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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

#491

Post by toss1 »

vagrantJin wrote: post #270
toss1 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This entire read seems to be that things are much better for YOU, the front-end developer. And yes, that makes a difference, you can deliver more features, faster, more reliably. But, if those sites just bog down and take double-digit seconds to load, even when properly deployed on scaleable delivery architectures, with fiber-optic speeds, and CAD/gamer-level power machines, they are junk. And I increasingly see exac…

I cant agree more. I could cry. Ive been on a crusade for over a year to scale back diddly js frameworks because 'scale'. Ive heard many bullshit excuses before but sacrificing performance and reliability for being "scalabable" is beyond mind boggling. It gives me a panic attack when medium articles are the chief architect and purveyors of software development truths. I live and work in developing countries and could…

Yup, all these rapid-dev frameworks and tools may be fantastic for rapidly developing and refining a prototype.

But that is just the beginning of the process, the job is barely half done.

The devs must then focus on exactly what is needed in the code to refactor and strip out every unnecessary instruction and byte of download.

Page load times and refresh times that are more than 3-digit milliseconds rapidly become unusable. When it is 5-dicit milliseconds, on a modest machine, you are shipping junk, and should not consider yourself a developer. Amateurs can do better.

Wow, do I miss the days of the 5KB web page competitions...

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

#492

Post by thekingofravens »

austincheney wrote: post #396
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…

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…

I know this won't count for much, but as an amatuer programmer who has done a lot of web scraping at my job due to having a restricted corporate environment, its a breath of fresh air to work with the few websites that actually assign IDs to elements, don't autogenerate all graphic elements and feel like whoever wrote them actually cared. Especially if you are trying to parse it with something stupid like Excel VBA. Trying to reverse engineer what happens when you click a button on a site with 20 event listeners tied to "submit" is a freakish nightmare.

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

#493

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

Big web companies killed open protocols (remember reading news via RSS?) in favor of exploiting and evolving web technologies as a way to push effectively proprietary UIs with spyware builtin.

The whole web was based on the premise server (media provider) and client (media consumer) could be created by different parties and should therefore assume nothing and rely on protocols - that’s not what happens today since with JavaScript the same party effectively “takes over control” of the user agent.

My radical opinion is that open protocol based web was killed the moment JavaScript adoption became standard, the same way an open web wouldn’t be possible with Macromedia Flash becoming a standard.

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

#494

Post by foofoo4u »

I believe a part of this is due to a pipeline issue. I wanted to become a web developer about seven years ago. I decided to read articles, watch videos, and attend some online courses to learn all about it. I even decided to join local developer sessions to see what the community is actively engaged in. Not once did I ever see or hear about developing a website as a traditional multi-page site (MPA). Literally everything was about SPAs. React, webpack, etc. Naturally, I wanted to ensure I was learning employable skills. I didn't want to learn how to make MPAs when that methodology is soon to be obsolete and going away like the dodo bird — or so I thought. Sadly, I think many new devs are like me. They follow an online tutorial and learn how great a framework like Django is. But the tutorial guides them into serving the site as an SPA, completely ignoring the fact that Django has a highly practical and powerful built-in template system that makes web development easy for most use cases! This has left an impression on me that this community has a "shiny object" problem. We throw away perfectly good tools and methodologies for the next great thing without thoroughly thinking through the use case to see if the increased complexity is justifiable. There is nothing wrong with SPAs. It's just that they have become the hammer and nail problem. Not every website should be an SPA. Just like how every website shouldn't be a MPA.

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

#495

Post by kodah »

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…

I went to go redesign my blog recently. I was intending to use the Go Template engine, but I'm not a frontend person so I wanted to use a frontend framework. I quickly discovered that most of even the purest of css frameworks did not have instructions for what I wanted to do. They all used Next.js, Webpack, etc and we're designed to be used in Vue or React. I love component frameworks for their simplicity, but everything that powers them is complex.

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

#496

Post by tyingq »

danjac wrote: post #472
tyingq wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 res…

Yes, I agree for those cases where the SPA was created to match customer expectations. I'm talking about using it where it doesn't belong, which happens quite a lot.

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

#497

Post by johnfn »

xyzelement wrote: post #275
leephillips wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not at all. It is more like saying that I make better food than almost all restaurants in town. Which of course is not true, and that’s the point. Because I do make better websites than almost any I come across in the wild. Your question about handling traffic is orthogonal to the topic of design. The answer is that any of my sites would do better, given the same server architecture, because I deliberately limit…

I think their analogy may still hold. My mom claims her cooking is better than the restaurants (arguable) but she's not operating under the constraints of cooking at the variety, consistency and speed that my local diner does. The diner needs to be able to provide hundreds of dishes on short order including on days when the main chef is out. So maybe my mom's once-in-a-while pot of chilly is great but she couldn't ru…

Thanks, this was exactly the thrust of my analogy. I appreciate it when it lands for at least one person (though perhaps I could be a bit more precise in my writing)

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

#498

Post by armonraphiel »

devit wrote: post #195
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 :-)

Which framework?

https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk/

Looks like the core site is Rails but it seems they use a bit of everything. Preact, Go, Node, etc

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

#499

Post by leephillips »

HugoDaniel wrote: post #462
leephillips wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. But I am using the measure of quality that I think is relevant. We call a chef good when we like the food, not when he finds a way to enrich a fast food chain.

Do your sites include interactive graphics and storytelling like the New York Times does? By what measure of "quality" are you setting yourself as "better" than the New York Times team?

I was circumspect in what I said and did not say. Rich Harris, the creator of Svelte, works for the Times. I use Svelte frequently, but would not have been able to create it. I don’t have his skills. And the interactive graphics that you are talking about are awesome. I don’t know how to do that, nor do I even understand how they are done some of the time. I was talking about the experience of navigating the front page and reading the articles, which is pretty bad. I am a better designer than whoever designs these pages. But I am not more skilled.

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

#500

Post by cutler »

coldtea wrote: post #65
notjustanymike wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Just like music, there was a LOT of trash web development back in the day as well. Sites built with tables in dreamweaver best viewed on netscape navigator at 800x600 with animated gifs bogging the download speed existed long ago. What we have today are the same problems with a new…

> I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Well, if the top 100 tracks from, say, 1961 to 2021 progressively get less musically diverse, with simpler chords, less harmonies, less timbral variety, lesser melodies, more repeatition, less dynamics, less genre variety, more infantile lyrics (something that has been studied and…

There's a simple metric for the state of modern music - where are the modern equivalents, in musical stature, of David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Roxy Music, Bob Dylan, Elton John, U2, Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan & The Eagles? Answer - there isn't anything anywhere near the pantheon of talent that graced the late 60s to the mid-80s. It's just a phenomenon of history. It's not relativism due to ageing. It's a fact in the same sense that Shakespeare's work outlived that of his contemporaries.
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