Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Front-end design, React, and a bridge over the great divide

bradfrost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 137 posts

Re: Front-end design, React, and a bridge over the great divide

#41

Post by tenaciousDaniel »

externalreality wrote: post #31

I think HTML is bad. I think DOM based development is bad. I really feel that Desktop UI development is much more mature and has much less legacy to compete with when developing a web UI. I think the very near future will be web assembly code that paints a canvas. Mature desktop methods with GUI design tools will be ported to web assembler and retrofit for the web. QT5, imgui, are just the beginning. I think a good e…

Yep! Which is why I'm dismayed at seeing this trend among designers where they feel the need to learn to code. There exists, however implicitly, an interface between design and development. That interface needs to be preserved, and it gets weaker each time a designer decides they should learn to code UI's themselves.

Technologies for building UI's will forever be changing, so designers should be able to work while being agnostic to the UI's implementation details.

Re: Front-end design, React, and a bridge over the great divide

#42

Post by ehnto »

jypepin wrote: post #10

every time Brad Frost writes something a bit controversial, it always feels like he can write and understand html and css, but anything else (including React) is way over his head. No disrespect, it just feels like he's not spending the time necessary to understand how things work and instead of doing so, he just goes on and vents on his blog.

For me, it's not that I'm overwhelmed by the learning. I understand the "what" and "how" just fine. But React is a paradigm shift that I have yet to fully grok the "Why" for. It often feels like I'm having to re-solve problems we've had solutions to for a decade, on top of all the brand new problems React introduces. The core problem React solves, "re-usable reactive components", just doesn't come to fruition in most projects I have seen. It mostly ends up in a greenfields component stew.

We can write re-usable components in pretty much any language with as bit of file organisation. So React takes a whole heap of convolution and tooling to end up in pretty much the same place as before, just written differently.

Don't get me wrong though, I have enjoyed learning it and it is very cool technology, and I'm still open to having that "aha" moment when I finally get why people think it's great. It just hasn't hit me yet.

Re: Front-end design, React, and a bridge over the great divide

#43

Post by Yhippa »

externalreality wrote: post #31

I think HTML is bad. I think DOM based development is bad. I really feel that Desktop UI development is much more mature and has much less legacy to compete with when developing a web UI. I think the very near future will be web assembly code that paints a canvas. Mature desktop methods with GUI design tools will be ported to web assembler and retrofit for the web. QT5, imgui, are just the beginning. I think a good e…

> I think HTML is bad. I think DOM based development is bad. I really feel that Desktop UI development is much more mature and has much less legacy to compete with when developing a web UI.

I secretly hope this becomes true. I always think back to how nearly everything done on the frontend are essentially hacks to really sex-up a document description language for scientists.

I think it would be really neat if we did end up building UI's in a responsive way like you describe. It would feel more like the right tool for the right job. But that seems so far away when I start to think about what it would take to get there.

Re: Front-end design, React, and a bridge over the great divide

#44

Post by baddox »

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #37

I love Brad Frost's work and writing, but I seriously disagree with this. Imagine being a designer at a place like Netflix. Your product is among the most ubiquitous in the world - if there's a device with any kind of screen, Netflix has an app for it. Now imagine developing a skillset, as a designer, that totally locks you into one platform (the web in this case). It makes absolutely no sense. I don't care how "easy…

I thought Netflix was pretty notable for using React Native or something similar in most or all of its native apps.

Re: Front-end design, React, and a bridge over the great divide

#45

Post by ng12 »

zbentley wrote: post #34
ng12 wrote: post #4

> While I’m definitely a lot more fluent in it now, I dunno, it just still feels a bit weird to me. I could share some specifics but that would only invite a bunch of angry nitpicking comments. All I’ll say is that when I go over to projects where I’m writing HTML or HTML-like stuff (Vue, for instance), it feels like a breath of fresh air. JSX is fine, the real power is building your HTML in pure JavaScript. I'll nev…

I suspect that, in 2-3 years, server-side rendering is going to be rediscovered as a cure for the plague of spaghetti frontend code, just as current template-in-javascript metalanguages are being discovered now as a cure for spaghetti frontend-plus-backend-rendered code.

I don't think so, at least not for the kinds of apps I build. My biggest problem is largely around interactivity -- shuffling lots of data back-and-forth between the client and the server. If I'm going to have a SSR app with lots of AJAX code running on the client, I might as well just go all-client.

Re: Front-end design, React, and a bridge over the great divide

#46

Post by tenaciousDaniel »

baddox wrote: post #44
tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #37

I love Brad Frost's work and writing, but I seriously disagree with this. Imagine being a designer at a place like Netflix. Your product is among the most ubiquitous in the world - if there's a device with any kind of screen, Netflix has an app for it. Now imagine developing a skillset, as a designer, that totally locks you into one platform (the web in this case). It makes absolutely no sense. I don't care how "easy…

I thought Netflix was pretty notable for using React Native or something similar in most or all of its native apps.

Perhaps. I don't know anything about how Netflix does their design. But the underlying point was that implementation details change, technologies change, and it's hard enough to keep up with the changes while you're focused solely on development.

I'm not opposed to individual designers learning how to code, but my fear is that the industry will come to an expectation that designers should be able to build UI's. I think that's a very very bad idea.

Re: Front-end design, React, and a bridge over the great divide

#47

Post by seanmcdirmid »

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #37

I love Brad Frost's work and writing, but I seriously disagree with this. Imagine being a designer at a place like Netflix. Your product is among the most ubiquitous in the world - if there's a device with any kind of screen, Netflix has an app for it. Now imagine developing a skillset, as a designer, that totally locks you into one platform (the web in this case). It makes absolutely no sense. I don't care how "easy…

Bigger companies will have more specialized design teams and more developer resources (for prototyping and production) to avoid generalist design-dev needs. This post sounds like they are aiming at smaller shops where designers are much more involved in touching the implemented product.

Re: Front-end design, React, and a bridge over the great divide

#48

Post by dmix »

ehnto wrote: post #42
jypepin wrote: post #10

every time Brad Frost writes something a bit controversial, it always feels like he can write and understand html and css, but anything else (including React) is way over his head. No disrespect, it just feels like he's not spending the time necessary to understand how things work and instead of doing so, he just goes on and vents on his blog.

For me, it's not that I'm overwhelmed by the learning. I understand the "what" and "how" just fine. But React is a paradigm shift that I have yet to fully grok the "Why" for. It often feels like I'm having to re-solve problems we've had solutions to for a decade, on top of all the brand new problems React introduces. The core problem React solves, "re-usable reactive components", just doesn't come to fruition in most…

What about the whole component based approached? You could certainly take a component based approach with simple code organization in HTML, CSS, and JS frontends. I've done that before, in a sort of pseduo-web components way using directories and naming schemes.

React and Vue makes it easier with single file components and wrapping it in functions which makes handling state and configuration. Which increases reusability and helps further encapsulate the components.

One of the most obvious gains to me is helping manage huge CSS files in legacy projects [1]. Components are way better than a giant BEM'd [2] CSS file, it's much nicer writing .box in a in Twitter.vue instead of .twitter__layoutBox among a ton of other nested layers. All just to avoid global clashes and maintain some sanity.

Or a ton of global jQuery plugins for select boxes and modals and everything else.

Everything is so much more portable across projects.

That's not even mentioning the whole plug-and-play reactivity that is baked in.

[1] Here's a good list of the problems of CSS-in-JS helps solve: https://i.imgur.com/LbE1kqc.png

[2] http://getbem.com/

Re: Front-end design, React, and a bridge over the great divide

#49

Post by swsieber »

> While I’m definitely a lot more fluent in it now, I dunno, it just still feels a bit weird to me. I could share some specifics but that would only invite a bunch of angry nitpicking comments. All I’ll say is that when I go over to projects where I’m writing HTML or HTML-like stuff (Vue, for instance), it feels like a breath of fresh air.

There's something to be said for constraints, and easy parse-ability

I experimented with a project once that could programmatically build a DSL for running e2e tests. The enabling factor was constrained html-like templates[0]. It would never have gotten even close to working with JSX.

[0] https://samsieber.tech/posts/2019/06/type-safe-e2e-testing-d...

Re: Front-end design, React, and a bridge over the great divide

#50

Post by grayed-down »

corebit wrote: post #7
nexuist wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I continue to believe that the loudest perpetrators of JavaScript hate are those who overcomplicate simple things or follow other people's advice to overcomplicate simple things. Things like using SPAs for five page sites, throwing Redux into every CRA installation, npm installing useless packages like is-odd or leftpad (lol), etc. You don't need to use ! You don't need JSX! You don't need ! Surely you still don't ne…

But seriously why can’t I just do modern webdev with a ?

Amen brother!
Post reply on HN