I can only think that modern front end development has failed • Hacker News Board

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

#471

Post by flohofwoe » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 10:48 AM UTC

vbezhenar wrote: post #469

flohofwoe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reddit.com is a slow and flickering mess even on my gaming PC. It's the worst example that comes to mind though. But if that same PC can run incredibly complex open world games while simulating (for instance) an aircraft complete with the cockpit and displays driven by emulated onboard computers at 60+ fps, it's not too much to ask the same from a webpage that "just" needs to do text layout and display a couple of im…

It's not slow for me. Took 2 seconds to show me content.

2 seconds is pretty slow to show a webpage though (assuming your not on a 90's analog modem connection). Also try scrolling, navigating, clicking on links etc... It feels like moving through molasses.

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

#472

Post by danjac » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 10:49 AM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #395

rabuse wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly hate SPA's. They're not necessary in almost every single use-case, yet everybody is shifting their shit into one.

I really believe it's a case of resume driven development. I'm sure there are counter-examples, but the whole move to SPAs, from my vantage point, has been driven by tech people and not leaders. Self-inflicted.

While RDD is a thing, the root cause is the stakeholders' requirements for more sophisticated and complex sites (whether smoother page transitions, more intricate effects, incessant demands to spy on every user interaction etc). It became harder and harder to do all this with server rendering and a rat's nest of jQuery. JS frameworks arose to meet these requirements and became an industry standard, and developers responded to market demand. It's all gone too far of course, but the stakeholders were as much to blame as anyone.

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

#473

Post by busymom0 » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 10:53 AM UTC

chubot wrote: post #403

chubot wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Imo Reddit ruined their site on purpose as that makes users go to the app instead which adblockers have a hard time blocking ads on (unless you have pi hole setup). They also added a ton of extra wasted space to make users scroll longer and thus stuff more ads in and increase user times.

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

#474

Post by kaba0 » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 12:01 PM UTC

zokier wrote: post #250

criddell wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If ECMAScript, HTML, and the DOM didn't exist and you were asked to create a specification for applications where the client UI is remote, possibly very resource constrained with a connection to the back end that may be slow and only mostly reliable, what would you invent? Is there a better model already out there that isn't used because Javascript + HTML has sucked all of the oxygen out of the room?

Java Web Start was a thing, and had some nice aspects to it. JVM startup time has been a problem, and the UI toolkits maybe had some issues? And of course the early JVMs were notoriously full of security holes, which is something browsers somehow managed to avoid. But nevertheless I think Java/JAWS got basic stuff still right: run applications directly from network (with auto-updates), have security controlled sandbo…

As far as I know, security issues were mostly due to security not being too important at the time, but could have been trivially solved. Startup time is similarly a question of what should be optimized for.

I would have liked to see a web built on Java tech.

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

#475

Post by kaba0 » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 12:37 PM UTC

wlesieutre wrote: post #66

gpanders wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I just went through a similar experience and had to tether off a Verizon connection for almost two weeks. I certainly felt the pain of a slow connection too and felt frustrated at how badly this affected the experience on so many sites. Here’s an idea: web developers should test their sites on the slowest connection speed still commonly available (ie 3G) and make sure the experience is still acceptable. I know…

No idea if they're still doing this, but Facebook has done "2G Tuesdays" for just that reason https://engineering.fb.com/2015/10/27/networking-traffic/bui...

Considering that facebook managed to use up 800 MB of ram, and it requires a good 2-3 secs minimum to open a chat head, I honestly have a hard time believing they test by humans that shit of a UI in any shape or form, let alone in multiple ways (or care about the test results)

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

#476

Post by codethief » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 12:59 PM UTC

cutler wrote: post #430

codethief wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took me a while to understand your React example (or at least I hope I get it now). But I don't know… I agree that React has some pitfalls and lots of people don't get it right (especially forms!) but there are ways (clean ways, in fact) to solve this. It's not React's fault, though. Handling complicated state has always been hard and it's not exactly easier in jQuery or pure JS.

But in this case, which isn't atypical, it WAS easier in jQuery. Much easier. I had it working fine with jQuery but wanted to see if I could make it work with React. Here's the full component: https://gist.github.com/polydevuk/96d89642f114707b2f1a0cc316...

That doesn't look bad to me, though. Pretty much 90% of the code is just HTML, anyway, and I doubt it would be much shorter in jQuery.

If you allow me a few comments on the code:

> .then(res => { setYou(res[form.name1].planets) ; setOther(res[form.name2].planets) })

setYou, setOther will usually each trigger a re-rendering. It would be better to store them together if they're always changed together.

> .then(res => document.getElementById('results').style.visibility = 'visible')

You might want to look into `useRef()` here.

> setRegion2(e.target.value) }>

This is what I meant in my earlier comment: Each change will now cause a re-rendering of the entire component. I think it would be better to split up the code here and move the tags into a separate component with separate state. This component would then only tell your parent component about a state change once both region1 and zone1 have been set.

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

#477

Post by cutler » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 1:20 PM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #299

avidphantasm wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, there is an irreducible amount of complexity. At that point, adding things like over-wrought frameworks to “make things easier” for the developer ends up pushing the complexity around, like an air bubble trapped under a screen protector.

There's necessary complexity, and then there's extra complexity. IMHO, a lot of frameworks just add extra complexity. Now that we're in the twenties, you don't need nearly the level of browser compatability shims like at the turn of the century. Sure, bleeding edge features need that, but most sites don't need any of that. Certainly news and shopping fit well enough with turn of the century browsers, so everything el…

Yes, we now have what everyone fought for in the 00s - browser support for web standards - as well as full ES6 support yet here we are with front-end devs falling like flies from burnout. It's like CPU speed bumps - all we do is just invent more complexity to whittle away the gains we've made. Makes me just want to revert to procedural PHP and jQuery/vanailla JS.

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

#478

Post by docmars » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

danjac wrote: post #468

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am going to :+1: the UK census site - built on code developed by the gov.UK digital service, it has been apparently bulletproof at taking 20 million plus individual households through a moderately complex survey. sometimes it can be done right. And it uses a framework :-)

gov.uk is such a glaring exception to government sites around the world I can only imagine there was some massive screw up where the developers were allowed to go off and build a fast, accessible and responsive site on their own without the requisite ten layers of committees, meetings and expensive external consultants. I hope there is a government inquiry to ensure this doesn't happen again and that taxpayers money…

This gave me a good laugh, thanks for that ;)

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

#479

Post by darkhorse13 » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:01 PM UTC

genericstorage3 wrote: post #467

darkhorse13 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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'll eventually need js. If server side renders html, now your client is coupled to server side both on api and on html. That's bad. Now 1 component will be: server side html, client side html, css and js.

>That's bad

Nice generalization. Tell to that to the thousands of absolutely massive companies running on server-rendered HTML how they need to adopt cutting edge JS.

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

#480

Post by lame88 » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:04 PM UTC

runawaybottle wrote: post #269

lame88 wrote: post #121

Plenty of discussion has been had around incentives and I agree with all that, but also there's another angle here: aside from dark patterns, I think the problems of terrible front-end experiences are most prevalent in the middle of the bell curve - the front-end products developed by rather mediocre skill levels and budgets. Which is usually a pejorative, but thinking of it as literally in the middle, not great but…

The implication is rough, but it is part of the truth (not all of the truth). However, I will add that the anointed ‘high-end’, your lifelong long backend devs, devops, data engineers, etc are adding to the problem. Backend people taking up the frontend hat under the fullstack guise create tons of awful end results, and this is even more common because they already exist at the company and are given a blanket ‘compet…

I do have a bias against front end development being from my perspective quite a mess, in the same way that physical scientists often look at the social sciences, though the social sciences are still quite important. But for what it's worth, I consider myself somewhere in that median band, and my perspective is motivated by and applies to front end as much as other parts of software dev/delivery.

I agree you can tell the difference, though I would place blame for those situations more on an organization than the developers who get shifted toward that work out of their specialization. It could be some dubious values, but it also could be project budgets.