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Plain Vanilla Web

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Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#451
post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of something similar every time I use the Uber Eats 'track order' screen. All I need is a simple textual history: 7:40 - Bob was delayed by 5 minutes. ETA 7.45 7:35 - Bob is heading your way. ETA 7:40 7:20 - Bob has picked up your order from Pizza place

Having a live location of the delivery person makes total sense here though.

Why? What I would prefer is a "Notify me when the rider is [X] minutes away. Use ringtone [R]" feature. X is the time I need to go downstairs and open the gate. The customer need not have their brains cluttered with logistics details.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#452

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 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.

I'm thinking about why this is not really how we do in the west. Would customers even want to get on the phone? I think my initial reaction if I was to contact a business through a hotline is that on the other side of the phone it will be a massive call center rather than the business directly which would make me cautious.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#453

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 some excellent first-principles thinking. Sort of like resisting the next team hire until it's unbearable, keeping the user out of the browser until it's unbearable

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#454
post #447

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…

In fact, I've gone the opposite way- my work has an internal cafe with a menu website that takes a lot of clicks to see everything. I originally planned to scrape the data and make my own website with better (imo) controls, but v0 turned into pumping the data into a Google sheet. I've never needed v1. The Google sheets "UI" solves filtering (i.e., breakfast vs lunch), access control, and basic analytics (~7 other col…

I have a similar experience with providing users with excel files, but would also like to add that in a lot of business, the number 1 competition for a web application is the good old excel file (or its modern cloud version), and it's sometimes a challenge to beat.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#455

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…

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Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, but the runtime is not exactly designed to guide you to the best way to do this. Hence the prevalence of frameworks to paper over the runtime. I openly admit that I'd rather learn a new framework than touch anything to do with figuring out how the browser is intended to behave in practice. What an abomination and insult to humanity. Edit: holy shit y'all do not like the earnest approach to technology

I guess openly admitting that you refuse to learn how your platform actually works is an "earnest approach", of a sort, but so is admitting that you routinely leave grocery carts in the parking lot and don't see a problem with it.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#457
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong with Flash and Silverlight except each being controlled by a single company. I liked those technologies. Adobe Flex was very nice to program in and use for it's time.

Both were absurdly slow and resource intensive.

Just like browsers now.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#458
post #450
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course vanilla JS is superior to any framework in terms of performance. Anything you can do in a framework, you can do directly in vanilla JS. But performance isn't the only issue here, otherwise we'd all be writing a lot more assembly code. I find your version of history amusing, because the first project that I migrated away from vanilla JS was actually to Angular, because the team found React's JSX syntax too w…

> at this point I wouldn't recommend React at all. Out of curiosity, what would you recommend?

I mostly use SolidJS. It's super lightweight - in many ways, it's just a wrapper around `document.createElement` and a signals library - so you've got a lot of flexibility to use it how you want. It works well for complex web applications, but the library part of it is small enough that you could probably use it for individual widgets on a page and not have too much overhead. The UX is React-like (hooks and JSX), but honestly feels simpler - JSX gets compiled directly to DOM nodes rather than a VDOM abstraction, and there's no "rules of hooks" to learn.

That said, it's kind of niche, which means you need to be more willing to write stuff yourself, so a good mainstream alternative is Vue. Vue is also signals-based and relatively lightweight, but still has a lot of batteries included and a wider ecosystem that is fairly strong. They're also great at taking the parts of other frameworks that work best and implementing them in Vue, but in a fairly considered way. I understand there's also some fairly battle-tested full-stack frameworks in the Vue ecosystem, although I've not had much personal experience of that.

Both libraries are signals-based, which is a completely different reactivity concept to React, which will take a bit of getting used to. But I suspect Vue will make that transition a bit easier - despite SolidJS's more superficial similarities to React, it behaves quite differently.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#459
I’m tired of SPAs and webpages that don’t render without JavaScript.

The web is supposed to degrade gracefully if you are missing browser features, up to and including images turned off.

Now, web developers give you a blank page if you don’t run a megabyte of their shitty code.

No thank you.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#460
post #255

Can we just use links to go between pages, instead of toggling css display:none on custom elements to show different "pages"? You're replacing browser functionality with custom code. To get on par with browser default functionality, you need to implement a loading indicator, error handling, back/forward button handling, address bar updates, opening links in a new tab when someone middle clicked or ctrl clicked, new w…

Indeed... I'd critisize SPAs a lot less if they wouldn't try to (poorly) mimic MPAs that often.

And at that point of course we would see some 90% reduction of SPAs, and hordes of FE devs looking for work. There is non-technical incentive at work to keep this bloat in the boat.
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