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Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

giuseppegurgone.com

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Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#141

Post by heavyset_go »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #129
solarkraft wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, with the same conclusion. React may not be my favorite web framework, but the native ecosystem blows everything else out of the water. Desktop support is approaching “okay” (judging by the almost kinda somewhat native feeling flagship app Facebook Messenger on macOS), which puts it many kilometers ahead of any alternative. The main alternatives for native feeling apps seem to be Xamarin Forms and Qt Quick,…

Judging from KDE's Kirigami apps and Subsurface on Android, I would not describe Qt Quick apps as native-performing or feeling.

Last time I used Qt Quick, native looking widgets were outside of its scope. You're meant to define the styling you want for all of your widgets, and Qt will render them consistently across platforms.

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#142

Post by Seirdy »

rgbrgb wrote: post #79

Lots of classic HN dismissals here, though I am glad we as a community have finally gotten past the anger around requiring JS to use the site. In my mouth, Twitter is probably the best, most responsive web app I've ever used. It is not trivial to make a responsive infinite scroll that remembers your place on back, live updates gracefully, has useful shareable URLs, keeps memory usage low, loads quickly, etc. To me it…

Try out Nitter, a Twitter web frontend that doesn't require JS. Same content but way faster, leaner, and nonsense-free (excluding the tweets themselves).

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#143

Post by Seirdy »

notpachet wrote: post #120

I am increasingly of the opinion that we need to ditch HTML in order to protect and advance the open web. We've lost something valuable in this brave new HTML-as-a-compile-target future. The original intention of HTML was to serve as a a lightweight, semantic language that people could use to produce documents that were more-or-less structurally understandable (by both humans and computers). Now it's so muddy that we…

> I don't want to rely on Google to do this for me. I want the documents of the web to be semantically meaningful to the point where my browser can make opinionated decisions about how to style the information I'm downloading.

You've described the Gemini protocol and Gemtext markup. Gemtext is explicitly designed to leave presentation up to the user agent.

https://gemini.circumlunar.space

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#144

Post by miguel-muniz »

karimf wrote: post #8

I've been searching a stack which could allow for a single codebase to be rendered in Android, iOS, and the web, and React Native + React Native Web might be the top choice for that. Other competitor includes Flutter, which used to only render canvas on the web, but right now it seems they have an option to render as HTML as well. I bet the need for cross-platform stack might continue to rise in the future. It's just…

I wonder if Apple would ever throw their hat in the ring, I don't think they appreciate Facebook and Google dominating the space when they try to push developers to use Swift

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#145

Post by SilasX »

heavyset_go wrote: post #140
SilasX wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? What's horrendous about Gmail? It's one of the few sites that's predictable, gets out of my way, has a smooth workflow, and doesn't leave me shouting, "WTF? Why would you do that?" The only issues I remember having are that sometimes label autocomplete is flaky and sometimes the new emails take too long to show up.[1] It has good support for vim-like keyboard shortcuts as well. Don't want to sound like a…

Try opening a few Gmail tabs on a machine that's more than a few years old or has a relatively low amount of memory. It might be an okay experience if opening Gmail is literally the only thing you're doing with the machine.

I’ve done that before, for working with multiple email accounts, and don’t remember it interfering with system memory needs.

Although google has had a huge problem with keeping accounts separate in the same browser, but that’s not a gmail thing.

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#146

Post by jamil7 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #139
rgbrgb wrote: post #79

Lots of classic HN dismissals here, though I am glad we as a community have finally gotten past the anger around requiring JS to use the site. In my mouth, Twitter is probably the best, most responsive web app I've ever used. It is not trivial to make a responsive infinite scroll that remembers your place on back, live updates gracefully, has useful shareable URLs, keeps memory usage low, loads quickly, etc. To me it…

In my experience, Twitter is only bearable on a Zen 3 or equivalent processor with at least 16GB of memory. Anything less than that is almost guaranteed to slow to a crawl if you're doing something other than reading a single tweet and closing the tab immediately afterwards.

Good thing we’re finally able to display text and images with all that hardware.

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#147

Post by dmitriid »

solarkraft wrote: post #44
karimf wrote: post #8

I've been searching a stack which could allow for a single codebase to be rendered in Android, iOS, and the web, and React Native + React Native Web might be the top choice for that. Other competitor includes Flutter, which used to only render canvas on the web, but right now it seems they have an option to render as HTML as well. I bet the need for cross-platform stack might continue to rise in the future. It's just…

Same here, with the same conclusion. React may not be my favorite web framework, but the native ecosystem blows everything else out of the water. Desktop support is approaching “okay” (judging by the almost kinda somewhat native feeling flagship app Facebook Messenger on macOS), which puts it many kilometers ahead of any alternative. The main alternatives for native feeling apps seem to be Xamarin Forms and Qt Quick,…

> kinda somewhat native feeling flagship app Facebook Messenger on macOS

You mean "horribly slow, loses scroll position, can't reliably load and display images, bad click targets everywhere" flagship app?

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#148

Post by BiteCode_dev »

skytreader wrote: post #89

Amusing anecdote involving div soups: Back in 2010 in one of my CS classes, the professor maintained a Google Sites to communicate with her students and upload slides. At the end of the semester, she wrote a list of students who must take the finals to get at least a passing grade. The thing is, you view it Chrome, the list displays normally, a handful of students. But you view it in Firefox and it's an empty list. O…

> With this article, it seems to me that Twitter devs, for all their fancy dev toolchains, could only produce slightly better HTML than my professor.

I assume they also make the html complicated to make it hard to scrap the site.

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#149

Post by tomgp »

steviedotboston wrote: post #77

So this explains how their markup is hot garbage, but not really WHY it is.

laziness. they could just not use a tool that generates reams of bullshit markup but that would require thought and effort to understand and work with the material of the web.

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#150

Post by SergeAx »

Let me write it all down, it's a bit confusing. There is a React framework, created to produce Javascript backed applications running in the browser. Then there is a React Native, a wrapper to run those applications on mobile platforms by compiling Javascript apps to native code. And then here is a React Native for Web, a way to compile a Javascript React Native apps into... Javascript to run inside browsers?

Boy, that frontend ecosystem is really cursed.

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