot of web devs are either stuck chasing novelty or constantly trying to bet on the next big thing. 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...

Coffeescript was 'replaced' by ECMAScript 2015. Ember is fine but it's not the end of the line - it's been superseded' in most scenarios by React and Vue.js because those are generally better tools.

JS technology changes quickly not for its own sake, but because there are still discoveries to be made about how to improve both syntax and how we think about code. I'm sure the pace will taper off sooner or later, until the Web is taken over by something else.

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#59

Post by RockIslandLine »

onion2k wrote: post #20
cjohansson wrote: post #9

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

The trend in my work is to add more and more JS to get the render time below 11ms per frame (11ms for my code, plus 5ms for the browser to paint and update, for a solid 60fps). To do that takes a lot of data structure design, memoization, cache management, plus a decent understanding of how browsers put things in the DOM and on the screen. Admittedly I work on something that's a bit unusual (a diagram tool for lawyer…

Why would you ever build that kind of application using web technologies?

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#60

Post by readarticle »

benbristow wrote: post #52
qznc wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as old and compact reddit are still there, I'm fine with it. Twitter on other hand has no lightweight version, unfortunately.

Twitter's redesign is one of the most performant SPA's I've seen in a while. It's really smooth and nicely designed too. A lot better than their previous webapp.

Do you know any others? Every time I’m redirected to twitter on mobile I’m in awe, it’s genuinely the only SPA I’ve ever experienced work “properly” on my phone comparable to a native app without any polish.
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