Things engineers believe about Web development
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Things engineers believe about Web development
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Re: Things engineers believe about Web development
#2While I agree with "web engine developers and web spec deveopers have little-to-no idea about web development" I disagree with "web browsers are good at handling complex and long-lived DOM trees with dynamic changes now"
Re: Things engineers believe about Web development
#3While I agree with "web engine developers and web spec deveopers have little-to-no idea about web development" I disagree with "web browsers are good at handling complex and long-lived DOM trees with dynamic changes now"
They are certainly better than before at handling the memory and bookkeeping of a large DOM tree. Every browser had so many unexplainable little bugs, but nowadays they can be relied on to correctly handle their own internal data without crashing. It’s a huge improvement.
Re: Things engineers believe about Web development
#4Who said every site should work without JS, even Figma?
Honestly, who is saying that? Who is saying these things?
Re: Things engineers believe about Web development
#5"it’s hard to imagine how [Figma and Photoshop for web] could work without JavaScript" is a bit of a strawman
Re: Things engineers believe about Web development
#6The refrain against the "we should go back to MPA apps with server rendered HTML" is often "well what about Figma and Photoshop", which of course, yes those don't really work in the MPA, server rendered HTML model.
The problem isn't so much those but how most developers lump themselves in with the incredibly interactive sites because it sounds sexier and cooler to work on something complex than something simple. The phrase becomes "well, what about Figma and Photoshop (and my mostly CRUD SaaS)?"
I think a valuable insight that the MPA / minimal JS crowd is bringing to the table is the idea is that you shouldn't strive for cool and complicated tools, you should strive for the simplest tool possible, and even further, you should strive to make solutions that require the simplest tools possible whenever you can.
Re: Things engineers believe about Web development
#7> As an example, the Eleventy documentation seems to avoid using client-side JavaScript for the most part. As Eleventy supports various templating languages it provides code samples in each of the different languages. Unfortunately, it doesn’t record which language you’ve selected so if your chosen language is not the default one, you are forced to change tabs on every single code sample. A little client-side JavaScript here would make the experience so much more pleasant for users.
This may actually be an ePrivacy limitation (cookie law) not a desire to avoid JS. Persisting the setting across pages requires client size storage, which in ePrivacy countries requires either that the setting be obvious to the user that it's persisted, getting per-action consent (ex: a "preferred language" setting) or site-wide user consent (a cookie pop-up).
Re: Things engineers believe about Web development
#8The refrain against the "we should go back to MPA apps with server rendered HTML" is often "well what about Figma and Photoshop", which of course, yes those don't really work in the MPA, server rendered HTML model. The problem isn't so much those but how most developers lump themselves in with the incredibly interactive sites because it sounds sexier and cooler to work on something complex than something simple. The…
> you should strive for the simplest tool possible, and even further, you should strive to make solutions that require the simplest tools possible whenever you can.
Why do you believe this? I couldn’t disagree more. People should strive for the most effective tool, and most of the time that’s what they already know, unless some new tools’ efficacy outweighs cost to learn it
Re: Things engineers believe about Web development
#9The refrain against the "we should go back to MPA apps with server rendered HTML" is often "well what about Figma and Photoshop", which of course, yes those don't really work in the MPA, server rendered HTML model. The problem isn't so much those but how most developers lump themselves in with the incredibly interactive sites because it sounds sexier and cooler to work on something complex than something simple. The…
Agree, too many believe in the silver-bullet that solves all their problems. Different problems require different solutions, it's kind of simple but hard to realize when you're deep into the woods.
If you want to build a vector editor in the browser then yes, probably you want to leverage webassembly, canvas, webgl or whatever you fancy.
But if you're building a more basic application (like most CRUD SaaS actually are) then probably you don't want to over-complicate it, as you instead want to be able to change and iterate quickly, so simplest tools and solutions gives you the most velocity for changes, until you've figured out the best way forward.
Trouble is to recognize where on the scale of "Figma news.ycombinator.com" you should be, and it's hard to identify exactly where the line gets drawn where you can justify upfront technical innovation in favor of true-and-tested approaches.
Re: Things engineers believe about Web development
#10While I agree with "web engine developers and web spec deveopers have little-to-no idea about web development" I disagree with "web browsers are good at handling complex and long-lived DOM trees with dynamic changes now"
> "web browsers are good at handling complex and long-lived DOM trees with dynamic changes now"
Is there an alternative renderer/something that handles "complex and long-lived $something-trees with dynamic changes" better than web engines does?
They've been optimized for just that during decades at this point, with huge investments both in human-hours and money. Hard to imagine there is something else that can handle that better than browser engines.