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Second-Guessing the Modern Web

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Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#91

Post by dexen »

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…

>it's simply not possible to avoid re-rendering the entire page without using XHR

Wrong on two separate levels.

First up, technologies like iframes, frames, and objects/embeds allow that just fine; you can use at least some of them without any JS whatsoever.

Secondly, with avoiding re-rendering you end up avoiding a 200ms ... 500ms load+render of simple full page, at the cost of doing 2...5 seconds of gradual load+render of various bits and pieces. Bits and pieces that often are so unwieldy they cause widgets & content to load gradually, jump around, and sometimes even get hidden behind a loader. While the CPU fan keeps whining at full revs.

The solution became worse than the problem it purported to solve, and your users pay the price in wasted time + RAM + electricity.

If you pay even a little attention to order of loading you can avoid FOUC entirely. If you pay a little attention to defining sizes of leading elements, you'll have constant layout of the top part of the page, and avoid flash of white background. If you use anchors here and there your user will be scrolled to the proper position.

Yes your page can easily look as if it got only updated with JS after doing a full load+render.

The technology is already in the browser; no need to approximate it with three layers of JS.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#92

Post by Scarbutt »

daguar wrote: post #40

> 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 tha…

mostly-CRUD-and-forms-websites.

There's no thin line for this, CRUD-FORM can be really complex or really simple. A thoughtful design choice must be made here between server-side-rendered html with some JS and a SPA.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#93

Post by duxup »

simonw wrote: post #78
burlesona wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most part I think the reason so many web devs put up with the “all-react” (and similar) development experience is basically cargo culting. If you admit you don’t like it, chances are there’s at least one front-end hipster around who will mock you as outdated, and that’s enough to silence most. For the hipsters, the problems of SPAs are hard, and engineers like hacking on hard problems. Also the fact that the…

What a great anecdote. It aligns with my big worry here: we are raising a cohort of front-end developers who don't know how to use plain HTML and forms!

IMO, it's kinda hard not to end up learning those things even if you are in react all day.

At one point or another things don't work and it's because of simple HTML... and not react.

Maybe that's not the right path to learn it but we've reached a point where if you want a job, plain HTML and JavaScript isn't it.... plenty of folks who had the benefit of developing their skills from HTML + JS all the way up will bemoan this situation.... but if they're hiring people they're not hiring anyone who just knows HTML and JavaScript without any exposure to anything else.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#94

Post by dahfizz »

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've often said that web development has a big culture problem.

In any other field, 'modern' is the opposite of a selling point. People want tools that work, that are proven and have years of stability and momentum. But in web development, there is an obsession with the new and shiny. It's 100% about the developer's own experience in creating a program and 0% about the user's experience actually using the half baked and constantly changing web app.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#95

Post by atroche »

renaudg wrote: post #87
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. One word : Craigslist.

I had a feeling that maybe Craigslist was declining in popularity, but it looks like they're still going strong: https://www.keranews.org/post/25-years-understanding-longevi...

(my intuition was probably based on the fact that it's not very popular in Australia, where I am)

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#96

Post by beckingz »

rossdavidh wrote: post #80
c22 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not both?

Both is good.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#97

Post by Scarbutt »

cageface wrote: post #75

Use the right tool for the job. Why is this so controversial? Yes SPA frameworks are overused but a lot of modern web "apps" are actually real applications and can't be built on a reload-the-world on a mouse click paradigm of the old web.

You are too rational ;)

Joking aside, was thinking exactly the same while reading the article. This has been talk about for years, and today there is lots docs and resources for devs to be able to make a thoughtful decision of going SPA vs no-SPA.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#98

Post by atroche »

asalahli wrote: post #70
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.

I'm skeptical of that. Have you timed it in Chrome DevTools? E.g. when I hit 'c' on the keyboard to compose an email, it's effectively instantaneous.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#99

Post by EGreg »

burlesona wrote: post #72
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.…

For the most part I think the reason so many web devs put up with the “all-react” (and similar) development experience is basically cargo culting. If you admit you don’t like it, chances are there’s at least one front-end hipster around who will mock you as outdated, and that’s enough to silence most. For the hipsters, the problems of SPAs are hard, and engineers like hacking on hard problems. Also the fact that the…

Hey all

I remember when jQuery was the React of its day. Then browsers copied most of its stuff. And now we have moved in to Angular and React.

Frankly, web components can do most of the stuff React does - and even the JSX can be done with eval and concatenating some backticks to strings. As long as you are SURE the strings are coming from templates, they can be assigned at runtime similar to how React assigns at compile time. Not that you should do any of that crap!

Still, React and Angular are insane. React makes you use Babel for JSX and a bunch of esoteric rules that they then make workarounds for, such as “hooks”. And Angular is even more complex, with its digest cycles and mocks and bindings etc. It totally sucks you in.

If you want to use a framework that’s much more lightweight, use Vue. Or use the one that we built ;-) It treats CSS, HTML and JS — and the rest of the Web - exactly as it was meant to be, and doesn’t try to reinvent the well. Well, it does use Handlebars for templating, but can support any other one also.

The React fad is like jQuery.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#100

Post by austincheney »

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.…

> they're easier to work with and they save us time.

I have never seen evidence of this.

Its a lie developers frequently mention because it sounds so thrilling to say. Approximately how much time does it save you in estimated hours? Its like asking for a helicopter to take me to work, because supposedly its faster. I'm simply assuming its faster without looking at any numbers or finances.

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