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The Web I Want (2018)

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Re: The Web I Want (2018)

#41

Post by tshaddox »

paxys wrote: post #16

> Most websites are about delivering and exploring content. HTML is amazing for this, and you don't need JavaScript. This is the fundamental misconception that most "get off my lawn" people like the author have, which leads to a variant of this exact post getting voted to the top here every single day. The web is not about delivering big blobs of text and images. It may have been at one point, but we are far beyond t…

That’s right. It’s futile to fight the battle of “the web should never have changed after year X” where year X happens to be when you first got interested in the web.

Re: The Web I Want (2018)

#42

Post by josephg »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #31
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. But applications can be small and performant. It takes skill, time, and work; a hard sell, these days. Nowadays, we can throw together two or three massive dependencies, and get a really high-tone app. That waddles like an overfed walrus.

I think it's worth asking why, which I guess is less fun than complaining. Are the frameworks too fat? Do they encourage wasteful network requests? Are things not being compressed? Do developers not understand how to incrementally ask for data?

Part of it is the obsession with SPAs. If your site is an application, it makes sense to ship a javascript blob to the browser and have that render everything. But 90% of websites aren’t apps. They’re news sites. They’re blogs. They’re project pages on GitHub or npm.

I think the frameworks are mostly so obsessed with the problem of complex applications that they miss having good support for the simple case of server rendering with little-to-no javascript in the browser. If your website looks like a blog, it will work better if the server ships html to the browser. And maybe, only html. Web browsers handle html really well.

Because you can make content websites using hundreds of kilobytes of react, people do because that’s what they learned at their coding bootcamp. React lets you do server side rendering, but it’s seen as some advanced feature, not as the default for how we should be building the web. (In fairness, SSR is quite complex if you also want to re-hydrate in the browser).

Most websites should be using tools which do server rendering by default.

Re: The Web I Want (2018)

#43

Post by josephg »

andrewfong wrote: post #37

At this point, I feel like the party best equipped to reduce JavaScript bloat are the web browsers themselves. There's the obvious stuff, like simply blocking third party tracking JS. There's some small quality of life bits -- a non-trivial number of websites load JS to make prettier UI elements (like a nicer date picker) because the defaults are so ugly (on desktop at least -- mobile tends to be better). If browsers…

> If HTML6 included virtual DOMs or reactive primitives, that might reduce the inclination towards framework bloat.

Please no virtual DOM. A virtual Dom is pure overhead compared to how svelte or solid renders.

But I’d be very curious about what proper browser integration would look like for reactive frameworks if you have an instinct for what better apis could look like?

Re: The Web I Want (2018)

#44

Post by hutzlibu »

josephg wrote: post #42
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's worth asking why, which I guess is less fun than complaining. Are the frameworks too fat? Do they encourage wasteful network requests? Are things not being compressed? Do developers not understand how to incrementally ask for data?

Part of it is the obsession with SPAs. If your site is an application, it makes sense to ship a javascript blob to the browser and have that render everything. But 90% of websites aren’t apps. They’re news sites. They’re blogs. They’re project pages on GitHub or npm. I think the frameworks are mostly so obsessed with the problem of complex applications that they miss having good support for the simple case of server…

"Most websites should be using tools which do server rendering by default. "

Meaning the server sends html, or the server sends an image?

edit: html, at least with react

Re: The Web I Want (2018)

#45

Post by thomasfromcdnjs »

paxys wrote: post #16

> Most websites are about delivering and exploring content. HTML is amazing for this, and you don't need JavaScript. This is the fundamental misconception that most "get off my lawn" people like the author have, which leads to a variant of this exact post getting voted to the top here every single day. The web is not about delivering big blobs of text and images. It may have been at one point, but we are far beyond t…

Amen.

Re: The Web I Want (2018)

#46

Post by overgard »

paxys wrote: post #16

> Most websites are about delivering and exploring content. HTML is amazing for this, and you don't need JavaScript. This is the fundamental misconception that most "get off my lawn" people like the author have, which leads to a variant of this exact post getting voted to the top here every single day. The web is not about delivering big blobs of text and images. It may have been at one point, but we are far beyond t…

I don't know, when I think about the majority of the sites I visit daily, it's pretty much just content. Like, let's see:

- Stack Overflow

- Hacker News

- Reddit

- Youtube

- Various news blogs

- Gmail

- Shopping/Amazon

- Maps

With the exception of maps, pretty much all of that would be perfectly fine server side rendered (and a lot is, I think). Even gmail would be fine that way, tbh I find it kind of annoying that things like the back button work in unexpected ways.

Things I don't do often but which would be fine server side even though they're SPAs:

- Taxes. Turbotax is very smooth and fancy, but frankly if it gets my taxes done quickly I just don't care that much.

Stuff that's heavy in JS, but which is pretty far weighted content-wise:

- Twitter

- Facebook

- Instagram

Also, a lot of the things that are essentially "web apps" I end up using the desktop/electron version anyway, like Slack or VSCode.

I really think most sites would be better if JS was kept to the bare minimum. The things that actually act like applications often end up with a desktop electron version anyway.

Re: The Web I Want (2018)

#47

Post by paxys »

overgard wrote: post #46
paxys wrote: post #16

> Most websites are about delivering and exploring content. HTML is amazing for this, and you don't need JavaScript. This is the fundamental misconception that most "get off my lawn" people like the author have, which leads to a variant of this exact post getting voted to the top here every single day. The web is not about delivering big blobs of text and images. It may have been at one point, but we are far beyond t…

I don't know, when I think about the majority of the sites I visit daily, it's pretty much just content. Like, let's see: - Stack Overflow - Hacker News - Reddit - Youtube - Various news blogs - Gmail - Shopping/Amazon - Maps With the exception of maps, pretty much all of that would be perfectly fine server side rendered (and a lot is, I think). Even gmail would be fine that way, tbh I find it kind of annoying that t…

None of these sites on your list would be operable without JavaScript, even with reduced functionality. Heck Hacker News, probably the gold standard for simple websites, would itself be unusable. You wouldn't even be able to get the upvote/downvote buttons to work.

Re: The Web I Want (2018)

#48

Post by detaro »

paxys wrote: post #47
overgard wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, when I think about the majority of the sites I visit daily, it's pretty much just content. Like, let's see: - Stack Overflow - Hacker News - Reddit - Youtube - Various news blogs - Gmail - Shopping/Amazon - Maps With the exception of maps, pretty much all of that would be perfectly fine server side rendered (and a lot is, I think). Even gmail would be fine that way, tbh I find it kind of annoying that t…

None of these sites on your list would be operable without JavaScript, even with reduced functionality. Heck Hacker News, probably the gold standard for simple websites, would itself be unusable. You wouldn't even be able to get the upvote/downvote buttons to work.

> Heck Hacker News, probably the gold standard for simple websites, would itself be unusable. You wouldn't even be able to get the upvote/downvote buttons to work.

Hacker News upvote/downvote buttons work without Javascript

Re: The Web I Want (2018)

#49

Post by overgard »

paxys wrote: post #47
overgard wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, when I think about the majority of the sites I visit daily, it's pretty much just content. Like, let's see: - Stack Overflow - Hacker News - Reddit - Youtube - Various news blogs - Gmail - Shopping/Amazon - Maps With the exception of maps, pretty much all of that would be perfectly fine server side rendered (and a lot is, I think). Even gmail would be fine that way, tbh I find it kind of annoying that t…

None of these sites on your list would be operable without JavaScript, even with reduced functionality. Heck Hacker News, probably the gold standard for simple websites, would itself be unusable. You wouldn't even be able to get the upvote/downvote buttons to work.

That's why I said a minimum of JS, not none. You don't need 500KB of frameworks for an upvote button

Re: The Web I Want (2018)

#50

Post by manuelmoreale »

paxys wrote: post #29
enos_feedler wrote: post #14

I’m not sure why that commenter who observed these claims get surfaced all the time yet nothing has changed, got flagged/downvoted. I was about to say the same thing. I’ll add a genuine question here in hopes to spur some discussion: It is clear the web is turning into trash or is already there, depending on your view. What genuine efforts have been made to rebuild the web without starting on the web/browser? We coul…

> It is clear the web is turning into trash or is already there Back in the "good old days" people keep mentioning there were maybe some single digit million people online. Today there are ~5 billion. So by what measure are things clearly worse? And for whom?

I just want to point out that more people using X doesn’t necessarily make X better. More people using the web today it’s just that, more people using it.

As for what measure, things are probably worse from a privacy/tracking stand point and also from a user centralization stand point. At least in my opinion.

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