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Qite.js – Frontend framework for people who hate React and love HTML

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Re: Qite.js – Frontend framework for people who hate React and love HTML

#41

Post by user34283 »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #30
mpalmer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Indeed, I genuinely do not. Rather than passive-aggressively insulting my intelligence, why not explain it for me? As I understand it, React was an attempt to shoehorn "immediate-mode UI"[1] on top of retained-mode UI, so it seems like web developers do in fact want to build immediate-mode UIs, and in fact are constantly complaining about the nightmarish complexity of the status quo. [1] I loathe this term, by the wa…

On the web you need accessibility and often also responsive layouts.

These are requirements the DOM / CSSOM addresses, you'd probably not have an easy time getting this right in a .

Re: Qite.js – Frontend framework for people who hate React and love HTML

#42

Post by spoiler »

mpalmer wrote: post #34
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I genuinely do not. Rather than passive-aggressively insulting my intelligence, why not explain it for me? As I understand it, React was an attempt to shoehorn "immediate-mode UI"[1] on top of retained-mode UI, so it seems like web developers do in fact want to build immediate-mode UIs, and in fact are constantly complaining about the nightmarish complexity of the status quo. [1] I loathe this term, by the wa…

[flagged]

No horse in this race, but your phrasing seems a bit weird, honestly... If reduced, your comments read as:

"You don't know about X? Well, at least I know about X and Y..." Doesn't seemed like a good faith comment to me either?

And then you say "You misunderstood my intentions so I'm going to disengage". For what it's worth, I didn't interpret your argument as insulting someone, but also it wasn't a useful or productive comment either.

What did you hope to achieve with your comments? Was it simply to state how you know something the other person doesn't? What purpose do you think that serves here?

Re: Qite.js – Frontend framework for people who hate React and love HTML

#43

Post by croes »

Lerc wrote: post #35
croes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UI is mostly static. Rendering everything at framerate per second is a huge waste of time and energy.

This was the case back in the days of the Amiga and 68000 Macs. Rendering everything every frame was impossible, the only way to make it work at all was to draw only what was absolutely necessary to depict changes. Then computers got faster, much much faster. It became possible to redraw the whole UI from state every frame without it being a significant cost. At the same time retained user interfaces managed to becom…

Just because computer got much faster doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to make wasteful rerenderings of things that didn’t change.

Re: Qite.js – Frontend framework for people who hate React and love HTML

#44

Post by never_inline »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #30
mpalmer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Indeed, I genuinely do not. Rather than passive-aggressively insulting my intelligence, why not explain it for me? As I understand it, React was an attempt to shoehorn "immediate-mode UI"[1] on top of retained-mode UI, so it seems like web developers do in fact want to build immediate-mode UIs, and in fact are constantly complaining about the nightmarish complexity of the status quo. [1] I loathe this term, by the wa…

I am no web developer but whenever I built the UIs, re-rendering a page by doing some big DOM change through JS as always led to stutter. So maybe its just inefficient and can't be optimised.

Re: Qite.js – Frontend framework for people who hate React and love HTML

#45

Post by mpalmer »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #37
mpalmer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I guess I misinterpreted your comment? I do apologise if that's the case. I certainly didn't intend to "jump down your throat", I was asking you to explain your comment further because I don't understand what you're getting at.

To be perfectly fair, you accused me of insulting you and said you "loathe" a word which I thought was a fairly inert term of art. Would you believe I didn't actually notice that you wanted me to say more? :) More than happy to give the benefit of the doubt though, the shoe's been on the other foot for me more than once.

For my part, I also loathe the insensate writhing mass of frameworks, patterns and dependencies that is "modern" frontend development. Where you and I differ is I recognize a handful of extremely good ideas hidden in the morass. But I am perfectly happy dismissing the majority of it; if nothing else, you shouldn't come away thinking of me as a React fanboy.

Writing is a lossy medium for thought, and programming is no exception. I'd say at a minimum that you and I are on the side of programmers whose code is a medium for their own thought.

All of these choices really just comes down to cognitive bandwidth, context, domain, taste, any number of things, really. Which is what was behind my first (admittedly terse, slightly salty) comment.

What I condemn is someone who opts out of making choices for themselves in their software. Web dev just happens to have an unfortunately high concentration of this sort of thoughtlessness.

Re: Qite.js – Frontend framework for people who hate React and love HTML

#46

Post by neya »

hliyan wrote: post #14

I'm starting to wonder whether reactivity (not React specifically) was the originally sin that led to modern UI complexity. UI elements automatically reacting to data changes (as oppposed to components updating themselves by listening to events) was supposed to make things easier. But in reality, it introduced state as something distinct from both the UI and the data source (usually an API or a local cache). That int…

Absolutely. Look at facebook today. Back in 2010, everything had just the right amount of interactivity. Because, separation of concerns existed at the language level - HTML for structure and CSS for presentation, JS for everything else.

Then some bunch of geniuses decided it would be awesome to put everything together in the name of components. Today, you open facebook, the creators of React - normal drop-down with just a list of barely 5-6 items is a fucking component that makes 10 different requests. I would even argue this unnecessary forced interactivity is what perhaps annoyed users the most as everything always has to "load" with a spinner to the point of the platform being unusable.

Same goes for instagram. It's not just that, React is a hot ball of mess. It's not opinionated, so anyone can use anything to do anything. This means if you work with multiple teams, each one uses their own code organisation, state management library and general coding paradigm. Eventually the engineers leave and the new guy decides to do things his own way. I've honestly never seen a company with a great product run over React. Everything always is being re-written, migrated every 3 weeks or straight up is buggy or doesn't work.

React is the worst thing to happen to the Javascript ecosystem. The idea is good, but the execution is just piss poor. I mean look at Vue and Svelte, they managed to do it right.

Re: Qite.js – Frontend framework for people who hate React and love HTML

#47

Post by Lerc »

croes wrote: post #43
Lerc wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the case back in the days of the Amiga and 68000 Macs. Rendering everything every frame was impossible, the only way to make it work at all was to draw only what was absolutely necessary to depict changes. Then computers got faster, much much faster. It became possible to redraw the whole UI from state every frame without it being a significant cost. At the same time retained user interfaces managed to becom…

Just because computer got much faster doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to make wasteful rerenderings of things that didn’t change.

No but calculation becoming more efficient than recall might not make it a good idea to make wasteful fetches.

Re: Qite.js – Frontend framework for people who hate React and love HTML

#49

Post by cluckindan »

whstl wrote: post #28
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely don't understand why this model is the norm. As a game developer working in my own engine, UI is unbelievably straight-forward: the game has state. The master Render() function draws all of the graphics according to the current state, called at framerate times per second. Nothing in Render() can change the state of the program. The program can be run headlessly with Render() pre-processed out completely.…

> The master Render() function draws all of the graphics according to the current state What you are describing is exactly what GP complained about: "state as something distinct from both the UI and the data source". React can be 100% stateless, functional, and have the state live somewhere else. You just need to apply the same limitations as your model: components should be simple and not store data in themselves. T…

>components should be simple and not store data in themselves.

That is a ”controlled component” model which is bad for interactivity, especially text inputs.

If every keypress triggers a state change and rerender, the UI will be slow and things like focus management become complex issues.

Without a rerender, it must now use a reactive binding to update the field value.

If you don’t want to update state on every keypress, your component must be uncontrolled, store its state internally (in the DOM) and update it to a parent store e.g. when the user stops typing (debounced) or moves focus out of the field. These are not trivial things either, and as a result, components get more boilerplate to handle the UX complexity. And of course, there are now UX pitfalls.

Indeed, these are reasons why reactive patterns exist. Now, if they just managed to abstract away the tedium.

Re: Qite.js – Frontend framework for people who hate React and love HTML

#50

Post by cluckindan »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #30
mpalmer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Indeed, I genuinely do not. Rather than passive-aggressively insulting my intelligence, why not explain it for me? As I understand it, React was an attempt to shoehorn "immediate-mode UI"[1] on top of retained-mode UI, so it seems like web developers do in fact want to build immediate-mode UIs, and in fact are constantly complaining about the nightmarish complexity of the status quo. [1] I loathe this term, by the wa…

React is not immediate-mode in the traditional sense where everything is redrawn on every frame.
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