371–380 of 521 posts
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How can a government contractor reasonably justify a price tag that's on par with fancy bloated non-government sites, for an no nonsense form + js approach?
Costs the same as what you would otherwise pay, plus it actually works?
That’s the problem. Maintenance is big money for government contractors.
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What aspect of Figma do you mean? Placing elements on a canvas has been possible almost forever...
Figma makes heavy use of WASM, WebGL and Web Workers it’s much more complicated than just rendering some shapes on a canvas with a scene graph.
Websites have no reason to use JavaScript. They should be a collection of documents, possibly generate dynamically on the server side, but to the user HTML+CSS that can be viewed in a browser, downloaded with curl, viewed as source code, etc.
Web applications have no reason to exist. Basically we are turning the browser into a JVM, a way to run code portably. But this have nothing to do with the web! It's just bytecode loaded from a remote server. What Figma, or GMail, or Google Docs has to do with a website? Nothing.
These things shouldn't be implemented in a browser, it's not the right place. These problem should have been solved at the operating system level, but it was too difficult for Microsoft to agree with Apple and the open source world on a portable operating system interface to made possible universal binaries among platforms, with maybe a bytecode, maybe a way to load code from an URL.
No they couldn't agree, so they took the only really open standard, the web, and bloated it, basically making it an operating system (well, Google even made it really one!), what's the point? That now most people run Windows or macOS with on top a browser (probably Chrome) into which they run 95% of the software that they use. Does this make sense? To me is a huge inefficiency, that only makes things slower, slower than they were in the 90s to me (even if we have order of magnitude more powerful hardware using the GMail web interface feels slower than what it was using Outlook on Windows 98).
I'd like to add a bit more nuance. Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure. These failures often make their way into production. I, personally, get great results with modern FE development. My users are happy. I am happy. It's all very successful. All the defenders of modern FE development will likely chime in with the same sentiment. I also get great results with C, which arguably provide…
>Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure I think this is the important thing here. Everything feels less stable, and more prone to breaking, on the modern web. You write some simple HTML, style it with CSS, and write vanilla JS for the parts that need it, and everything feels solid. You start a new project with a framework, and it seems like there is this whole area of your project that is…
I am not an expert chef. I can cook pretty well, and my guests enjoy my food. But it doesn’t compare to what a professional chef can do. I am not an expert abdominal surgeon. If we are in Antarctica and your appendix becomes inflamed, I will try to save you by cutting it out. But you will probably die. I am not an expert front-end developer. I make sites for myself, for others, and have even been paid for it a few ti…
Quality you get from strangers correlates with how easily the average customer can judge the work (food is easy to judge). Sometimes things are important enough to be regulated (healthcare) otherwise most markets are for lemons.
I am not an expert chef. I can cook pretty well, and my guests enjoy my food. But it doesn’t compare to what a professional chef can do. I am not an expert abdominal surgeon. If we are in Antarctica and your appendix becomes inflamed, I will try to save you by cutting it out. But you will probably die. I am not an expert front-end developer. I make sites for myself, for others, and have even been paid for it a few ti…
I’m an amateur builder but the work I’ve done on my house is better than most of the work I’ve seen done by various trades on my friend’s/family’s places. Quality you get from strangers correlates with how easily the average customer can judge the work (food is easy to judge). Sometimes things are important enough to be regulated (healthcare) otherwise most markets are for lemons.
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>Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure I think this is the important thing here. Everything feels less stable, and more prone to breaking, on the modern web. You write some simple HTML, style it with CSS, and write vanilla JS for the parts that need it, and everything feels solid. You start a new project with a framework, and it seems like there is this whole area of your project that is…
You write some simple HTML, style it with CSS, and write vanilla JS for the parts that need it, and everything feels solid. Bootstrap + jQuery on the front end, Flask or similar with CherryPy on the backend. SQLite or Postgres if you need it. That will handle 99.9% of websites, it will be cheap and easy to develop and host, and deliver a great experience to the end user.
Why? CSS can do layout with grids and flexboxes just fine, while es6 plus the modern browser api are as ergonomic as jquery. Why pull these dependencies from a decade ago?
What upsets and concerns me the most is when I see poorly developed SPA on really important sites. For example, government service application websites. If reddit or nytimes has a bloated, intermittently failing SPA site, that's an annoyance. When it's a form to apply for unemployment, ACA health care, DMV, or other critical services, it's a critical failure. Especially since these services are most often used by exa…
One of my duties is performance improvement, so I’m very familiar with problematic architectures. You can have an instantly loading informational SPA... I tend to use Gatsby for that. For more interactive sites, I prefer vanilla React with lightweight libs, code splitting and sensible caching rules.
I do agree that poor design, reluctance to refactor and lib/tracking heavy apps are very problematic. Isn’t that something that’s always been a problem in Webdev?
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>Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure I think this is the important thing here. Everything feels less stable, and more prone to breaking, on the modern web. You write some simple HTML, style it with CSS, and write vanilla JS for the parts that need it, and everything feels solid. You start a new project with a framework, and it seems like there is this whole area of your project that is…
This is partly true, but I would also like to state things have much improved. I can vividly recall the 2000s where practically every website would look and behave differently in different browsers. I recall a lot of debugging client-state using poorly scripted PHP websites. Tooling so much more advanced and things "breaking" have moved from the user to the developer. In the jQuery days (or even before that) it was v…
That was a time before the web became more standardized as an app platform. Corporations like Microsoft with .NET, Sun with Java, and Adobe with Flash, were all competing take over the whole world of write-once-run-anywhere frontend apps, become the platform of choice, and lock everyone into their way of doing things. Also there was no distinction between desktop computing and mobile computing as mobile computing back then was still underdeveloped.
Now the web is the frontend platform of choice. Ostensibly the platform isn't owned by anyone but the WC3 consortium (which is good), but practically speaking, Google won since everything is WebKit now (which is worrisome). And this has not yet so far solved the problem of the web being built on an incredibly poor programming model that make everyone want to use virtual-DOM frameworks and CSS preprocessors.
Hopefully, web assembly will replace the status quo and let people develop front-end apps using better programming languages and frameworks than just the ones the compile to JavaScript.
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I honestly hate SPA's. They're not necessary in almost every single use-case, yet everybody is shifting their shit into one.
Why SPAs? They're good when you develop capabilities API-first. When we build features, we follow an approach of making the feature possible (customer support can exercise the feature with PostMan or cURL) then making it friendly with a UI. There will be some tweaks and changes to the API to support the UI, but it's rarely drastic, and it ensures that every single capability we build out can be exercised by some othe…
What upsets and concerns me the most is when I see poorly developed SPA on really important sites. For example, government service application websites. If reddit or nytimes has a bloated, intermittently failing SPA site, that's an annoyance. When it's a form to apply for unemployment, ACA health care, DMV, or other critical services, it's a critical failure. Especially since these services are most often used by exa…
This is a very simplistic characterization of what's happening. First of all, for all the broken websites there are also a lot of websites that are not broken at all. It's also very easy to make a broken website using a completely server-side rendered website, and that actually happens often enough. Second, SPA's decouple frontend and backend in a very strict way, which can bring enormous organizational benefits. Tim…
On a separate note, I think the dashboard is alright but I wouldn't call it excellent. It's a bit slow and some things, for example mousing over the map, are glitchy.