MDN (beta) is now built with React

Re:MDN (beta) is now built with React by warpech on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @08:33AM (#20449419)

I am shocked and feel kind of betrayed that the de facto "Web documentation" moves away from using Web technology for static documents to something that treats the Web as a broken runtime for apps.

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Re:MDN (beta) is now built with React by SquareWheel on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @12:38PM (#20451607)

It's a webpage built on web standards and designed for web developers. It couldn't get any more webby.

Furthermore, it's fast and it looks good. What's the problem?

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Re:MDN (beta) is now built with React by altfredd on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @01:27PM (#20452057)

> It's a webpage built on web standards and designed for web developers.

There are a lot of web standards. XHTML and XSLT are web standards. Server-side rendering is web standard. Being able to save a page with search results and view it online used to be standard.

Some standards are better than others. Some are objectively bad and promote hazardous and error-prone practices. ActiveX is a standard, that was meant to turn Web into platform for running Windows applications. It did so by giving web developers access to powerful programming languages and diverse range of APIs (some of those APIs were a bad idea by themselves). All modern Javascript web frameworks are spiritual successors of ActiveX, and I sincerely hope, that they will end up in the same garbage dump of history where it did.

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Re:MDN (beta) is now built with React by SquareWheel on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @01:37PM (#20452155)

Well, the W3C's standardization attempts of XHTML were a bust. Microsoft's use of ActiveX was also quite proprietary (only ran on Windows as I recall). At the very least it wasn't an open standard.

ECMAScript however is open, very well-supported, and actually works. I see little connection between today's JS frameworks and ActiveX controls. That seems like a stretch of definitions.

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Re:MDN (beta) is now built with React by altfredd on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @01:54PM (#20452327)

> I see little connection between today's JS frameworks and ActiveX controls.

XMLHttpRequest used to be a popular ActiveX control, that introduced ability to programmatically perform web requests at programmer's discretion. Most modern Javascript frameworks can't be used without such ability.

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Re:MDN (beta) is now built with React by SquareWheel on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @02:31PM (#20452639)

XMLHttpRequest was useful enough to become a standard browser feature. That doesn't prove that ECMA is somehow nonstandard, or even a poor standard. Or that frameworks built on top of it are.

Besides, today XHR is being replaced with the fetch API.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:MDN (beta) is now built with React by anderspitman on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @12:19PM (#20451432)

That'll mostly depend on if it still gracefully handles JS being disabled. But I hear ya.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:MDN (beta) is now built with React by TomMarius on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @12:11PM (#20451359)

Isn't it maybe because it does not?

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