Write code for the web • Hacker News Board

Re: Write code for the web

#341

Post by mnvrth » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 4:27 AM UTC

manchmalscott wrote: post #278

> On the other hand, literally every single workaround I’ve had to write in the recent past in web related code has been due to Safari's princessness. On a recent project I was working on, I noticed that having a long list of items in an overflow: scroll container would still allow the root page to scroll as far down as the items theoretically would. You could just scroll far past the actual HTML root tag because som…

+1 for your invocation of eldritch gods :)

I know what you're saying, there is undoubtedly a complexity angle too, not all of it is malice. But after a while, one starts noticing the pattern (or maybe it is just me) that Safari has a holier-than-thou attitude towards standards. Their way of standardization is - I'll just go ahead and do something my own way, and then rest will just follow suit because I have so much market share.

Which isn't, as you say, far from Chrome's actions in theory. But in practice, the feeling I've been getting recently is that more Chrome is happy to accommodate. Safari seems to (intentionally or culturally) drag its feet a lot more in picking up stuff that has been ratified.

Re: Write code for the web

#342

Post by aniforprez » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 6:19 AM UTC

dickersnoodle wrote: post #319

aniforprez wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would, a million times, pick writing web apps over interacting with Xcode in any capacity or deal with the proprietary project formats or deal with git in an iOS app project or debug the arcane errors that xcode spits out. Drilling down to figure out where a div is that I need to change is child's play in comparison. You are citing imaginary problems. CSS-in-JS is not that bad and, given the choice, you don't even…

They are not imaginary problems. And Apple's DX isn't "incredibly poor"; coding SwiftUI views with Canvas and the #Preview macro is a dream compared to farting around with Eclipse or one of it derivatives.

Xcode's DX is probably a decade behind competitors, possibly even more. Android Studio is far better than Xcode because, for one, the dependency management and version control actually works and is mostly something you can safely ignore for most toy and small apps and ,for two, is a reasonably well rounded IDE built by a company that specialises in making IDEs. You're comparing Eclipse to Xcode when I don't think Eclipse has been used to build Android apps in 7+ years. The moment you have to do anything complex like even simply debugging errors and performance, Xcode falters and drops the ball. If all you're doing is building a +1 counter then I'm sure that works. For anything more complex, Xcode is hell. Or at least was when I was working on it until the pandemic post which I gave up

This isn't even going into what an utterly horrific editor it is that is plagued with bugs and is missing basic IDE features like a functioning autocomplete, refactoring etc. Mind you, at one point I was celebrating because they finally added highlighting your cursor line in an update after the extensions I used to add that broke. That's how bad Xcode was circa 2015 when simple text editors had those features baked in. If you're comparing Xcode to Eclipse and ranting about JS, then feels like you kept up with how engineering has evolved for Android and JS in maybe 5-10 years. In contrast, it feels like Xcode only adds incrementally miniscule changes and every time I look at it, they seem to not have improved it much at all

All this isn't even getting into what an awful experience simply updating the damn thing is. Why does it have to download 20GB every couple of months and why does it fail so often?

I'm sorry I'm so aggressive but nothing has made my hairs more gray than trying to work with Xcode. It is appalling that it's basically the only way you can develop apps for the Apple ecosystem

Re: Write code for the web

#343

Post by bowsamic » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 7:51 AM UTC

wackget wrote: post #336

bowsamic wrote: post #92

Unfortunately from a non-professional perspective, writing for the web is just soul crushingly boring and honestly depressing. I'd rather not be reminded that this is where the cross-platform development takes place. It genuinely makes me hate programming and I find negative joy in it

What parts of it do you find boring, specifically?

I find working with abstraction boring generally. I want to program a machine to do things, not feel like I'm working in some kind of abstract virtual space. Further, I could maybe tolerate that if it were a nice abstraction, perhaps like smalltalk or something, but the web is a terrible abstraction, being made to do nothing like it was designed to do. It's extremely unpleasant.

Re: Write code for the web

#344

Post by Sateeshm » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 7:55 AM UTC

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #189

65 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? If you don't want to write bare HTML/CSS/JS you can use one of the many frameworks that make writing web apps easier. Even if you hate React or Vue you can use Alpine. If you really hate Javascript you can use HTMX. The web has the best tooling out of any platform because it's the biggest platform. It also has the best documentation... because it's the biggest platform. I don't know what your point is, that web…

Web tooling is still not great. It’s still too low-level. We shouldn’t be writing div over and over with different interacting class properties. Something like SvelteKit’s level of frontend/backend integration feels 5 years too late. Ultimately it seems like the web ecosystem gets trapped in local maxima (“put JS in everything!”) and really seems to avoid actually creating useful, productivity-enhancing primitives. A…

Is writing a div and classes really low level? Even if you think that, there are numerous full featured component libraries available for web, where you don't need to write a single div or a class.

Re: Write code for the web

#345

Post by elendee » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 7:59 AM UTC

gymbeaux wrote: post #226

When I think about it, it astonishes me that there are people in the world who take Apple's developer tools, and make some really beautiful and useful iOS apps. I've tried on and off since high school and have never been able to do it. I started in high school with Xcode and Objective-C, which is a very difficult language to work with (being not that far removed from C/C++). When they moved to Swift I thought "okay f…

can attest; I bounced off Xcode several times when trying to bootstrap my way into a dev career in 2010 or so, despite being a lifelong Mac user.

Re: Write code for the web

#346

Post by steve1977 » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 8:48 AM UTC

coffeebeqn wrote: post #133

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is because Apple is a hardware company, that uses software to attract consumers. While Microsoft is a software company, that uses hardware to attract consumers.

Apple is a vertically integrated company. They offer you (in theory) everything you need for computing

If you are a consumer or for example a creative pro. If you are a big enterprise, not so much.

Re: Write code for the web

#347

Post by thepra » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 12:23 PM UTC

dickersnoodle wrote: post #85

Go ahead and write "code for the web" but be prepared to have to choose among a bunch of different JS libraries and CSS design systems depending on who the CTO is for your organization and who has their ear; writing bare-metal HTML/CSS and minimal Javascript won't get you far with the C-suite and you'll be pulling your hair out trying to get things to play nicely with each other (or wind up digging through five or te…

Well, not all web development is exclusive of JS nowadays, we have the WebAssembly based Blazor framework where you use C# throughout 98% of the web app development, no JS library is ever required of you want to.

Re: Write code for the web

#348

Post by jowea » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 12:24 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #158

idle_zealot wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> except for maybe Uber, Google Drive, and games I understand Drive working better as a native app; it needs to be able to provide a virtual filesystem to the OS and do background syncing and such. But why Uber? Uber has (or maybe had) a mobile site that works fine for requesting rides and basically everything the app can do. I don't see what value Uber being a native app adds for the user. The same goes for most mob…

Uber had an excellent PWA, m.uber.com. I used it for years, but it didn't seem to work right on a new phone, with some UI elements not visible or off-screen, so I went back to the app.

I just opened it and it seems to be a simplified version of the app lacking a lot of features like stops and groceries.

Curiously I just realized it's the same view I get from the app on my phone a lot of the time due to some kind of error when loading the normal app view.

Re: Write code for the web

#349

Post by no_wizard » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 2:21 PM UTC

depressedpanda wrote: post #321

no_wizard wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly if their new revenue share scheme stands up to the court I could see them taking 27% from PWAs as a possible future. It would be the only thing that spurs them to make it more robust. I don’t agree with it at all to be perfectly clear. I’m only postulating that realistically the only way Apple takes PWAs to first class status is if they get a cut. Its rather unfortunate

You're speaking like Apple will get away with their malicious compliance and petulant behavior. I'm not so sure they will, now that the cat is (finally!) out of the bag.

I'm not as hopeful that globally Apple will face regulatory scrutiny as much as it has in the EU, and even then, the EU only goes so far as well. They have as of yet had nothing to say about Apple's solution to their regulations around this

Re: Write code for the web

#350

Post by dwaite » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 5:30 PM UTC

idle_zealot wrote: post #105

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #15

Early on, I made the choice to not to invest in learning native mobile development. I focused all my limited time on the web, and I think that, for once, I made the right choice. Today, one can build amazing stuff for the browser. And, in my very humble opinion, the vast majority of apps should've been WebApps — except for maybe Uber, Google Drive, and games. I worked in the journalism business, and, in my country, t…

> except for maybe Uber, Google Drive, and games I understand Drive working better as a native app; it needs to be able to provide a virtual filesystem to the OS and do background syncing and such. But why Uber? Uber has (or maybe had) a mobile site that works fine for requesting rides and basically everything the app can do. I don't see what value Uber being a native app adds for the user. The same goes for most mob…

Uber gains benefit of functioning better under low/no connectivity, better location access and local/remote notifications as well as visual integration (e.g. showing ETAs and updates in the Dynamic Island or on the Lock Screen).

Some of these (increased caching and remote notifications) you can get on iOS if you install a web app as a Home Screen icon, but as just a website Uber might not get their minimum bar of functionality for widespread use. So far, I haven't seen any large companies have installed web apps as their go-to-market strategy.