I suspect the author hasn't actually done this on a project with more than one person, supporting 99% of browsers in the wild. I also suspect they didn't run their own code, because either my screen is not as tasty, or "onlick" is not an handler of div.
Nothing is more convincing than real world success stories.
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.
I do agree with you, it's why I'm skeptical about the results of following this advice. I vividly remember how much things sucked, and obv the web has come a long way, but the tools have gotten even further. If I see how much mileage I get out of the tools I use on the daily, I would not be nearly as productive without them, and produce a lot more buggy, inaccessible, and shitty apps.
whereas you can addEventListener anywhere you want
Honestly, and sarcasm aside, I think this is an incredibly important thing for any new web developer to do.
Trying to learn web development in 2023 (or even in 2014, when I started my career) is so hard, because you're constantly standing on top of the shoulders of giants without even knowing how far you are from the ground.
I started a refresh of my personal site a few months back and resolved to write all the html and css "by hand", vanilla style, as a way of forcing myself to relearn the basics, and it was really refreshing to strip away all the layers of extra stuff and build it with simple tools. And I actually learned a ton of stuff that was useful on a daily basis while I worked on a React project during my day job, stuff that I just had never had to do or learn or use because some framework was always helping me out.
Recently I've been working on a little toy app in Phoenix, and I had the "revelation" that Eex / Phoenix components were slowing me down instead of speeding me up, because I didn't understand the underlying concepts as well as I needed to. As soon as I said "fuck it, I'm writing vanilla html and only using Eex where it's absolutely necessary" I was able to get through a whole host of issues that were giving me friction and actually build what I wanted.
I had a similar experience a few years ago when learning Phoenix. I just didn't get Ecto at all, and the reason was simple - I didn't know SQL and database design. Once I resolved to just figure out how to do the thing I was doing with raw SQL, Ecto immediately made way more sense.
We obviously can't peel back layers of the onion forever, or we'd never get anything done. At some point you have to get comfortable with abstracting away the details. But what I've found in web dev is that the big frameworks are written by people who've done the "vanilla" way so much that they've identified places where things hurt and built solutions that abstract that pain away. That's all well and good when you understand why the abstraction exists and the problem it solves, but it can really be confusing before you've put in the work to gain some of that context.
With just this list it's hard to imagine how this would work.
The only scenario where I can sort of imagine it being potentially helpful is an agency setting with many not-too-complex projects and limited ongoing development. I can imagine updating projects being a hassle. That said I don't have experience in that field, and I bet there are other ways to deal with that.
Not that they were necessarily wrong, I also tend to reach this conclusion on most big web projects I work on.
Well, what are the objectives? If they are complex, so should the code be complex. That's the nature of our job. By adding an advanced framework you up the complexity by default. Instead of adding more code, you add more build dependencies. This is especially wasteful on websites.
In my opinion, people today are afraid of writing code. Everyone wants some framework to write code for them. That is not how we push our industry forward.
Then, enjoy maintaining React apps once React inevitably bites the dust and ends up in the JS framework graveyard.
And speaking from experience maintaining React apps is quite nice. React has great backwards compatibility, and where it doesn't there are usually codemods available. Dependencies can be tricky, but that's not exclusive to React.
Also don't forget React evolves, backed by multiple #huge companies, and still innovating.
Edit: it depends on what you mean by "bites the dust". If you mean "isn't cool anymore" then I'd say that's kind of irrelevant. If you mean "isn't supported anymore", I don't see that happening any time within the next decade at least. Rails isn't cool anymore but it's still supported and lots of people are still (more or less) happily using it at their day jobs. React is so widely used it'll be kept on life support long after it has been supplanted by something better, if and when that happens.
React might be 10 years old, but it changed like 5 times during that time. Something built in first or second version of React is pretty much an entirely different framework at this point. (Would it even build with using the newset toolchains?). It's almost disingenuous to ignore that fact.
So while it's unlikely that there won't be a thing called "React" in the future, it's not that crazy of an idea.
Today, it's moving heavily towards server-side rendering because the client-side / SPA format is already quite mature. Their approach with server components is an optimization path that uses concepts/patterns from already popular server-side languages and frameworks + templating, and blends them seamlessly with client-side development, giving engineers the best of many worlds.
This was a natural evolution from NextJS which popularized this way of using React, and it's giving engineers more choices in how they build + optimize their apps.
It’s just going back full cycle, with a few extra steps. And the only clear purpose is SEO.
But here's the thing, hot-shot devs, and hot-shot dev wannabes look down on maintenance; and humans are social creatures, me included. So I'm not going to do a job for you that you look down on, unless you carry me in (and out) on a sedan chair.
Same for writing doc, I'm good at it and enoy it, but there's no pleasure in doing something that other people don't really value.
Popular backend templating systems face the same problem with possible sunsetting and decay of collective knowledge over time.
React is a great investment, and is here to stay for a long time because its team (and community) are massive, and are keeping pace with newer libraries/frameworks that are in a lot of ways doing things better. React's market share has hardly been touched by Vue, Svelte, Solid, etc. and less so by HTMX and other new attempts at un-frameworking the web.
But this article is not showing me how to do that and the things listed are not going to have an impact on the complexity of my projects as these basic things are solved quite well.
> By adding an advanced framework you up the complexity by default
If you know your project will remain simple then by all means. That's often not how it works though and then you end up writing a framework yourself once the scope gets increased and features are added.
Adding to that that using a framework gives you so many things for free. There are so many aspects to a good website and leaning on a group of people specialising in all those things is often a smart move with better outcomes.
I think the initial complexity might be a little bit higher, but there often is a big return on investment later on, and also immediately in terms of productivity.
I'm not going to stop you from not using a framework, I think it's great to experience it, have been there many times before, got burned (badly), and now make different decisions.
I’m genuinely asking. I never understood this argument that people bring.
In my view, the web is 95% small to medium projects. Most technologies should be focused on that - simple solutions for simple projectS. Add complexity later.
I would also add that a lot of us do work on the bigger projects, which makes sense as bigger projects require more people. So at least in my life, and I expect many others, it is quite relevant.
I also don't believe the article qualifies that these tips are only for small to medium projects, I'd read it very differently if it did, but I would still like to see some real world examples though.
Many developers also dislike using many different frameworks, because that would require more learning. If you have to choose one technology it's better to use one where you can do everything. Not one where you can do 95% really fast, but 5% not at all.
I personally always use "complex" frameworks like Angular or React because sooner or later feature requests come in, where those frameworks pay off. On average it saves time for me to always use those frameworks. That might be different for you depending on the work you do.
The big projects are of course important. But even chrome needs a simple little website with a download link.
Product folks come up with features. They have no idea how hard those features are to implement. Which in a way is a blessing; they'll come up with the best features if they don't have to consider the implementation details. But because there are always trade-offs in implementation they also don't understand those.
A feature that is super difficult to implement, and that therefore has trade-offs on speed, maintainability, etc, should be communicated back to the product folks. If you have to move to a framework just to implement this one feature, then that is either because this one feature is really badly or over-designed, or that one feature is absolutely critical to the entire site, which is stupidly rare and again a symptom that someone hasn't really thought this through enough.
The failure in communication is usually "you're just the nerd pushing the nerd buttons, you don't have valid opinions on product design" which is a cause of so, so many problems in our industry.
But are they that wrong? We compute to, well, do things with our lives. To find out how to go places, to pay bills, to talk with friends, to meet with people, to learn about things. A view that computation should come with technical (e.g. tech bloat) limitations in mind feels important only to technical people and not to actual computing.
If building it one way will take 3 months and involve shipping 500Kb of JS to every user, whereas building it a slightly different way will take 2 weeks and ship only 50Kb of JS, then I think the second option is better, even if it includes a slightly degraded customer experience (though tbh 500Kb of JS is all by itself a degraded customer experience).
Our online lives would be a lot better if the product folks listened to the tech folks a bit more.
I like to draw a parallel to music; if the producer doesn't understand music at all, then maybe they should listen to the musicians a bit when it comes to creating a musical product.
What if people don't use it because of the degraded customer experience? Then does it really help if people who would originally benefit from the computation never compute?
> Our online lives would be a lot better if the product folks listened to the tech folks a bit more.
I mean, according to which metrics? Again this is really popular on HN and other nerd forums but from what I can tell it's just a nerd forum indicator. I think you can make a decent case for involving tech and product together, and I can think of many, but it's a case-by-case basis and has nothing to do with degrading customer experience. This view is popular on HN because we don't actually care here much about actual customers and care more about things like "site payload" and "how much JS is running in my browser". If the argument is that people with older devices won't be able to run the JS like this, I'd argue that your networks have more latency than any bloat you get from JS. Which is why a holistic experience matters more than what your personal tech-experience gets hung up on.
My target user is someone running 3G on their phone on the commute home in a crowded train. The designer's sexy animations and carefully coordinated state changes are not worth the extra 100Kb of 3rd-party dependency JS required to get them to work, because the user is not going to see them; they're going to switch away from the app after 10s of staring at a blank page waiting for the JS to download.
Seen too many "perfect" designs on a laptop monitor right next to the router in the dev studio fail completely in the wild. Every Kb matters.
For example a static page with a booking process with various entry points on the website, which slightly change the booking logic. Also you can book as a new user, as a logged in user, for somebody else etc. Also the logic is changing at regular intervals, because the business owner is trying different things out.
Using Angular with reactive forms makes this easier to develop, maintain and hand off to other Angular devs.
While it makes writing the static parts of the website more complicated, it makes developing the booking process easier. And overly complicated business processes are what is mentally challenging for me. This is where I want all the help I can get. Writing static pages is something I can do in any framework even when I am tired. Making this part easier or reducing boilerplate is nice but doesn't make me much happier. Being able to build ridiculously complicated forms without my head exploding does :) Of course if you work on projects with relatively straight forward requirements there is 0 advantage in using Angular or React for you. It always depends on the type of work you do.
The more complex the business logic, and the more options there are, and the more it is expected to change, the more it benefits the development team to write that code in their language of choice on the backend, close to the data store(s), using native classes/objects -- rather than being forced to write it in JS/TS, serialize everything to/from JSON, reliant on magic under the hood to lay it out in the DOM, with more and more "state" necessary to be managed client-side.
Why?
TS is maintainable and very pleasant to code in. Most people’s computers are way faster than making round trips to a server. You talk about serializing everything to/from JSON, but my phone can do that in milliseconds (if not faster). Compare that to 100-200ms of latency between a faraway server, and all of a sudden doing things client side makes sense.
Engineering is all about tradeoffs. I’m tired of people trying to make blanket statements like “React is always better”, or “SSR is always better”. It’s not, and we know it’s not. There are several successful, performant, maintainable apps written using React. There are plenty written using a backend framework and SSR too. Heck, there’s successes that use both!
The common denominators in the success stories? Competent engineers. And I expect a competent engineer can analyze requirements and determine what would be the best outcome for their target users. A booking site absolutely benefits from a front end framework that handles client side logic. It probably also benefits from a clever backend for processing the data after the user is finished with it. Let’s not pretend there’s a one sized solution that fits everything, because there isn’t.
A complex booking engine like an airline or Stubhub needs constant, almost real-time connectivity with a database, otherwise you risk selling product at a stale price, double-selling, selling to an unauthenticated person, getting taxes and fees wrong, missing custom post-sale add-on opportunities, and lots of other potential problems. The client has to make a lot of network calls, so you're going to deal with latency, there's no client-side solution that avoids it without risking the issues above.
The client being able to fetch just updates is a lot more efficient. If you open a web socket the server can even push.
You make a great point why we use client side solutions.
That's exactly why HTMX has gained immediate traction so quickly, it solves many of these exact problems elegantly and easily, much of the time without a single line of JS.
If only they actually worked like this. I’ve experienced, as I’m sure many other people have, problems booking flights, lodging, buying tickets, etc, where when I go to checkout it fails because I was too slow. It’s also much faster to only request smaller pieces of data if you can, instead of resending an entire web page and then re-rendering the whole web page.
All that to say, there are tradeoffs. Finding the solution with the best latency and the best experience requires a careful analysis of all these details and figuring out which approach (or combination of approaches) solves that problem the most efficiently. Of course it’s not easy, but nothing you’ve said here indicates one solution would always outperform another solution.
Because they are typically written using popular heavy frameworks! Big, expert teams of developers can't get it all bug-free and fast and smooth when working with them. Thank you for making my point better than I could.
> only request smaller pieces of data if you can, instead of resending an entire web page and then re-rendering the whole web page
You have revealed by this statement that you have no idea how HTMX works. You are making an argument against something you've clearly never looked at.
My whole argument can be succinctly summed up by this comment from a different Hacker News user from when React was first announced:
> One of the biggest problems with the web platform is that we've spent the last 20 years trying to shim applications into a document framework. HTML was designed to help academics share research papers, not to replace native thick-client applications, yet that's the direction it's been evolving towards.
> I'm really happy to see Web Components (inc. Polymer, Angular, x-tags, and React) landing into HTML. If we accept that web apps != web pages at a spec level, hopefully we can build an awesome platform on which to create tools that leverage all the great parts of the web (linkable, available, auto-updating, device-agnostic) without the mess that we've made trying to make the web do something it wasn't designed for.[0]
This sentiment, after 10 years, is still spot on. The web isn’t academics sharing research papers anymore. Interactive web apps, whether you like it or not, require a ton of client side state management. React was developed to address concerns with managing that state and improving performance where HTML5 fell short. It still succeeds at that.
Of course, if you have a static site, don’t use React! But let’s not pretend there’s no use case for it either. There’s tradeoffs. And I’ll repeat that til the end of time. No matter what you choose, there’s tradeoffs.
Maybe because HTMX fits all the principles listed by the author? Or because it's specifically referenced in the article (3 times)?
A tangential answer (focusing on backend not language) is because I'm (we're) going to have to reproduce much of the fronted complexity of the business logic on the backend to validate what the frontend sends.
I'm mostly agreeing with you. I've built multiple web-platformed insurance systems and booking systems in the last decade and moved from fully server rendered pages to client rendered forms. The complexity increased with that change but as you highlight once it's done the ability to test different frontend flows is great.
But I'd like a way to share more of the business logic rather than writing it twice.
I think otherwise. I.e.: blog shouldn't be web app just because it's content management is.
If you use a CMS you have already a templating situation and dynamic content, using a framework, or jamstack like situation is not that different, depending on the specifics it might produce faster results.
I can say with confidence that unless I royally screw something up in my component lifecycles or render loops, everything is just as snappy as ever. No latency. No lag. Just a zippy fast web app with URL/route changes that fly, fetched data populating quickly, and interactions feeling wonderful -- and that's because said apps I'm developing _aren't_ using any heavy tracking libraries.
People are too quick to blame slow performance on modern view libraries, and even likelier: they've never used them before.
Have you checked this is the reason? not slow network? and not ads/analytics and blocking assets? That's not exclusive to frameworks btw, and probably less likely as most optimize these things for you.
The website that is linked originally has a bunch of blocking assets.. lighthouse score is not amazing either.
Just like the original article, you might want to test your assumptions a bit more.
The small projects are where the people I care about are struggling.
e.g. WhatsApp back before the acquisition
Making it easier for people to build big, complex apps doesn't favour large organisations with lots of resources. The opposite in fact.
However I'm taking about even lower down the food chain than this.
Then if that's not enough, you've got things like HTMX if you're keen on doing everything in terms of html templating, you've got tools like Svelte if you want an isolated chunk of dynamic UI in a mostly static page, you've got bundlers like Vite that just work without any configuration if you get to the point where you need a build step, and you've got a multitude of lightweight frameworks for the next step.
And on top of that, pretty much all the old ways still work. The browser is an incredibly stable environment! Outside of a handful of security-related removals, if it got into a mainstream browser, without a feature flag or an explicit "experimental" warning, it's pretty much there for life. So if you want to go back to the old ways, there's not much stopping you - but a whole bunch of quality-of-life development improvements along the way to make things even easier than they were back then.
And, while only a minority of projects are that complex, those projects are the ones most developers are working on. Most other projects are probably better served with a wordpress install and a bit of theme customisation. Which means it's going to be a minority of developers who work with the very minimal things that are sufficient in these sorts of cases.
I've used SPA frameworks, but try to avoid it if I can, because most of the logic is in the backend. I don't want to create and sync API interfaces, have 1-2 additional contexts (JS + frontend framework) and debug an extra layer.
With htmx I can now have interactivity via the backend. I use Alpine.js for some interactivity.
It's almost impossible. The first reaction is always `npm init`
You can still find developers who are using the basics, but mostly they're designing WordPress themes or working for boutique web design agencies, because those are the sorts of problems that are solved with just simple HTML, JS, and CSS.
It's like asking a Java developer when the last time they developed something without maven or gradle is, or Python developer why their first reaction is to use pip. If the majority of problems developers had to solve were simple enough that they didn't need these tools, then there'd be far fewer developers and most of them would still end up working on the 20% of projects where they're necessary. Because, well, that's where the complexity lies.
> It's almost impossible. The first reaction is always `npm init`
Consider a simple case — a static website containing several pages (it's simpler than anything requiring a dynamic server, right?). If you are a professional front-end developer, you are almost certain to prefer some kind of a static-site generator over copy-pasting the html template with repeated elements (header, footer, navigation) multiple times. You could use a static-site generator written in Ruby (but then you would go gem install), or in Python (but then you would go pip install); or you could use a Hugo binary (I'd love to see anyone call its templating language simple); or, if you are a front-end developer, you might npm init && npm install eleventy. Is this too complex a step?
I dunno, I'm a Go dev, so it makes sense to me ;)
> Is this too complex a step?
If it just stopped there, sure, that would be fine. But it never does. My experience of front-end devs is that they will do anything to avoid writing any actual code. So there's a tendency to pull in dependencies and bloat the thing until it suffocates in its own complexity. I've seen node_modules with thousands of subdirs, and a build process that takes minutes, for really very simple sites.
something like this: https://www.hotelpalacebarcelona.com/
they don't care it's not "html first"
> I personally always use "complex" frameworks like Angular or React because sooner or later feature requests come in, where those frameworks pay off. On average it saves time for me to always use those frameworks.
I wonder whether they ever pay off. First, I don't believe the frameworks you mention really, as you suggest, enable the last 5% of functionality that would otherwise be impossible. No, those frameworks are written in the same language they work in, which means that strictly speaking they do not enable any new functionality.
Second, whatever ease / speed of development you use must be weighed against the additional cost borne by the project's users. The time you save (that you might otherwise spend learning to achieve the same result without the framework) could be less than the time spent collectively by users waiting for the framework to load.
And what's good for one small project is likely to be good for many small projects.
For text at hand I understand that author expects this way should be “the best” for everyone.
Then author gives examples that even in medium project at first requirement change or first additional non-trivial rule are going to have 2-way bindings plus bunch of other plumbing implemented where “html first” doesn’t have it and someone will have to write some JS monster to handle state etc.
In what terms? Sites in existence? I suppose. But sites by usage? Virtually all huge.
I'm not sure that view is correct. For one thing, I'm not sure how you even define this.
As technology has advanced, many of the "small/medium" projects that used to require lots of dev time have turned into fully-built alternatives. The days when you need a dev to setup a blog are gone, as are the days you need one to setup a store, or a simple marketing website.
Are these part of the 95%? In some sense, yes, but in the sense of giving advice on a framework to choose, not at all, because no dev will even be making that choice - it's irrelevant.
As for medium-sized projects, there are tens of thousands of small, internal company tools that aren't even on the open internet. They probably fit your definition of being medium sized, let's say have a few devs working on them for many years, certainly medium sized compared to FB etc - but I'm not sure that whether this approach is right or wrong for them. (Genuinely not sure!)
I'm just saying, you need to much better define what you mean by small and medium sized, because some people might be thinking of my definition, while for some people medium-sized is, idk, AirBNB, which is tiny compared to FB but gigantic compared to most projects out there.
Their second principle, to use inline styling, makes it harder to create a consistent look across the entire website. Defining that in one place and referencing it everywhere is better and easier.
Big companies are in the minority and what they do would not classify as "normal" or "standard practice".
It really bugs when people say "it's standard industry practice" when actually what they mean is "thats how the big businesses do it".
When you make a product that looks like it works but doesn’t, they don’t understand. They put you on a path to overpromise and underdeliver.
One of the lesser known features of unit tests are that they give the code that management can’t see more QA prior to being wired up. They narrow that awkward window from first paint to shipping.
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 front-end, built om modern principles like functional, reactive programming.
Now I can do software development. Before that, with HTML, CSS, plain JS, PHP it was ... just hacking, nothing else. (Rails was good for full-stack, was not shining on the front-end)
I'll skip frameworks when the web stack will be ready for the apps, too. Now it's (perhaps) good enough for sites, I should admit.
Like it or not, the web is an excellent platform for delivering software applications to users, especially one-off or infrequently used applications.
Let’s use software development tools, rather than web publishing tools, to develop that software.
As an example, shipping a macOS or iOS app, via official means, requires a lengthy review & approval process, upfront costs, buy-in into native languages with little to no use outside of these platforms, a limited selection of tools, and hard decisions about which version of the OS to support based on the features you need vs. the market share of older versions.
People (and teams) choose web development for the lower barrier to entry, and as a platform, browsers get products most of the way to their goals, and fast.
Is it your preference to install a new local first desktop application any time you wish to do any of these things?
I’m not against Web Apps, but many take my browser as free real estate.
At that point, I'm just going to start the project with React / Vue / Svelte every time because almost 100% of the time, I realize I need to support the features they offer that raw HTML/CSS cannot, or if they do, are very poorly implemented by browsers, hitting limitations with them that become frustrating and prevent you from achieving the scope you're aiming for.
Using any of those three libraries/frameworks is painless, and I can get a project going rapidly and with high confidence that I can support any functionality, interaction, animation, content, routing, and other common web problems, with great ease.
"But we need this and that custom dynamic logic..." well now we're in the realm of software development.
We will be doing something different in a couple of years and saying that the stuff we do now is out of date and the new stuff is home. It's always been this way. We are tech nomads finding ourselves new homes as and when we move on.
With the introduction of Angular 1.x and eventually React, Vue, and Svelte -- creating web apps finally felt productive, easy to debug, and easy to ship. Wiring up interactions finally felt intuitive. No more jQuery code colliding with itself as you struggle to organize your project and cobble together a bunch of poorly maintained "component" libraries and pray they work together without obvious user-facing bugs on your site or app.
Or worse: on a team of engineers.
I won't lie, learning how early build systems worked was a pain, but the curve was completely worth it, and I wouldn't change a thing. Today, using tools like Vite with their default project templates is almost too easy, and you can hit the ground running in no time.
Publishing to Vercel, Netlify, and other modern hosting stacks is a breeze, and they all support direct tie-ins with every popular package & build system.
I don't necessarily disagree that more components in browsers is a bad thing (I've been very happy to use the new modal element, for example), but I think the browser is working better right now as a lower-level (albeit still fairly high-level) platform that allows people to build a variety of documents and applications on top.
And to be fairer, it's generally a pretty good philosophy for greenfield apps at that particular point in time, but if I started an app on rails 4 or 5 there's no way I'm updating my front end every time they change their minds about how front end should work
They believe this now, in 4-5 years it'll be XYZ next thing
Basecamp (formerly 37signals) has a track record of challenging the status quo, whether in business or engineering practices and to actually be fair, they're not changing their front-end philosophy on a whim or to simply follow a fad. They're trying to solve real problems. In the past, their flagship product served as proof that exposed many established counter-advices as merely baseless beliefs. Over the years, they've demonstrated how many "bad ideas" could actually work better, once you become more pragmatic.
They might not be BIG, but they're also not small. Imo, what they say and do engineering-wise tends to matter much more to average developers than what Facebook or Google might recommend.
I think the question stands, is Basecamp a good enough example?
To me it seems more like they’ve evolved it.
From Rails UJS using jQuery, to vanilla Js, then TurboLinks and onto today’s tools like Turbo and Stimulus.
The evolution isn’t a bad thing, and the older approaches still work in modern rails.
They’ve changed and updates the build tools, but then you have to keep up.
They went from Sprockets, to Webpacker, and then module loading to replace Webpacker.
So they’ve haven’t changed philosophy as such, it’s just considered and measure evolution and refinement.
Feels that way in practice to me anyway! :-)
It's been a long time since I used Basecamp but that was decent enough
Not everything has be a Large Enterprise Application.
This is why I reach for a view library like React, Vue, or Svelte, even if I'm creating something simple. This is because I'm familiar with using these and they provide me with the ability to implement nearly any kind of dynamic functionality or interactions I could want, fine control over component lifecycle, and tight integration with my CSS library of choice to speed up development.
End-users are none the wiser, that is of course unless I do a terrible job using these tools.
Then of course you're left to reimplement basic browser functionality that you now lost (or more likely, you just grab another package that solves that and throw it in your payload).
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 listeners. It's actually somewhat worrying - when regulations hit us, we'll have to scramble hard to get back what we threw out.
But all in all I kind of agree with you that it's very hard to find high profile examples of sites that are "HTML first". I believe in it, but haven't actually seen it pan out. But I suspect the reasons for it not panning out might be purely in education. By the time HTML became powerful, frontend dev education was already deeply framework-focused.
Because the tools to create it are relatively new, and the sites you're speaking of had already been written. What high-profile site didn't already have a massive legacy React/Angular/Vue codebase, and a team of framework-trained developers, as of 2021?
TBH that's not a framework vs HTML issue, that's just sloppy or inexperienced devs
If the rendering framework doesn't support accessibility as a first class citizen (or better yet, automatically creates/makes accessibility part of what is rendered), then the framework is not suitable for production use.
> entirely on you
of course - choosing a framework or hand rolling one makes no difference. It's still not production ready, if it doesn't have accessibility built in.
Choosing, for example, whether to use a div with a click handler, or a proper button, is a decision you need to make regardless of whether or not you're using a framework.
So it seems incorrect to say that you lost accessibility in this case due to the framework. You lost accessibility due to developers who didn't understand the web platform well enough to design proper accessible controls. If they hadn't used a framework, they'd probably still not have made the site accessible.
And i actually think that it is _better_ for a developer not to have to do their own accessibility controls, but delegate this problem to the component framework. They have to know about the problem, but not have to spend cognitive budget thinking about it while they compose their UI from framework components - this should _automatically_ be taken care of by the design of the framework.
Frameworks also have linters that will help a lot, it’s on you to use them
Admittedly I had the same reaction you did as I was reading the article. All I could think was how poorly these approaches would scale when the need arose for even modest ly complex state management.
While the body of the article doesn't address this, IMO the title does. I think it's generally good advice to suggest only reaching for the tools intended for complex environments when they become necessary, not before.
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’m absolutely for reducing complexity as much as possible, but I’m highly skeptical these principles will achieve that and I would not be surprised if it increases complexity by having multiple ways to do something.
With peace and love but I can’t see from this list if you actually put these principles to the test or you just assumed it will do what you hope it will.