Second-Guessing the Modern Web
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Second-Guessing the Modern Web
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Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web
#2Good points that seem to boil down to choose simplest tool for the job, even if it's not trendy.
Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web
#3> If Wikipedia were started today, it’d be React. Maybe?
No, I'm building a hard fork of wikipedia and I'm using Go to render the pages on the server side and a vanilla JS for a user friendly the rich text editor.
I don't know why not more people use WebComponents as a light weight alternative to React/Vue/Angular. It was natural choice in my case because it grew out of the desire to keep the tech stack small. For now I haven't find a reason to regret it, two way databinding is nice to have, but when the js is reloaded with every page, the global state is easier to reason about and less of a problem.
Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web
#4Wikipedia has been taking some strides in this direction. For example, on the "mobile" site, if you follow a link from an expanded page section and then go back, the section is no longer expanded, and you lose your place. (Then it re-expands, but you're in a completely different place on the page now.)
This type of stuff is one of the reasons why I choose to support older browsers like Netscape, IE, and Lynx. I think that a website which would have been usable 25 years ago has a much better chance of being usable by some random person using an old device I've never heard of and a browser I've never tested with.
Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web
#5Good points that seem to boil down to choose simplest tool for the job, even if it's not trendy.
It's my personal philosophy in many things, but I like to insist that it's far from being the end-all be-all of good engineering in general. Perhap so I don't fall prey to the usual weaknesses of a hacker.
Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web
#6HTML should never have grown into the mutated application runtime it is today. The presentational concerns for documents are different from application rendering. The javascript stack should have been something entirely separate.
I strongly feel we should create a lightweight HTML fork that is again document-centric and doesn't allow for all of this javascript nonsense. Something that doesn't allow for stupid custom UI or behavioural tracking. Just text, images, videos, and links. The painting algorithm would be dead simple, documents would load lightning fast, and we'd be confident there would be no ad malware.
Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web
#7> If Wikipedia were started today, it’d be React. Maybe? No, I'm building a hard fork of wikipedia and I'm using Go to render the pages on the server side and a vanilla JS for a user friendly the rich text editor. I don't know why not more people use WebComponents as a light weight alternative to React/Vue/Angular. It was natural choice in my case because it grew out of the desire to keep the tech stack small. For no…
Probably because "more people" are not trained to "use WebComponents as a light weight alternative to React/Vue/Angular", let alone lead a team in that direction (and assume responsibility for a thing that has no market value on their resume... it's the situation 80% of tech workers find themselves in).
Momentum is a b#%~~ I mean, momentum is hard to ignore.
The sad reality is that trendy will always be driving behaviors for as long as recruiters attach value to buzz-words and -names.
Meanwhile, I guess a few will take the risk to do good engineering and damn the name of techs used, hopefully to rise to decision-making positions. Hopefully. Oh who am I kidding.
Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web
#8Either you omit some interactive elements on load, or you try really hard to make sure that the JavaScript loads faster than users will click, or you make some elements not require JavaScript to work - like making them normal links or forms. Or some combination of those.
I realise I'm in the minority, but I use JS whitelisting, which means that any SPAs I come across in my web searches (a disturbingly large number, and unfortunately increasing) will quickly make me go back since I can often find what I'm looking for somewhere else, on a site which doesn't require running arbitrary code just to render what usually turns out to be static content anyway.
The state of web development has always seemed a bit odd to me, largely driven by fashion and a desire for developers to "outdo" one another in complexity. There's a ton of churn and ADHD as people jump around from one trend to the next; instead of settling down and focusing on getting the most out of a platform, they're eternally in search of the next one. Reinventing/reimplementing in JS what basic HTML and CSS can do is just one example of this behaviour. The massive overuse of the "modern" adjective is another, and quite frankly all this really irritates me, as someone who just wants to use the Web as a hypertext document system to find some information.
Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web
#9HTML should never have grown into the mutated application runtime it is today. The presentational concerns for documents are different from application rendering. The javascript stack should have been something entirely separate. I strongly feel we should create a lightweight HTML fork that is again document-centric and doesn't allow for all of this javascript nonsense. Something that doesn't allow for stupid custom…
Creating it is the easy part, IMO. The hard part is to get people to publish on it.
I fear that most authors (and most creators of images and links) are not knowledgeable enough to see the web's shortcomings and that it will be very hard to explain the shortcoming to them -- with the result that most authors will continue to consider their job to be done once they have put their writings (and images and links) on the web.
Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web
#10HTML should never have grown into the mutated application runtime it is today. The presentational concerns for documents are different from application rendering. The javascript stack should have been something entirely separate. I strongly feel we should create a lightweight HTML fork that is again document-centric and doesn't allow for all of this javascript nonsense. Something that doesn't allow for stupid custom…
I strongly feel we should create a lightweight HTML fork that is again document-centric and doesn't allow for all of this javascript nonsense. Something that doesn't allow for stupid custom UI or behavioural tracking. Just text, images, videos, and links.
HTML already has such a mode. It's called "turn off JavaScript". Fortunately, there are still plenty of good sites in that style.
(You can still have ads with plain HTML; they just aren't as annoying nor intrusive.)