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Second-Guessing the Modern Web

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Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#411

Post by earthboundkid »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #380
mavhc wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That happens less often than people's computers dying. Which emoji did she use?

The green one. I'm of course referring to the Markiplier drama of last year, where a streamer asked people to vote on his stream by typing in red/green emojis. This resulted in hundreds of people losing their Google accounts due to an oversensitive spam filter. The matter fortunately got sorted out (somewhat, not all accounts were unbanned), but essentially only because it involved a fairly well-known youtuber. https…

Server side email has the failure mode of the company going broke or banning you. Client side email has failure modes like destruction of device (house fire, flood, other accidents) or even just obsoleting of OS/app. Neither is inherently superior to the other.

In the particular case of the emoji ban, the problem is that the FTC should never have allowed one company to control search AND email AND school document sharing AND maps/reviews AND video AND mobile phones, etc. If you don't use Google for your email, there's no danger of Google banning you from it. :-) More seriously, Google (and Amazon and Facebook and Microsoft+Github) needs to be broken up to protect consumers from one company having a chokehold on their digital lives.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#412

Post by RonanTheGrey »

_630w wrote: post #216
runawaybottle wrote: post #139

I’m tempted to step back and evaluate this on another level. Our industry is very big, and any industry that gets that big will be able to house a lot of people just for the sake of it. If you think we have a large amount of fresh frontend people, understand they are hired almost with a one to one correspondence with fresh product/business people. Modern product development is essentially a polishing job on every com…

At this point, I am convinced the problem is not web frameworks but browsers. Someone needs to take all the legacy bloat away and put it in the side while starting from the scratch. Web doesn't need three different languages. It doesn't need freedom that costs accessibility. It doesn't need to be so primitive. It smells. Awful defaults. import "reset.css" import "reset.js"

Well, and this is it, isn't it?

The whole conversation ignores, for example, the reason that jQuery was invented: At a time when there were many competing browsers, all of which spoke different dialects of JavaScript (that's my punny way of saying that they had different bugs), HTML/CSS bugs that were all different across browsers... jQuery brought order to chaos.

And the problem is, that as browsers improved and got closer to general standards compliance (where we STILL ARE NOT today), they didn't remove the cruft and the past bad behavior - no, they continue to support code that implements that crappy API that was deprecated 15 years ago.

These problems continue today and as long as that is true - as long as fundamentally, the problem is the browser itself -- these frameworks will continue to have a place.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#413

Post by burlesona »

pistoriusp wrote: post #307
burlesona wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most part I think the reason so many web devs put up with the “all-react” (and similar) development experience is basically cargo culting. If you admit you don’t like it, chances are there’s at least one front-end hipster around who will mock you as outdated, and that’s enough to silence most. For the hipsters, the problems of SPAs are hard, and engineers like hacking on hard problems. Also the fact that the…

> If you admit you don’t like it, chances are there’s at least one front-end hipster around who will mock you as outdated, and that’s enough to silence most. It sounds like you're reinforcing this divide by classifying people who have a different opinion to you as "hipsters." They label your technology choice as outdated, and you label them as hipsters. You become the thing you fight.

Haha, that's fair. It would be more fair to say "advocates" or something like that. My bad.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#414

Post by learc83 »

tomaszs wrote: post #395
learc83 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all of them. Without the overhead of rendering everything to a virtual DOM and then doing a diff, performance can get pretty close to native javascript--the sweet spot the author mentions gets bigger. Plus since the framework is mostly just a compiler, the bundle issue is less of a big deal.

Virtual DOM actually has some efficiency benefits. So it is not as easy as no Vdom = better. Also React, Angular or Ember does not add a lots of code to the project. I am 100% sure real world app written in each of major frameworks including Svelte has almost exactly the same size. Svelte has the same problems like React or any othe framework.

>Virtual DOM actually has some efficiency benefits.

Please explain these efficiency benefits. VDOM architecture can't be faster than native javascript updating the DOM because at the end of the day you still have to to use native javascript to update the DOM.

> Also React, Angular or Ember does not add a lots of code to the project.

They do to small apps. I tend to embed small svelte apps inside of a larger multi page apps to handle more complex UIs. In that use case the much smaller overhead helps tremendously.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#415

Post by giantrobot »

int_19h wrote: post #266
giantrobot wrote: post #136

I think deep down people writing SPAs really just Flash apps or Applets would come back. They want to ignore everything about the web except the ability to deliver content over a network. I'd go so far as to say they hate the web as a concept. Most problems stem from that disdain for the web. Many of those problems are then exacerbated by "opinionated" frameworks being en vogue. None of them are helped by the shit pl…

We also had XSL-FO, allowing for very precise control over the rendering of that server-served XML. Oh, and this all was more than 20 years ago, not 15. IE5 had XSLT support, and it shipped in 1999!

You're right, I was thinking of FireFox 4.x having full XSLT support which was 2004/5 IIRC.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#416

Post by wlll »

dbbk wrote: post #358
boomlinde wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean to equate wearing tinfoil hats with employing a blacklist-by-default Javascript policy I'd gladly hear your reasoning. I'm sure it would help others not confuse your point with vapid shitposting, as well.

Yes, that's what I'm equating it with. I think it's a fair analogy. Disabling Javascript isn't enough to 'protect your privacy', and even if it was, I haven't heard of any tangible impact that would have on anyone's life.

> I haven't heard of any tangible impact that would have on anyone's life.

I installed the NoScript plugin (alongside my existing adblockers that also block social media stuff).

I love it. My browser (Firefox) is now far more responsive and more stable, and my CPU fans turn on far less.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#417

Post by burlesona »

arvinsim wrote: post #274
burlesona wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most part I think the reason so many web devs put up with the “all-react” (and similar) development experience is basically cargo culting. If you admit you don’t like it, chances are there’s at least one front-end hipster around who will mock you as outdated, and that’s enough to silence most. For the hipsters, the problems of SPAs are hard, and engineers like hacking on hard problems. Also the fact that the…

> Also the fact that the solutions don’t work very well means they’re constantly being reinvented, which means if you do the work to keep up with it all you’re rewarded by being regarded as an expert, which is nice. This is a huge assumption. For example, I don't think any web dev enjoys wrangling with CSS positioning or workarounds because they want to be "rewarded by keeping up". > Last year I assigned a feature to…

1) CSS works great, and while it continues to incrementally improve, has been fairly stable since its introduction. What I meant about "solutions" that don't work well are things like React state which has gone from "not a thing" to "redux" to "redux is an antipattern" to "redux is moot because now graphql" which oh BTW means you now need a whole new API? Ok. That framework churn is because those problems are actually difficult, and to date there's no "one true way" that is pretty straightforward and covers 90% of cases pretty well. By contrast, things like "how to set up a webserver that handles HTTP requests" are easier and already well-solved in every serious language, and thus not so subject to the same degree of churn.

2) All those concerns were present in the project I worked with said developer on, and were easy to handle with the basic tools of the browser.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#418

Post by theonething »

luxphl wrote: post #155
theonething wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's saved me hundreds of hours, if not more. How did you come up with that? You tracked the time it took to complete the project with and without React and diffed it?

The same way anyone would come up with a time estimate if asked how long it would take to mow the lawn with a pair of scissors or lawnmower -- experience and extrapolation.

Fair enough on the experience and extrapolation. But I would argue your analogy is a bit off. It's undeniable that a lawnmower is faster than scissors. I don't think that's the case between React and no React.

A closer analogy would be a comparison between different models of lawnmower or between a lawnmower and a different kind of mechanical grass cutting device. In which case, it seems you would need to log time to see if you've saved time using one over the other.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#419

Post by wlll »

MattGaiser wrote: post #110
rossdavidh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I put food on the table, and I do more work in Django than I do in SPA's. In fact, one of the complaints I read about from management is that Django devs cost more than JS devs (don't know if that's true, just saying it's a management concern). But I think the "React everywhere" error, is more or less the same as the "one language for everything" error, the "everything should be Windows" error, and many other cases o…

I haven't seen a bootcamp teaching Django recently, so I can see where that might be true. The cheap people are overwhelmingly JS.

I've been working in the tech industry for 20 years and from my experience rarely do "cheap developers" ever actually seem to work out costing less in anything other than the very short term.

The cheaper the developer, the shorter the period where they cost less.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#420

Post by MivLives »

burlesona wrote: post #72
luxphl wrote: post #47

I empathize with the author but client-side technologies like React have a pretty clear advantage that explains why they're popular: for the people that are tasked to make websites (i.e. us, HN readers), they're easier to work with and they save us time. It outweighs all the end-user-facing cons by a lot, because companies need us, and our salaries are expensive. It's true that they are largely more complex than O.G.…

For the most part I think the reason so many web devs put up with the “all-react” (and similar) development experience is basically cargo culting. If you admit you don’t like it, chances are there’s at least one front-end hipster around who will mock you as outdated, and that’s enough to silence most. For the hipsters, the problems of SPAs are hard, and engineers like hacking on hard problems. Also the fact that the…

About your junior dev it might also be the way he was taught React.

I'm also a junior and the way I was introduced to React was by teaching me enough JS that I could theoretically write React (with a bunch of research).

One of the things I've noticed among other junior engineers (including myself) is tutorial driven development. Through a mixture of inexperience, laziness, and self doubt it can be easier to find someone else who's implemented something and just use theirs. Rather then thinking about a complex problem and naively coding up a solution finding someone else's hopefully battle tested code.

An example of this is how I used to make JS based games. I essentially used an array to toggle classes on a grid of divs divs in the style of an LCD screen. I hadn't heard of html's canvas element. My solution worked but I don't think anyone would think it's a particularly good one. If I had found someone's snake game and saw they used canvas I could have saved myself some headache.

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