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I can only think that modern front end development has failed

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Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#401

Post by seandoe »

drumttocs8 wrote: post #393

Websites for giant retailers like Walmart, Home Depot, etc are shit, and it blows my mind. How much are these developers getting paid to make the modern web so unusable?

They don't get paid to make the modern web usable. They get paid to do what their project managers tell them. I see this first hand everyday. I've tried to fight it. I've tried to prioritize performance, usability, etc. It's not a priority for a lot of companies. At my company, the priority is delivering features that the sales team need to close a new customer.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#402

Post by ryandrake »

nlh wrote: post #191
okareaman wrote: post #14

I recently lost my internet provider, so while I wait for a new one I'm tethering from my phone. The Verizon unlimited data plan actually throttles me to modem speed, about 56k, so it's actually not unlimited. Anyway, it's been interesting to judge various websites by how fast they load at that speed. Hacker News comes right up. Twitter is acceptable. Facebook is terrible and often does not even load at all. The same…

I travel a lot and have gotten quite used to browsing on airplane WiFi, so a similar low-bandwidth experience (at times). I'll add a huge culprit to the list: Medium. They have their own "clever" code to progressively load images and I find it absurdly frustrating (because in most scenarios, the images just don't ever load), so I end up with lots of design articles with blurry blobs of color instead of images. There…

Isn’t progressive loading actually built-in to the JPEG standard? Like you get it for free if you encode it for progressive decode. Yet another “lets use JavaScript” waste of time. Developers gotta develop tho.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#403

Post by chubot »

chubot wrote: post #305
bit_logic wrote: post #156

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…

Yeah what's weird is that there's is an entire generation of developers who think of SPA as the default. They think that server side is slower because you have to send down more data, or you have to wait for the server to generate HTML. Quite the contrary, it's slower to send down 1 MB or 10 MB of JavaScript to render a page, than to simply send down a 100 KB HTML page. Even if you need some JS also, browsers know ho…

Thinking about it a bit more, Reddit is a really good example because it launched and got popular before the iPhone or the App Store existed (2006 or so). It was a fast and minimal site back then, similar to what Google used to be.

Either the existence of the mobile app, or the drive to get people to install it, ruined the website. It's slower and has poorer usability than 5 years ago, and also 15 years ago.

Twitter is another company that existed before the App Store and the SPA trend. I noticed they recently turned off the ability to see the 280 chars you care about without having JavaScript on :-(

It's trivial to have a no-JS fallback, and they had it, but turned it off.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#404

Post by gumby »

bit_logic wrote: post #156

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…

> 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.

Unfortunately the incentives are backwards. Typically governments have to choose the lowest bid. Those private companies you mentioned can make more complex tradeoffs.

Sometimes, of course (cough Florida unemployment and covid tracking sites), failure in performance is by design.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#405

Post by [deleted] »

wonnage wrote: post #265

You try writing a UI that: 1. works visually at all screen widths and resolutions 2. returned from a server with zero knowledge of said screen widths and resolutions 3. without shipping redundant assets 4. responds immediately to user input 5. but all visual updates go through this slow and crappy DOM API 6. oh, and it's all single-threaded 7. and there's no standard library for stuff like virtualized lists, modals,…

[deleted]

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#406

Post by [deleted] »

cryptica wrote: post #2

All software development has failed. Everyone is mindlessly copying megacorps with terrible development practices. Then when their crappy systems fail constantly, they blame the tools and demand even more complicated tools from their corporate masters... Which make their code even less reliable. Tooling is not the problem, the problem is you and your selfish subconscious urge to create more complexity to create more…

[deleted]

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#407

Post by austincheney »

pm wrote: post #400
austincheney wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take away React, Vue, Angular, or similar away from most current front end developers and there is panic. When I say panic I mean full insanity panic like abandoning the profession or completely going postal. —— A simple checklist to provide superior front end applications: * Don’t use this . You (general hypothetical you) probably don’t realize how easily you can live without it only because you have never tried. Do…

What do you use instead of these constructs?

Instead of this I use explicitly named variables and functions.

Instead of addEventListener I assign event handlers directly to the event property of the DOM: button.onclick = whatever. This forces simplicity and cleaner code management because only one function can be assigned to any given property.

Instead of querySelectors I use other standard DOM methods.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#408

Post by tarmon »

p1mrx wrote: post #342
bit_logic wrote: post #156

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…

SPA = single-page application

Thank you! It is hard to search for that term :)

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#409

Post by chrononaut »

alerighi wrote: post #372
have_faith wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We have to distinguish websites from web applications. 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…

As someone who doesn't do neither front-end nor back-end development I think this comment does the best job in this thread summarizing pitfalls I've observed as a user.

Although you probably (?) want to add that OS maintainers are slowly turning their repository of available OS-level applications into walled gardens, which I could see may push some developers to currently prefer web application implementations.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#410

Post by robertakarobin »

austincheney wrote: post #407
pm wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you use instead of these constructs?

Instead of this I use explicitly named variables and functions. Instead of addEventListener I assign event handlers directly to the event property of the DOM: button.onclick = whatever . This forces simplicity and cleaner code management because only one function can be assigned to any given property. Instead of querySelectors I use other standard DOM methods.

Other standard DOM methods like what? getElementById and getElementsByClassName?
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