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HTML First

html-first.com

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Re: HTML First

#411

Post by sergiotapia »

qwertox wrote: post #340

I gave up this year, it's no longer possible to keep fighting these react, vue, angular monsters with their bundlers and transpilers and all the junk that comes with them, like node with npm which always throws at you the message that your brand new, seconds old project has 7 severe and 8 critical vulnerabilities in it, because it must download thousands of files, possibly including a wrapper for boolean values. The…

Hit the eject button! A lot of the great things about the web are there in Phoenix Liveview. Sexy reactive websites without the need of lunatic React/Node shenanigans.

Thought TBH the article's examples are whack to me. Why would I write pure tags instead of using the Phoenix form helpers that print out errors and other nice shit for me automatically. I get the spirit though.

Re: HTML First

#412

Post by [deleted] »

6031769 wrote: post #344
qwertox wrote: post #340

I gave up this year, it's no longer possible to keep fighting these react, vue, angular monsters with their bundlers and transpilers and all the junk that comes with them, like node with npm which always throws at you the message that your brand new, seconds old project has 7 severe and 8 critical vulnerabilities in it, because it must download thousands of files, possibly including a wrapper for boolean values. The…

Rage! Rage against the machine! You (and indeed everyone else) has no real need for heavy JS front end bloatware. Just say no. Serve light pages from the backend (or cache) and do all the fancy work in CSS (if you must). Say hello to fast render times and global accessibility.

[deleted]

Re: HTML First

#413

Post by rank0 »

Why on earth do so many projects like this have to hide behind this weird inclusive language?

Why can’t we be honest with ourselves and admit that our pet projects are just pet projects? Not everything has to save the world or even take any sort of moral stance at all!

Re: HTML First

#414

Post by whstl »

docmars wrote: post #384
tonyennis wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your suspicion is incorrect. Currently running 10 or so codebases with 8 devs using this approach. Thanks for catching the typo

Do you find that your team often has to reinvent the wheel in terms of what libraries like React/Vue/Svelte have to offer? Doesn't that increase time and scope tremendously?

I actually find that I often have to reinvent a lot of the browser's wheel when using React and friends, so it's often a wash.

Complete back button support beyond what the router offers, saving search/sort/filter in query string so users can copy/paste/bookmark/back/forward, handling connection and other errors gracefully, loading, accessibility, having to wrap Vanilla JS components into their own framework-compatible components, having to update things in different parts of the screen. And the last often requires a total paradigm change in terms of how data is handled in the app thanks to the introduction of state managers (React-sans-Redux looks totally different from regular React). All those require extra work on every project I worked, and no, libraries often don't solve them completely or as easily as it is with previous backend tech.

These frameworks are also steering a lot of software into some very problematic product decisions. Like using fancy third party components where stylized native would suffice (and be more useable/accessible), using date pickers for absolutely everything that looks like a date (it sucks to type your birthday in those unless you were born this month), saving things in the browser instead of in the backend (so the site looks different in different computers), or just having some specific UI-framework forced on you so you have to use a certain framework.

There are obvious advantages to frontend frameworks, and I'm a big fan of React/Vue/Svelte. I really like those things, been using those for years and I was doing what used to be called "DHTML" since the late 90s. But it takes so much more complexity than the average web app to reap those advantages... IMO they are definitely overused.

Re: HTML First

#415

Post by gedy »

resonious wrote: post #396
codeptualize wrote: post #89

This is fun in to theory and in simple examples, but show me a big project that applies this and how it made a difference. There are some bold objectives at the start that would be wonderful, but I’m a bit disappointed by the advice. I really don’t see how these would work in anything other than very basic scenarios, even less how they would achieve the objectives. I’m all for using the web platform to the max, and I…

I tried to push for an "HTML first" style frontend at my job, but we hired some run-of-the-mill frontend devs and they basically didn't get it and just wanted everything to be divs with VueJS controlling all of the logic and content. One semi-objective thing we lost was accessibility. Much of the site is impossible to navigate via keyboard due to naively re-implemented behavior like links being divs with click event…

> One semi-objective thing we lost was accessibility.

TBH that's not a framework vs HTML issue, that's just sloppy or inexperienced devs

Re: HTML First

#416

Post by TheMajor »

oblib wrote: post #341

Personally I prefer to take away from this the aspects that might work for me, as opposed to looking for anything I can come up with to rip the author a new ass. In my case, I decided to keep using jQuery as opposed to React or other newer frameworks when I started building an app I was getting ready to update around 5-6 years ago. Not because I found anything negative about React.js and other, newer, JavaScript libr…

This was the end result I came to as well after the bigger frameworks started gaining popularity. I work primarily solo in a single organisation with server-generated (CMS driven) websites.

Yes, I could have replaced jQuery with Vanilla, but the syntax for jQuery is still so much simpler, and I care about my limited time and productivity. For me to switch over to something like React would be complete overkill.

Again, as part of a bigger team, like you, I'd most likely consider a different approach.

Re: HTML First

#417

Post by aniforprez »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #216
codeptualize wrote: post #89

This is fun in to theory and in simple examples, but show me a big project that applies this and how it made a difference. There are some bold objectives at the start that would be wonderful, but I’m a bit disappointed by the advice. I really don’t see how these would work in anything other than very basic scenarios, even less how they would achieve the objectives. I’m all for using the web platform to the max, and I…

37 Signals has adopted some of these ideas. Would their apps qualify as "big" for you?

It's been a while since I used it but I did a limited trial of Hey and it was genuinely miserable to use. Not only did everything take a few ms extra, the entire interface was so incredibly janky and had no accessibility concerns at all. They were shipping their website to their mobile apps and it was horrid. I would not put Hey as a shining example anywhere for this philosophy

It's been a long time since I used Basecamp but that was decent enough

Re: HTML First

#418

Post by TheMajor »

oliyoung wrote: post #339

` ` Encouraged? Huh? We spent YEARS splitting logic from presentation and not describing presentation with visual characteristics. This is a terrible idea.

I just can't bring myself to like or be encouraged to use any form of approach that binds together logic and presentation. It looks and smells like terrible programming. Separation of concerns matters and, as you mentioned, more seasoned devs had decades of this being drilled into us.

Re: HTML First

#419

Post by raincole »

squidbeak wrote: post #180
csbartus wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I've created my first website in 1999 with plain HTML, CSS, vanilla JS, hosted on Geocities. Since then I've been using PHP/WordPress/Yii/Laravel, Ruby/Rails/Sinatra/Jekyll, React/Typescript, ClojureScript to create both sites and apps. With React / TSX components / CSS-in-TS / Effects / Context I'm home. Finally a fully fledged programming language for the web / front-end. A language made explicitly for the f…

Perhaps web publishing shouldn't be presupposed to be 'software development'?

Then use Wordpress. Or Substack. Or even Wix.

"But we need this and that custom dynamic logic..." well now we're in the realm of software development.

Re: HTML First

#420

Post by evantbyrne »

corethree wrote: post #268
evantbyrne wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have fond memories of early React; It was extremely verbose not having hooks until relatively recently, build tools were necessary but a horrible mess, and it was falsely advertised as being faster than vanilla JS. Hype around Facebook carried React. It has improved massively since then, but so has vanilla JS. I don't see a transition away from React as a step back at all. React made rendering new elements cl…

I never said a transition back from react is not an improvement. Again you're not getting it. I'm saying we had problems with vanilla js initially and we've never moved forward. The fact that we are going back to vanilla js is reopening all the old issues are a sign that we are in stagnation. Nothing has changed. It's a circle of attempting to improve and failing.

I dunno man, I don't consider browser APIs to be a failure. In fact, it's probably the most popular UI toolkit in existence by a wide margin. It being a collection of evolving standards doesn't count against it in my book.
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