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Second-Guessing the Modern Web

macwright.org

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Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#31

Post by snazz »

correlator wrote: post #21
theonething wrote: post #14

> There’s no category winner like React as an alternative I'm really rooting for frameworks like Phoenix LiveView, Rails Turbolinks, Laravel Livewire to fill this void. SPA like interactivity by just rendering HTML templates and sending them to the client via Ajax or websockets sounds great to me. I wouldn't miss JavaScript one bit.

Rails turbolinks is magic!

I quite like Turbolinks too, but it can have some unintended interactions with other JS code. If you're looking to make your non-SPA site faster another way, you can try https://instant.page/ as well. It preloads pages as you hover over them, which makes links feel like they load instantaneously. It's a pretty cool trick! You can try it out on their project website or on https://www.snazz.xyz.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#32

Post by Frost1x »

MattGaiser wrote: post #23

The problem with not using a JS framework is that eventually, the investors/business person/design team/frontend enjoying devs wants this highly animated site with all sorts of little toggles, confirmation boxes, popup models, toasts, etc. It is far nicer doing that in React where you can just casually npm in some online component that does that rather than in vanilla JS or jQuery. React is basically a compromise bet…

>Developers like simple sites like Hacker News. Nobody else does.

I'm not entirely sure about that. Pretty sure most people just want some program to accomplish the function they're using it for so they can move on with their day, not chase around an overly complex and forever changing UI they have to keep up with, ontop of their actual work.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#33

Post by austincheney »

tiborsaas wrote: post #29
userbinator wrote: post #8

Either 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, a…

> instead of settling down and focusing on getting the most out of a platform How do you know when to settle? Should we have stopped at jQuery? We are doing exactly what you are asking for, but not in the way you like. Web developers are getting the most of the web platform. The result is that new frameworks and libraries are keep popping up. Most will sink, a few will float and it's okay, this is how evolution shoul…

> Web developers are getting the most of the web platform.

I disagree, as so many (perhaps most) web developers have no idea what to do with web technologies aside from building SPAs in their pet framework.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#34

Post by caribousoup »

userbinator wrote: post #8

Either 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, a…

I think modern web misery all stems from an industry problem. Everywhere I've worked, I have insisted on building things with basic semantic HTML, hand coded CSS, and vanilla JS where precisely needed. Nobody listens.

You can make something that loads 50x-100x faster, works responsively on every device, has energy efficient rendering, and the UI/UX is dead simple to use and familiar to all people. And yet... at least for me, I have to fight against every client, employer, and coworker to execute this approach.

Maybe web developers as a whole just got bored. They don't want to make webpages like they did in 2002.

Make a folder with some .HTML, .CSS, .JS files. Then sync it to a linux box. Wow, you're on the internet, a modern marvel. I see younger devs who don't even know this basic stuff. As if, this were all way more complicated than it actually is. It's not.

How do we get web devs back on track? Makers need to thoroughly understand their tools and materials, inside and out, for any industry. I'm just not seeing that as much anymore. It seems like an education problem, or maybe it's just human nature to go for new and shiny instead of practical and reliable.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#35

Post by buboard »

> But the cultural tides are strong. Building a company on Django in 2020 seems like the equivalent of driving a PT Cruiser and blasting Faith Hill’s “Breathe” on a CD while your friends are listening to The Weeknd in their Teslas. Swimming against this current isn’t easy, and not in a trendy contrarian way.

more like, your friends are listening to Weeknd on vinyl and gramophones because their friends do. The more i read about JS frameworks the more i want to start doing everything in Perl again, or C, because its the work that matters and not the tools.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#36

Post by austincheney »

pnako wrote: post #28
austincheney wrote: post #17

The only important question is whether this is a technology problem or a business problem. Fundamentally the problem is this: Web developers don't know what they are doing and oversell their capabilities. To be more clear though, this isn't a new problem, just that the symptoms of the problem have changed as the tools have evolved. I remember starting at Travelocity in 2007 and they sure as shit didn't know what they…

What you describe as "broken" is what I imagine to be the ideal situation. I expect travel agencies and similar websites to have a rock-solid back-end, and I don't care at all for any Javascript fanciness. In fact I would expect their websites to work with JS disabled. The fact they canned whatever special project the JS developers were working on might have been the right decision (and I just checked, Travelocity is…

> I expect travel agencies and similar websites to have a rock-solid back-end

They had no such thing. Sometimes their shopping carts were so horribly incompetent it’s amazing we generated any revenue at all. Pretty bad since they had no idea just how broke it was until investing in something like Tealeaf.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#37

Post by coffeefirst »

MattGaiser wrote: post #23

The problem with not using a JS framework is that eventually, the investors/business person/design team/frontend enjoying devs wants this highly animated site with all sorts of little toggles, confirmation boxes, popup models, toasts, etc. It is far nicer doing that in React where you can just casually npm in some online component that does that rather than in vanilla JS or jQuery. React is basically a compromise bet…

Except for the user, who never asked for vanity animations and hate the popups.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#38

Post by buboard »

MattGaiser wrote: post #23

The problem with not using a JS framework is that eventually, the investors/business person/design team/frontend enjoying devs wants this highly animated site with all sorts of little toggles, confirmation boxes, popup models, toasts, etc. It is far nicer doing that in React where you can just casually npm in some online component that does that rather than in vanilla JS or jQuery. React is basically a compromise bet…

developers pushed animated sites to naive businessmen. Almost none of the latter know how to measure the ROI (if they did, they d know it s negative)

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#39

Post by babaganoosh89 »

acemarke wrote: post #13

Dan Abramov put up a tweet thread agreeing with this piece, and talking about how the React team is now looking at trying to come up with some server integration capabilities to enable a hybrid model for the rest of the community: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1259614150386425858

I think a lot of the problem is React's syntax and ecosystem is too complicated for the majority of sites out there. IMO using React to make static sites and regular CMS / document type sites is way overkill no matter how performance optimized it is.

I've been experimenting with Vue and I'm liking it more and more just for the simplicity.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#40

Post by daguar »

> But there are also a lot of problems for which I can’t see any concrete benefit to using React. Those are things like blogs, shopping-cart-websites, mostly-CRUD-and-forms-websites. For these things, all of the fancy optimizations are optimizations to get you closer to the performance you would’ve gotten if you just hadn’t used so much technology.

I think this is at the root of it — most web devs today don't see that some plurality or small majority of web app use cases these days just don't require the tradeoffs of SPAs.

But there's a generation of devs who've come up exclusively on JS tooling (Node, Express, React/Redux or Angular) and the crowding effect has therefore made those the default choices, if only because the labor pool is big.

My honest belief is you can more quickly build most functionality needed for most businesses with a plain-old full stack framework like Rails or Django these days.

But the real value of those frameworks doesn't show in the initial speed to build (though it's there!) — it really shows up in how much common functionality (logins, file uploads, etc.) you get for free 6-12 months in, and how low your cost of change stays over time as a comparable SPA app becomes a pain in the butt to add new features to.

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