I hope that someday, more devs/designers will realize that adding more Javascript to change the web's document centric nature doesn't work, and just makes things worse. If you want an app, make an app, not a website.
In Defense of the Modern Web
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Re: In Defense of the Modern Web
#12Interesting take and I kind of agree.
My take is, however, that the web as we know it is going to be split in apps and websites.
Sites is stuff that works fine with an 'old classy' request->response method, stuff like blogs, newssites, wikis, information sites, simple booking sites etc. You can make a great living just doing that. Probably most content available on the web will fit in this category. However I think Wordpress and similar frameworks / libraries will continue to dominate this field.
Apps is stuff where you practically need a SPA, where there is no choice. Things like music players, photo editors, file managers, chat applications etc.
Old mom n pop shops will still be around and never need a SPA, but a lot of applications being ported to the web do need it. If you do old style websites, there is nothing wrong with that and it still works fine for a lot of stuff. But if offline capability is a requirement (as an example), it is very hard to make a compelling case without making a SPA.
I like both, I find the old style apps to be a lot quicker to develop but the SPA, PWA style app gives the user a much native feel which is important for a lot of apps.
Re: In Defense of the Modern Web
#13> The fact that we can do server-side rendering and communicate with databases and what-have-you using a language native to the web is a wonderful development. The author isn't just a React apologist, but also seems to want javascript everywhere. So much of this debate - sever side rendering, etc. - has to do with the inefficiency of DOM. Mobile and desktop UI toolkits aren't DOM for a reason. They do application UI…
I don't think the DOM is the bottleneck as much as JavaScript is.
Re: In Defense of the Modern Web
#14This author seems to think the only competitor to react is other js frameworks, when in fact most of the web's largest sites work just fine with small amounts of what he calls 'artisanal js'. You probably don't need your js framework, your 10k npm dependencies, or your complex mix of server and client side rendering. Not every website needs an api and clients to consume it, and not everything needs to be an app. The…
> your 10k npm dependencies
Believe me, you're preaching to the choir. Nor am I advocating for every website to have an API. But unfortunately we part ways here:
> The web is a success
The web is not a success. It's dying. Consumers vastly prefer native apps — one recent study (https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web/) tells us that 90% of mobile time is spent in apps vs 10% in browsers.
Re: In Defense of the Modern Web
#15Every time a web designer complains that a full-page refresh is "jarring", a bit of me dies. This is like saying a lightbulb turning on quickly is jarring. It's the expected, immediate behavior. If every lightbulb I used turned on with different durations and easing functions or flashed colors at me, or loaded a flashing placeholder while the lightbulb loaded, that would be jarring.
Yeah, I don't get that at all. Especially if you can make the next page really fast.
I'm also kind of gawking at the screencast he uses as an example:
https://twitter.com/ryanflorence/status/1186675229621248000
Ryan Florence makes a fine point that his tool is being used to build things that don't benefit from it, but this isn't necessarily a good interface. It's pretty but it's just got way too much going on at once. How does anyone actually read in that context?
Re: In Defense of the Modern Web
#16All I really want from the web is to get text, images and data and submit form data. I don't really want interactive applications which are almost but not quite entirely unlike proper native apps. I just want to read interesting people and submit my own thoughts in return. I want to see pictures & text about things I want to buy, and submit my address & payment information to buy them.
The modern web delivers some of that, but only accidentally. The modern web is all about delivering potential malware to me and expecting me to run megabytes and gigabytes of this code, all in order to … display pictures and text, something the browser has been capable of for over twenty years.
Re: In Defense of the Modern Web
#17What we have today is a POST modernism web. Nothing about it is modern.
Re: In Defense of the Modern Web
#18Every time a web designer complains that a full-page refresh is "jarring", a bit of me dies. This is like saying a lightbulb turning on quickly is jarring. It's the expected, immediate behavior. If every lightbulb I used turned on with different durations and easing functions or flashed colors at me, or loaded a flashing placeholder while the lightbulb loaded, that would be jarring.
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Re: In Defense of the Modern Web
#19Every time a web designer complains that a full-page refresh is "jarring", a bit of me dies. This is like saying a lightbulb turning on quickly is jarring. It's the expected, immediate behavior. If every lightbulb I used turned on with different durations and easing functions or flashed colors at me, or loaded a flashing placeholder while the lightbulb loaded, that would be jarring.
Why do you assume that it's just web designers? Have you ever shown a web app vs. a native app to someone who doesn't write code? Or just someone who has design sensibility?
The lightbulb example is also not a good one. A lightbulb transitions between two states. An interactive application transitions between hundreds of states. Full page refreshes make each transition clunky and noticeable. Only programmers look at it and say "yea, that's fine," because we know how difficult a web browser is to implement. But end users don't care about difficulty. They care about the end result.
Re: In Defense of the Modern Web
#20Interesting take and I kind of agree. My take is, however, that the web as we know it is going to be split in apps and websites. Sites is stuff that works fine with an 'old classy' request->response method, stuff like blogs, newssites, wikis, information sites, simple booking sites etc. You can make a great living just doing that. Probably most content available on the web will fit in this category. However I think W…
I'd really love to see an entirely new rendering context for the web. Right now you have to go WASM > JS > DOM. What if there was something else, like AOM (application object model) that gave direct access to WASM. It would allow the DOM to go back to what it was originally intended for - interactive documents.