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Plain Vanilla Web

plainvanillaweb.com

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Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#391

Post by jagged-chisel »

numbsafari wrote: post #383
bradly wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sell urns online and my website just has an email link. No shopping cart. A brick-and-mortor urn shop would never have a shopping cart, so why would a virtual one? I've purchased specialized woodworking tools online that simply involved filling out a form. I later received the parts with an invoice to send payment. You can simply not pay if you choose not to. There are so many way to do commerce both on and offline…

As in urns for ashes, not Universal Resource Names.

urns, not URNs

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#392

Post by Julesman »

GPT agrees with me.

The site positions itself as advocating for simplicity and minimalism in web development—stressing plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—but then pivots into building the entire project using React. That’s a contradiction.

If the goal is truly "plain vanilla web," introducing React (with its build tools, dependencies, and abstraction layers) runs counter to that ethos. A truly minimalist approach would skip frameworks entirely or at most use small, native JS modules.

So yes, it's philosophically inconsistent. Want to dig into a better alternative stack that sticks to that principle?

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#393

Post by evantbyrne »

gkiely wrote: post #357
evantbyrne wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a comical misrepresentation of reality. The actual reason people switched to React was because it was what Facebook was doing and they wanted to imitate one of the wealthiest companies to ever exist, not because the masses had problems with rendering form widgets. This problem was solved twenty years ago. Perhaps the worst part about this slander is that benchmarks have actually shown time and again that vani…

You were doing ok up until this comment.

yeah idk either I didn't read it carefully enough or it was edited at roughly the same time, because I thought I was responding to something very different.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#394

Post by al_borland »

bob1029 wrote: post #291

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…

I’ve never felt more useless at work than when I was told to integrated with a new React self-service portal. No one actually wanted to build things for it or use it. It was the pet project of a new CIO. I think it fell over under its own weight in under 2 years.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#395

Post by mrheosuper »

chenster wrote: post #377
landgenoot wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved to south east Asia and the phenomenon of a "hotline" openend my eyes. Every business is basically a phone number that you can message. It does not matter if you buy a pizza or furniture, book a hotel or need someone to clean your sofa. No website. No need to fill in forms. No platform fee.

In south east asia, people dont' have very good phone or even smart phone in that matter, txt msg makes sense. The same to many african countries where dumb phones are still dominant.

Do you really think that SEA is still stuck in such economy ? Man you need to explore the world more

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#396

Post by lmm »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #14

I work for about 2k users, they do not give a shit about reactivity... build a monolith, make it comfy, embrace page refresh (nobody gives a fuck about that in the real world), and get shit done.

Page refresh between pages is ok. Lag when updating a form based on your inputs isn't. Frontend UI is like a bigger monitor or faster PC - you may not have known what you were missing, but once you've experienced it it's very frustrating to go back to the clunky old thing.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#397

Post by [deleted] »

intalentive wrote: post #290
lerp-io wrote: post #287

"However, this rich functionality comes at the cost of framework and tooling complexity" this makes not sense, can someone explain how doing stuff in raw DOM is less complex than using react that is doing stuff for you?

It’s less complex in the sense that you only need an editor and a browser. You don’t need to install npm or Vite.

[deleted]

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#398

Post by al_borland »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #41
pelagicAustral wrote: post #14

I work for about 2k users, they do not give a shit about reactivity... build a monolith, make it comfy, embrace page refresh (nobody gives a fuck about that in the real world), and get shit done.

Even so you can do insanely simple refreshing dynamics with CSS and JS without importing any npm packages.

I have a few sites that aren’t that complex, and I use JS to run a PHP file and populate the results in a div. It appears reactive, but it’s dead simple.

I get that huge apps probably need a lot more than that, but so many people these days reach for heavy frameworks for everything, because it’s all they know.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#399

Post by Yhippa »

lmm wrote: post #396
pelagicAustral wrote: post #14

I work for about 2k users, they do not give a shit about reactivity... build a monolith, make it comfy, embrace page refresh (nobody gives a fuck about that in the real world), and get shit done.

Page refresh between pages is ok. Lag when updating a form based on your inputs isn't. Frontend UI is like a bigger monitor or faster PC - you may not have known what you were missing, but once you've experienced it it's very frustrating to go back to the clunky old thing.

> Lag when updating a form based on your inputs isn't.

Why not?

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#400

Post by lmm »

coolhand2120 wrote: post #23

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 you don't have to learn "framework after framework". Realistically, at a well-organised organisation you learn React and that's it. You don't worry about the compilation and minification and what have you, because you have a working build system that does the build and does the source maps, and you have a culture that fixes these things if they break or become flaky.

As someone who stepped away from web for a while and came back to it a couple of years ago, a straight React or Next.js application is so, so much nicer to work with than old-school webapps were. It feels like the web has finally been dragged kicking and screaming into a world of regular software development best practices. JS isn't the best programming language but it's a proper programming language and it does the job, I'm continually baffled that people would rather contort themselves with the sub-Turing tarpit of CSS and what have you instead of just using some libraries, writing some code, and actually solving their problems in what's usually an objectively easier and better way.

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