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Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

paramaggarwal.substack.com

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Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#11

Post by godman_8 »

ehvatum wrote: post #7
Spivak wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The JAM stack the author is talking about is entirely driven by JS. The is “static” in the sense that a .dmg file is static and can be hosted on a CDN and not templated on the server.

Jesus, why? You could write the back end in something that isn’t fucking garbage, at that point.

I’m not a JS fan but quit with the toxicity. The proprietary logic is done with languages like Go, Rust, Python, JS, etc and built with a RESTful API in mind so the frontend can consume it. Angular, React, and Vue are built to do this well. It’s all in moderation and should be done responsibly. The downside with this of course is added complexity on all levels. However with this design maturing the complexity has reduced some or effort offloaded elsewhere (microservices, serverless, k8s.)

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#12

Post by geggam »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #2

Good. I could do without the JS, to be honest (I'm a little tired of pages that refuse to show me anything unless I whitelist some stupid third-party jQuery script in uMatrix), but, baby steps. When sites finally ditched their trendy Flash rewrites and went back to HTML, I thought, thank God .

Be interesting to see if we could start charging website owners fees for them using our processing power to render their site.

Something needs to be done to encourage some efficiencies given the fact it takes more resources to surf the internet and read about running a k8s cluster than it does to actually run the cluster

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#13

Post by kareemm »

popup21 wrote: post #8

Wouldn't do it any other way. I dipped out of web dev in 2015 to run an ecommerce project. I stopped tracking all the latest js framework news. I settled on a barebones CSS rule set. I stopped choosing SPAs as the starting point for mvp ideas. I shelved Wordpress and moved some content sites over to Netlify and just recently started using a nifty desktop ssr cms instead of Hugo, Gatsby, etc. I was regressing to the e…

> recently started using a nifty desktop ssr cms instead of Hugo, Gatsby, etc.

What are you using?

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#14

Post by popup21 »

kareemm wrote: post #13
popup21 wrote: post #8

Wouldn't do it any other way. I dipped out of web dev in 2015 to run an ecommerce project. I stopped tracking all the latest js framework news. I settled on a barebones CSS rule set. I stopped choosing SPAs as the starting point for mvp ideas. I shelved Wordpress and moved some content sites over to Netlify and just recently started using a nifty desktop ssr cms instead of Hugo, Gatsby, etc. I was regressing to the e…

> recently started using a nifty desktop ssr cms instead of Hugo, Gatsby, etc. What are you using?

Publii. It's developed by a European (France, I think) team. It syncs to Netlify with a single mouse-click.

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#15

Post by p2t2p »

geggam wrote: post #12
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #2

Good. I could do without the JS, to be honest (I'm a little tired of pages that refuse to show me anything unless I whitelist some stupid third-party jQuery script in uMatrix), but, baby steps. When sites finally ditched their trendy Flash rewrites and went back to HTML, I thought, thank God .

Be interesting to see if we could start charging website owners fees for them using our processing power to render their site. Something needs to be done to encourage some efficiencies given the fact it takes more resources to surf the internet and read about running a k8s cluster than it does to actually run the cluster

You're free not to use any website...

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#16

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x »

No, the SPA hype has warn off and people realize that although these new technologies exist, they are not always needed.

If you are building a web app, use React or similar.

If you are building a web site, use plain HTML+CSS w/ supplemental JS.

Sometimes your project can be split in half. Do the landing page, signup, login, privacy policy, etc. in plain HTML.

Maybe don't embed all that stuff in your app and you wouldn't struggle with forms and routing, something that browsers can do very well with no programming.

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#17

Post by gwern »

> I find it fascinating that we are back to generating separate HTML/CSS and JS files and then putting them on a static file server — the CDN. It has been a decade long effort and as we come back to where we started, I feel like we are at a whole another level (a spiral?).

"The wheel of reincarnation" from client to server and back: http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#18

Post by camccar »

cjohansson wrote: post #9

It seems the trend points to slower and slower websites with more JS bloat. I also notice a increase in JS-errors causing entire sites to malfunction, recently this happened to large apps like Teams and Float

New reddit is painfully slow to login. So much javascript for a simple dialog to load it's absurd.

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#19

Post by jakelazaroff »

popup21 wrote: post #8

Wouldn't do it any other way. I dipped out of web dev in 2015 to run an ecommerce project. I stopped tracking all the latest js framework news. I settled on a barebones CSS rule set. I stopped choosing SPAs as the starting point for mvp ideas. I shelved Wordpress and moved some content sites over to Netlify and just recently started using a nifty desktop ssr cms instead of Hugo, Gatsby, etc. I was regressing to the e…

> I doubt I'll ever voluntarily use one of those frameworks for web dev.

> I do, however, like this thing called, Svelte.

Svelte is just another one of “those frameworks”, except with a vastly smaller community: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=svelte%20i...

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#20

Post by onion2k »

cjohansson wrote: post #9

It seems the trend points to slower and slower websites with more JS bloat. I also notice a increase in JS-errors causing entire sites to malfunction, recently this happened to large apps like Teams and Float

The trend in my work is to add more and more JS to get the render time below 11ms per frame (11ms for my code, plus 5ms for the browser to paint and update, for a solid 60fps). To do that takes a lot of data structure design, memoization, cache management, plus a decent understanding of how browsers put things in the DOM and on the screen. Admittedly I work on something that's a bit unusual (a diagram tool for lawyers.. kind of like Visio-in-a-browser), but I can assure you that if you want robust, fast rendering it takes a lot of code to do it well. It is not bloat.
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