I can only think that modern front end development has failed • Hacker News Board

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#451

Post by goatinaboat » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 7:04 AM UTC

azangru wrote: post #376

goatinaboat wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You write some simple HTML, style it with CSS, and write vanilla JS for the parts that need it, and everything feels solid. Bootstrap + jQuery on the front end, Flask or similar with CherryPy on the backend. SQLite or Postgres if you need it. That will handle 99.9% of websites, it will be cheap and easy to develop and host, and deliver a great experience to the end user.

> Bootstrap + jQuery on the front end Why? CSS can do layout with grids and flexboxes just fine, while es6 plus the modern browser api are as ergonomic as jquery. Why pull these dependencies from a decade ago?

CSS can do layout with grids and flexboxes just fine

I never bothered to learn CSS is why. Bootstrap looks good and consistent with what users expect and requires almost zero effort to use.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#452

Post by atoav » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 7:13 AM UTC

If your thing is considerably worse than any (handwritten) HTML page, maybe you are doing it wrong? Well written HTML even without CSS is fast and accessible and this should be your baseline.

Modern CSS is extremely powerful and you can get good looking websites with just handwritten CSS. If you change your site once a week instead of uaing a CMS maybe consider using a static site generator like Lektor (fast, no need to worry about people hacking your wordpress instances).

If you really need server side code/interaction reduce dependecies and still let HTML do the heavy lifting.

I did some experiments with WASM and Rust and it is really neat, but IMO it doesn't beat the simplicity of a basic HTML page yet.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#453

Post by tomwojcik » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 7:25 AM UTC

danjac wrote: post #370

tomwojcik wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking about starting Django + Hotwire project myself but I'd like to see some examples first. Is your side project open sourced?

Yes: https://github.com/danjac/audiotrails

And a cookiecutter for Django + Turbo, very cool. Thanks!

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#454

Post by prince005 » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 7:35 AM UTC

I think the bigger reason here is that devs jump directly into Frameworks rather than understanding the basics of web development itself.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#455

Post by redis_mlc » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 7:53 AM UTC

postalrat wrote: post #322

caseymarquis wrote: post #25

I'd like to add a bit more nuance. Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure. These failures often make their way into production. I, personally, get great results with modern FE development. My users are happy. I am happy. It's all very successful. All the defenders of modern FE development will likely chime in with the same sentiment. I also get great results with C, which arguably provide…

Whats the business case for less JS? Recently the company I worked for started a project where it seemed pretty clear to me would be possible to develop with very little JS running on the frontend. But I couldn't convince anyone of it because no one saw enough benefit from doing it that way.

You could use this as a starting point:

Since you have to validate on the server side for security reasons anyway, you're duplicating logic in javascript.

But the real argument comes down to vanill-js vs bloat. Since I use vanilla-ja, the amount of js will always be minimal.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#456

Post by coldtea » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 8:03 AM UTC

mitchdoogle wrote: post #317

coldtea wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Well, if the top 100 tracks from, say, 1961 to 2021 progressively get less musically diverse, with simpler chords, less harmonies, less timbral variety, lesser melodies, more repeatition, less dynamics, less genre variety, more infantile lyrics (something that has been studied and…

I wonder how deeply tinted your rose-colored glasses need to be to go to these lengths to prove that things were better back in the day.

Or how deep a fear of being called an "oldster" one has to have, to need to go to these other lengths to prove that things are always a fuzzy blog, and there are no periods (and historically even decades or centuries) with worse or better artistic output...

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#457

Post by uncledave » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 8:33 AM UTC

seandoe wrote: post #391

uncledave wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes definitely. I was surprised recently as I had to fill in a massive form based site for UK NHS mental health survey stuff. The site appeared as a flat background old style early 2000’s sort of thing with bits of comic sans in it. I nearly died when I first saw it expecting a shit show. But it turned out to be responsive and fast. It worked perfectly from end to end and had little to no JavaScript. It was by far th…

> early 2000’s sort of thing Right. It probably IS an old site and they've had years to iron-out bugs.

Nope. I spoke to the woman who issued us with an account and they just had it built for them.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#458

Post by marton78 » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 8:50 AM UTC

mmcnl wrote: post #357

bit_logic wrote: post #156

What upsets and concerns me the most is when I see poorly developed SPA on really important sites. For example, government service application websites. If reddit or nytimes has a bloated, intermittently failing SPA site, that's an annoyance. When it's a form to apply for unemployment, ACA health care, DMV, or other critical services, it's a critical failure. Especially since these services are most often used by exa…

This is a very simplistic characterization of what's happening. First of all, for all the broken websites there are also a lot of websites that are not broken at all. It's also very easy to make a broken website using a completely server-side rendered website, and that actually happens often enough. Second, SPA's decouple frontend and backend in a very strict way, which can bring enormous organizational benefits. Tim…

I'm not sure why you think this were written in pure js without a framework. It uses React and Sanity.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#459

Post by austincheney » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 9:06 AM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #444

austincheney wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you ignored this from that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24057163 If jsPerf is down try http://jsbench.github.io/

What precisely do you think a microbenchmark taken out of context is going to prove?

That a 250,000x performance difference is a very large gap. It’s the difference between walking 1 foot or 48 miles.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#460

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 9:23 AM UTC

bit_logic wrote: post #156

What upsets and concerns me the most is when I see poorly developed SPA on really important sites. For example, government service application websites. If reddit or nytimes has a bloated, intermittently failing SPA site, that's an annoyance. When it's a form to apply for unemployment, ACA health care, DMV, or other critical services, it's a critical failure. Especially since these services are most often used by exa…

[deleted]