531–540 of 605 posts
I think it is a good idea. JavaScripts and CSS can enhance it but should not be required. Accessibility functions are also helpful; if designed well then it would be helpful for everyone (not only if you are blind or other disabilities), in many possible circumstances.
Sadly, this is the story of nearly every React project I've reluctantly inherited. In my experience, it's because React is not opinionated like its peers Vue and Svelte. So, a bunch of devs will use something for state management and and another team will use something else completely. Eventually both teams leave after making a mess. But, if you look at the graphs and numbers that MBAs chase, they will all look like…
You don't have to have a technical discussion whether or not React is too complex, you just have to look at the average website created with it.
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It is harder to do more with less. There is a reason React and other is used so much. Makes it easier to make interactive websites. It’s like asking why backend engineers think it’s harder to code an api using C instead of using Django.
I used to think that was true but I now think it’s only true for very interaction-heavy apps: if you have hundreds of interactions on a page over many minutes, using an SPA is amortized across a lot of time, but if it’s something you could do with e.g. a simple Django app you’ll not only be done faster but will spend an order of magnitude less time on maintenance and accessibility work.
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It is harder to do more with less. There is a reason React and other is used so much. Makes it easier to make interactive websites. It’s like asking why backend engineers think it’s harder to code an api using C instead of using Django.
> There is a reason React and other is used so much. Yes, it's because many people are quite bad at their jobs and reach for the same tool regardless of whether it's the right one. Let's not make excuses for incompetence.
What do people like for form validation? In this article he recommends the “validation-enhancer” library: https://www.npmjs.com/package/validation-enhancer I’ve also seen one called “formisch” that the author of valibot is working on: https://github.com/open-circle/formisch They’re both pretty new. Has anyone tried them?
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Unfortunately the LLMs are trained on what we've made, and there's going to be a ton more React garbage[1] in the training set than there are carefully-crafted websites like the article describes, so I don't expect a decrease in overengineered, bloated junk. If anything, I predict that the fact that you can shit one out in less time than before will have a different effect: A modest increase in bloat since an LLM won…
You can order LLMs to use other patterns. I had an LLM recreate an app in a different stack with reasonable success
I built apps like these on GOV.UK over 10 years ago for the Ministry of Justice. We built our own form wizard library that let us validate long forms in steps and break them out into multiple pages because Ruby on Rails didn't support doing that out of the box. It was a very important principle back then that everyone should be able to make use of these digital services regardless of whatever users were using to acce…
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Two years ago, I started a new company, and decided at the outset to avoid using any heavy JavaScript SPA framework. We stuck to simple server-rendered html and only use progressive-enhancement style JavaScript. Our app was fast, and simple, but it also came at a cost: we were limited in our ability to take rich UI elements off the shelf with an npm package. We had to do a lot more work to provide a rich user experie…
I feel like there is some context missing in your story here. There is a lot of middleground between heavy SPA frameworks and creating everything from scratch. More importantly, I am left wondering what sort of functionality was your team trying to build that requires that much interactivity? At least that is what I assume with "rich user experience"?
When the startup is trying to attract customers and also impress investors, sometimes there is a lot of effort spent on the investors just so they keep putting money into the machine. "See! We have an ultra modern/sleek site so it must be some other variable that is causing customers to churn..."
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As someone who has built both react based frontends and html based ones (with htmx), there is a law of diminishing returns at play. To start off, writing a basic crud website with forms is much easier with htmx. But when you start building more complex components, and integrate with other systems (OAuth for e.g.) there are tons of libraries and SDKs for the react ecosystem, but not many for pure html components. At t…
Really curious to understand why I'm being downvoted. I don't think it's a particularly spicy take - Just choose the right tool for the job.
Some people might say, "Why do you need all that oAuth complexity? Rip it out and use a cookie like God intended."
We, the devs/ICs, don't often get to make those decisions. We're placed into teams working on specific features/apps/tools and we often have to integrate with a myriad of business systems by default.
Yea, I would love to work on a simpler system, but I don't get to make that decision. Especially not when my company has been acquired by unbounded VC cash three times in the past 5 years and now I'm forced to fold in my lovingly crafted baby into the behemoth.