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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

#201

Post by boomlinde »

muglug wrote: post #51
torgoguys wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gmail wasn't a single page at launch, so its UX advantage had nothing to do with that.

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

#202

Post by tonyedgecombe »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #115
paranoidrobot wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All sorts of devices with some kind of UI are using a browser in some kind of kiosk/headless mode. STBs, Smart TVs, IFE systems are or were web based.

To be honest as time goes on the Smart piece of your device starts to get slower and slower. One of the main drivers for getting a amazon fire stick is that it is much more responsive than the Smart TV itself.

I thought that but the Youtube app on both my smart tv and Apple TV are broken in exactly the same way and unusable without a regular reboot.

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

#203

Post by [deleted] »

wyqydsyq wrote: post #157
henrikschroder wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It enables you to take a JavaScript-first approach Uh-huh... > which in turn makes building complicated applications easier. What? This is vacuous market-speak.

To word it more technically, building an SPA allows you to build applications as declarative composable functions which are deterministic, as opposed to the spaghetti code commonly seen in the days of jQuery and PHP which is harder to read, reason about, debug and maintain due to their imperative and nondeterministic nature.

[deleted]

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

#204

Post by zelphirkalt »

wyqydsyq wrote: post #136
torgoguys wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it's a web-based user interface as this tax app sounds to be, it is arguably improved purely by being an SPA. Requiring full page reloads just to submit or change some tiny bit of data in a page is objectively bad UX.

A problem is, that I need to fiddle around with JS blocking, even on official websites from city, state or gov, because they hired inresponsible web devs or made inresponsible decisions to let Google and others track me on their website. So initially they will be blocked. As far as "experts" for SPA are concerned, they often do not even include a noscript tag, which means I see a white page. Now it cannot become less user friendly than that. I've yet to see a SPA, which offers a working alternative via noscript tag, when I blocked all their tracking. The thing is that SPA all too often serves as a way to force tracking onto the unsuspecting user. "You need to allow our JS! Your browser is outdated! Use Chrome!" and the unsophisticated person will think: "Oh well, lets just whitelist this page dammit!"

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

#205

Post by jonny383 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #190
jonny383 wrote: post #167

There's nothing wrong with static HTML/CSS/JS. There's also nothing wrong with a rich SPA. And again, there's nothing wrong with using some kind of dynamic server-side HTML/CSS/JS presentation (like WordPress). Where there is a problem is the culture of software engineering, and the tendency to select the newest technology stack of the day for inappropriate applications. I think any seasoned software engineer has acq…

Except that usually someone from marketting or the reception still wont touch the website, because they think, that they can save time by delegating that back to the developers. Wordpress has some kind of terrible design decisions backed in and yes, there are many more elegant and long term effective ways (it's not about getting it online in 30mins) to build a company website.

This is a cultural issue within a company that has nothing to do with a suitable technical solution.

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

#206

Post by snypox »

scarface74 wrote: post #111

I’m by no stretch of the imagination a modern web developer. I know plain JS well, HTML and enough CSS/Bootstrap to throw together an internal website. Even then most of my experience is with server side rendering. However, for any large project, I would much rather be forced into using a modern framework than not. Any web app that is large enough is going to have some type of bespoke framework that was created by th…

Plus shifting processing from backend servers to end user browsers can be a huge plus of you have a decent amount of visitors. Also, just simply pushing my code S3 is so much easier for me than building a Docker image and putting it into a container orchestrator.

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

#208

Post by Dylan16807 »

manigandham wrote: post #165
userbinator wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with the Outlook web app (not the "basic HTML" mode, which is perfectly usable in contrast) is the exact opposite --- it's extremely slow and consumes a ridiculous amount of memory for what it does (I've seen it take over 2GB of RAM, and this is with an account where all the emails with their attachments total less than 100MB.) When composing a message it lags so much that it will delay each keystroke b…

Unused RAM is wasted RAM. If you don't have anything else that needs it then just let your system automatically handle it. Also I find most performance issues with big apps are a result of browser extensions that interfere. Try using a private window without any extensions.

> Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

Bloat RAM is also wasted RAM. If it's not being used as a cache of reasonable size, or in a time/speed tradeoff, all you're doing is making things worse.

> If you don't have anything else that needs it then just let your system automatically handle it.

That's a statement that only really applies to people misunderstanding RAM used by the page cache or suspended programs. And both of those depend on active applications not allocating that memory!

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

#209

Post by PaulWaldman »

sireat wrote: post #196
kugelblitz wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this downvoted? I'm a big fan of PHP, but I feel something like Netlify CMS + Jekyll on Netlify is appropriate for this. It would be super fast (statically generated and on Netlify CDN) and secure (no database or app scripts) and includes an editing interface. With WordPress I don't worry about the PHP part, but for the tendency of people to bloat it by installing plugins and not updating it enough.

How does something like Netlify CMS work for an end user? I mean how do you skip the "storing some sort of state in DB including a users table" step? It is very typical for a small to medium business site client to want a minimal CMS and ability to add a few more users with edit rights. With Netlify CMS it seems the build happens from a git repo so wouldn't it require for end user to learn git? I love how fast and ea…

Netlify requires adding a few static assets to your site that handle authentication and CRUD actions. This then updates your git repo. The format of the posts are in Markdown, so it may not be the most user-friendly, but the end user would not have to learn git.

https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/add-to-your-site/

https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/add-to-your-site/

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

#210

Post by Dylan16807 »

mycall wrote: post #145
userbinator wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with the Outlook web app (not the "basic HTML" mode, which is perfectly usable in contrast) is the exact opposite --- it's extremely slow and consumes a ridiculous amount of memory for what it does (I've seen it take over 2GB of RAM, and this is with an account where all the emails with their attachments total less than 100MB.) When composing a message it lags so much that it will delay each keystroke b…

> I've seen it take over 2GB Probably because that RAM wasn't doing anything else. Why not use it as cache to speed things up. I'm sure it can work fine in much smaller RAM sizes.

It's very rare that a program intelligently adjusts its cache size based on the amount of memory available.

And that doesn't explain how the "cache" is twenty times bigger than the source data.

I bet with less RAM available it would start thrashing.

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