In Defense of the Modern Web
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Re: In Defense of the Modern Web
#2I just know the web is very hard for my kids to use, and the more app-like the page the harder it is. Watch them use a page for a minute and they’ll remind you of two or three janky, shitty, or counter-intuitive things about web interfaces that you’ve become blind to, through familiarity.
Native’s much more likely to be ok.
Chief problems are: web interface design tends to be much worse than native (even if they look nice on a screenshot), UI latency is bad and gets worse the more JS you throw at it, there’s more likely to be unhelpful functionality the developer’s accidentally created (selecting the text on a “button” rather then clicking it), and they’re more likely to have weird state-related fragility.
Re: In Defense of the Modern Web
#3This author seems to think the only competitor to react is other js frameworks, when in fact most of the web's largest sites work just fine with small amounts of what he calls 'artisanal js'.
You probably don't need your js framework, your 10k npm dependencies, or your complex mix of server and client side rendering. Not every website needs an api and clients to consume it, and not everything needs to be an app.
The web is a success because it is simple, accessible, fast, and nobody cares how the server makes the html they are reading. Let's keep it that way.
Re: In Defense of the Modern Web
#4Every time a web designer complains that a full-page refresh is "jarring", a bit of me dies.
This is like saying a lightbulb turning on quickly is jarring. It's the expected, immediate behavior. If every lightbulb I used turned on with different durations and easing functions or flashed colors at me, or loaded a flashing placeholder while the lightbulb loaded, that would be jarring.
Re: In Defense of the Modern Web
#5Every time a web designer complains that a full-page refresh is "jarring", a bit of me dies. This is like saying a lightbulb turning on quickly is jarring. It's the expected, immediate behavior. If every lightbulb I used turned on with different durations and easing functions or flashed colors at me, or loaded a flashing placeholder while the lightbulb loaded, that would be jarring.
A full-page refresh when I vote on a comment would be jarring. That's what he's saying.
Re: In Defense of the Modern Web
#6I think one nuance is lost on both articles: web-development is generally stuck in a system where all the incentives are wrong.
- The developers want to prove themselves with a new technology
- The site owner wants to make money, so adds are required
- The website needs to "verify identity" to cut down on fraud, so invasive trackers are added
- The finance team wants to cut down on infrastructure costs, so they want less done on the servers
- The user wants to do what they came for done, but may be frustrated by how the site slows down the browser
This tug-of-war is a lot of what leads to slow, resource-intensive, privacy-invading websites.
Re: In Defense of the Modern Web
#7Every time a web designer complains that a full-page refresh is "jarring", a bit of me dies. This is like saying a lightbulb turning on quickly is jarring. It's the expected, immediate behavior. If every lightbulb I used turned on with different durations and easing functions or flashed colors at me, or loaded a flashing placeholder while the lightbulb loaded, that would be jarring.
A full-page refresh when I vote on a comment would be jarring. That's what he's saying.
If it works without JS enabled that way, but works the current way with JavaScript, what's the problem?
Re: In Defense of the Modern Web
#8Every time a web designer complains that a full-page refresh is "jarring", a bit of me dies. This is like saying a lightbulb turning on quickly is jarring. It's the expected, immediate behavior. If every lightbulb I used turned on with different durations and easing functions or flashed colors at me, or loaded a flashing placeholder while the lightbulb loaded, that would be jarring.
A full-page refresh when I vote on a comment would be jarring. That's what he's saying.
Or when I click the 'reply' button to post this very comment, which does result in a jarring full-page refresh — and one that instantly robs me of the fuller context in which I'm replying.
Re: In Defense of the Modern Web
#9> The fact that we can do server-side rendering and communicate with databases and what-have-you using a language native to the web is a wonderful development.
The author isn't just a React apologist, but also seems to want javascript everywhere.
So much of this debate - sever side rendering, etc. - has to do with the inefficiency of DOM. Mobile and desktop UI toolkits aren't DOM for a reason. They do application UI and have application concerns, meanwhile JS is sitting in this weird Frankenstein ducktaped documents-and-apps markup world. An ecosystem that has to support a million (often competing) things, but all slowly, and with decades of legacy we can't break.
It's going to be interesting change of landscape when we have isomorphic Rust/Wasm delivering truly native web apps that don't render on top of the 30 years of DOM kludge.
The Rust community is just getting started and hasn't had a long time at this, but there's already some really impressive UI work being done in the browser with Rust/Wasm [1]. Once Rust frontend frameworks begin to arrive, it'll be a whole new ballgame. It's so damned fast.
Re: In Defense of the Modern Web
#10This author seems to think the only competitor to react is other js frameworks, when in fact most of the web's largest sites work just fine with small amounts of what he calls 'artisanal js'. You probably don't need your js framework, your 10k npm dependencies, or your complex mix of server and client side rendering. Not every website needs an api and clients to consume it, and not everything needs to be an app. The…
The web is not only html documents rendered server-side though. You need much more advanced interactions.