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Plain Vanilla Web

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Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is significant path dependency in either direction. A sibling comment to yours described it very well. There really isn't a good substitute for understanding early on whether you're going to be making a website or an application.

Until you have a definitive answer, err on the side of simplicity.

You never have a definitive answer. It's always probabilistic. You make the decision that you think has the highest odds of success at every point in time.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#302
post #66

I'm not against frameworks, but in many cases, they're unnecessary. I've always questioned why we should add 100KB of JavaScript to a page before writing a single line of real code. My team and I built https://restofworld.org without any frameworks. The feedback, from surveys, outreach, and unsolicited emails, has been overwhelmingly positive, especially around usability and reading experience. We might adopt a frame…

I think that this comment is a great example of the total disconnect these conversations always have. On the one hand we have lots of people on here who are building full-featured web apps, not websites, on teams of 30+. These people look at frameworkless options and immediately have a dozen different questions about how your frameworkless design handles a dozen different features that their use case absolutely requi…

Fully support the comment.

Those kind of posts are the same as ORm vs plain SQL or Scrum vs whatever.

Time wasting at best, misdirection of inexperienced at worst.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#303

I've transcended the vanilla/framework arguments in favor of "do we even need a website for this?". I've discovered that when you start getting really cynical about the actual need for a web application - especially in B2B SaaS - you may become surprised at how far you can take the business without touching a browser. A vast majority of the hours I've spent building web sites & applications has been devoted to admini…

This is how 100% B2B worked before there was B2B SaaS, and it's still how 99% of B2B works today.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#304

Very nice! I wish this was the world we lived in. I'm from the before times, when W3C stuff was all we had, and it was miserable because it was so immature, and we hired people who "knew jQuery, but not JS". But if I'm being honest post query selector frameworks don't have a strong cost benefit argument - testing frameworks notwithstanding, which are quite lovely. I run sites that serve hundreds of millions per day a…

> But if I'm being honest post query selector frameworks don't have a strong cost benefit argument

To me the killer app in the modern world is reactivity, ie making views that update in response to changes in the data model. To manually create listeners and do differential updates, and manage removal and teardown of event listeners etc, is akin to doing manual memory management. We used to do that with jquery sometimes, and it’s the most error-prone thing you can do. It’s a stateful shithole.

Once they manage to find a way to modularize components in a way that is largely view-declarative, I would be happy to crawl up on the surface of vanilla JS again, but not before. It’s simply missing functionality, imo.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#305
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that this comment is a great example of the total disconnect these conversations always have. On the one hand we have lots of people on here who are building full-featured web apps, not websites, on teams of 30+. These people look at frameworkless options and immediately have a dozen different questions about how your frameworkless design handles a dozen different features that their use case absolutely requi…

Many years ago—2002!—Joel Spolsky wrote this: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/05/06/five-worlds/ His thesis was that before arguing about software development tools, practices, anything really, it's vital to establish what kind of development you're doing, because each "world" has its own requirements that in turn motivate different practices and tools. The worlds he quoted were Shrink-wrap; Internal; Embedded; G…

That was one of the most interesting reads I've read in a while, thanks.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#306

I've transcended the vanilla/framework arguments in favor of "do we even need a website for this?". I've discovered that when you start getting really cynical about the actual need for a web application - especially in B2B SaaS - you may become surprised at how far you can take the business without touching a browser. A vast majority of the hours I've spent building web sites & applications has been devoted to admini…

Especially for internal tooling that is little more than CRUD, I find the web to be most useful when a consultant is brought in to build it once or when an internal team can't be allocated to help maintain it.

If you have even a small bandwidth to maintain it over time, quick and simple solutions like an Excel template and a few custom scripts work great and often end up being more flexible as your end user is mostly working with raw data.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#308
post #27

Very nice! I wish this was the world we lived in. I'm from the before times, when W3C stuff was all we had, and it was miserable because it was so immature, and we hired people who "knew jQuery, but not JS". But if I'm being honest post query selector frameworks don't have a strong cost benefit argument - testing frameworks notwithstanding, which are quite lovely. I run sites that serve hundreds of millions per day a…

At 100s of millions I’m assuming you have something closer to a static site than an application?

It's a popular non-netflix/google video streaming app that you've maybe heard of. HTML5 apps/sites/whatever are just part of our supported clients. All clients are supported by a largish SOA. All of the HTML clients are indeed sites, SPAs on a CDN to be more specific, and not "apps" but this is the sickly nomenclature our industry has adopted. But I really should have called them sites if I want to motivate others to do the same, thanks for the correction.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#309
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way are properties verbose and limited in your view? You can set them declaratively with a template binding in most template systems.

I showed earlier how it takes multiple lines and some fiddling with DOM to set a simple property with vanilla web components. Sure, if you're using a framework like lit, you have access to template binding, but at that point you might as well use an equivalent framework like SolidJS or Svelte which just skips the web component layer.

Bringing it back to the site, the author does describe implementations of context providers and signals:

https://plainvanillaweb.com/blog/articles/2024-10-07-needs-m... https://plainvanillaweb.com/blog/articles/2024-08-30-poor-ma...

I haven't tried signals yet, but I couldn't see why you could pass in an object with multiple values.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find this convincing. For one, many sites don't need web fonts to begin with. For two, the sites that do can use `font-display` or, even better, just let the browser figure it out. Browser developers have spent way more time on these problems than any one of us individually ever will and more often than not, the behavior you get out of the box is already pretty fine.

As a user of websites, I definitely notice when a website uses web fonts and relies on font-display. Preloading them is the only way to avoid jarring changes to the layout. Even if the changes are relatively small, they're very jarring. I won't do that to users of my sites. It's not hard to take care of properly.

That's a very subjective take on what properly means in this context. Many would argue that serving the content is the main thing that matters to your users, and if your font takes so long to load that you need to deal with it separately, it would be better to not do that to begin with. To put another way, as a fellow user of websites, I would much rather read what's written than look at a blank page while some marginally different version of Helvetica is fetched in the background.
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