Second-Guessing the Modern Web

The first big project I had as a professional SWE was to rebuild a checkout page to use React. Seems like overkill for a single checkout page to be its own React app? It wasn’t. There was a lot of edge cases. It needed to handle different countries (some have states, some have zip codes, Brazil has a crazy tax scheme), different SKUs, different payment methods (including resellers), free trials, etc. The original template + jQuery rendered version was nearly impossible to work with. Any sort of change would take forever and would lead to bugs whose patch would only increase complexity.

React substantially simplified the page, and it actually looked and performed much better since there wasn’t any jankiness from HTML rendering before JS could correctly format the page. We were then able to experiment on the page to optimize the experience and drive conversions.

TL;DR, more often than you would expect, the tiny performance costs you face from using a SPA is more than made up for by being able to develop quickly and more confidently.

This idea comes up often. I think it's a bad idea for many reasons, so rather than repeat myself I wrote them down here: https://robert.ocallahan.org/2020/05/why-forking-html-into-s...

We should create a better division in web standards between the "document web" and the "application web." I think there are valid use cases to both, and we shouldn't rule out either. Wikipedia has to be the greatest realization of the initial spirit of the web: an endless interconnected network of articles of varying topics. That's a real use case, but it's not the use case of _every_ application.

Some applications really want to make use of a richer UX, one that doesn't need to re-render the entire page from scratch on every button click. Maybe Gmail is the best example of using the SPA experience to drive a rich UX. The web browser was not meant to build such applications, that's something we don't acknowledge enough. The web browser was designed, since day one, to render and link between text documents. We've been trying to play UX catch-up for 20 years at this point, and it's finally converged with lots of support for treating the web as an application platform as well (React, Angular, etc.)

So we've taken years to arrive at SPA's, but I think they're completely justified. They absolutely have tradeoffs, but they're not pointless tradeoffs. That doesn't mean that all applications should be SPA's, but I also think it's completely wrong to say that all applications should be simple documents too.

I empathize with the author but client-side technologies like React have a pretty clear advantage that explains why they're popular: for the people that are tasked to make websites (i.e. us, HN readers), they're easier to work with and they save us time. It outweighs all the end-user-facing cons by a lot, because companies need us, and our salaries are expensive.

It's true that they are largely more complex than O.G. web technologies, and it worries me that they create a sort of gatekeeping effect on the industry, but I think it's disingenuous to outright claim React & co. are bad from a development perspective. I sometimes wonder if the people claiming to hate client-side technologies or disable JS in their browsers have actually ever had to build a complex website to put food on their table. My bet is the answer is often no, or they are a contrarian in general.

I've done lots of native development on Desktop and Mobile and I can sort of see how you get there if that's your point of reference, but if you work on web apps daily it's clear why the popular technologies are popular, and it's not hype.

> 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.

If "React" is used loosely here to mean a modern frontend framework, then at least one concrete benefit is the ease of splitting web pages into components, and the ease of co-locating CSS with these components.

I have tried Eleventy with nunjucks, but compared to the way React (Vue, Svelte, whatever) allow you to organize your code, it felt really awkward. Even Google dev rels, such as Jake Archibald, admit that they love the developer experience of something like Next.js [0]

[0] https://developers.google.com/web/shows/http203/podcast/soci...