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Second-Guessing the Modern Web

macwright.org

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Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#61

Post by cosmojg »

seangrogg wrote: post #51
austincheney wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And most backend engineers don't go architecture astronaut Kafka, Cassandra, Kubernetes, et al into seemingly straightforward concepts? The number of times I've seen Kubernetes as part of an on-prem install of enterprise software when there will only be one node was hilarious. That front-end devs get flak seems to largely be because their choices are visible, not because they are any different from the weird heaps pe…

Oh no, that's terrible and idiotic behavior as well. A lot of dumb decisions are made on both the backend and the frontend at many companies; one does not preclude the other.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#62

Post by MattGaiser »

coffeefirst wrote: post #37
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.

The focus groups seem to love those things.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#63

Post by fastball »

mellow2020 wrote: post #60
saagarjha wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, what did you think he was going to say? React is bad, we're dropping it?

"React is bad in your case, drop it." I know it's far out idea in tech, to flat out tell someone "you don't need this, you just save time and money and get a better result of you don't use what we made", but it shouldn't be. React is fine per se, the problem is throwing these "simple, magic" solutions onto everything , without even caring what mountains of code end up running as a result. The minimum for a Discourse…

I personally liked how easy it was to install Discourse thanks to Dockerization, and don't care one whit about requiring 10GB of space (cheapest DigitalOcean droplet comes with 25GB).

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#64

Post by systemvoltage »

amw-zero wrote: post #52
caribousoup wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with the sentiment of what you're saying, but I don't agree with the premise that there are no use cases for single page apps. You can achieve a decent UX for some applications by using small amounts of vanilla JS, but it's simply not possible to avoid re-rendering the entire page without using XHR requests at some point. That is how the browser is designed, fundamentally. Because it wasn't designed as an app…

SPA is a poor approximation of a native client with a hugely bloated browser stuck in some level of the abstraction, bypassing native app libraries, design sensibilities, typography guidelines and accessibility by implementing some UI framework that was developed by people that are entirely unqualified for it. Have you looked it the guidelines for UI development, say for MacOS? Here you go: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

PWAs, browser apps - they bypass all this work from professionals and give it in the hands of an unequiped developer. Oh god.

A browser is a window, an area of the screen that is allowed to do whatever it wants in a sandbox mode. This is a terrible idea. It becomes complete wild-wild-west.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#65

Post by Dowwie »

luxphl wrote: post #47

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.…

You are contradicting yourself by opening with a claim of time savings and ease of use followed by admitting that the solution is largely more complex. More complex work does not save time in aggregate and is not easier to use.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#66

Post by mmaunder »

luxphl wrote: post #47

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.…

I’ve written one or two web applications to put food on the table. I’ve found that unless additional complexity comes with an orders of magnitude benefit, it’s usually not worth it.

Seems like the author had a few well articulated and valid concerns, and probably likes the taste of food too.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#67

Post by pier25 »

snazz wrote: post #31
correlator wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Cool trick!

Sapper (the Svelte framework) does the same if I'm not mistaken.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#68

Post by c22 »

luxphl wrote: post #47

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.…

I always wondered if we take shortcuts because we have to re-write everything every 14 months or if we have to re-write everything every 14 months because of all the shortcuts we take.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#69

Post by networkimprov »

Dowwie wrote: post #65
luxphl wrote: post #47

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.…

You are contradicting yourself by opening with a claim of time savings and ease of use followed by admitting that the solution is largely more complex. More complex work does not save time in aggregate and is not easier to use.

The solution is not more complex to the developer or user, it's more complex to the browser, which hardly ever complains when you make it work harder :-)

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#70

Post by asalahli »

amw-zero wrote: post #45

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 r…

> Maybe Gmail is the best example of using the SPA experience to drive a rich UX.

My experience is quite the opposite. I still use Gmail's "Basic HTML" UI, and it takes less time for me to click a link and load a new page on that UI than any interaction on the default UI.

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