I'll have you know I spent time on organizing and structuring my code with early JS design patterns like IIFEs to limit scope, lazy loading of modules, and minification.
Anyway, in my experience, AngularJS was the biggest attempt at making structured front-end applications, and it really appealed / appeals (Angular is still very popular apparently) to Java developers; biggest ones was its modularization (which wasn't a thing in JS yet), dependency injection, and testability.
When we started out with an app in Backbone (to replace a Flex app because it wouldn't work on the ipad), I actually advocated against things like testing, thinking that the majority of functionality would be in the back-end. I was wrong, and the later AngularJS rebuild was a lot more intensive in front-end testing.
Of course, nowadays I'm repulsed by the verbosity, complexity and indirection of modern-day Angular code. or Java code for that matter.
Interestingly, new Angular is slowly moving away from these, introducing Signals for state management and standalone components, and I see these developers actually struggling a lot to adopt new Angular patterns.
Still, I believe Angular is a really great platform for building B2B or enterprise apps. It’s testing and forms handling is far ahead of every other SPA, and it actually fees like a cohesive framework where people have spent time designing things the right way; something I absolutely cannot say about react frameworks such as Next.js or Remix.
Errors/messages/warnings is one of the first things I do in an app framework, since it's incredibly hard to "bolt that on" later.
So in addition to aggressive caching, I’d say keeping the app’s file size down is also pretty important to making it useful on poor connections. That’s frequently something that’s barely optimized at all, unfortunately.
So unless it is an all text app, the size of the code bundle is probably going to be quickly dwarfed by the size of media like images, animated images, or videos.
If a site has an SPA with a, say, 3mb code bundle, I think in most cases, that’s not an architecture issue. It’s probably an issue of poor engineering and switching to a MPA is not suddenly going to make those engineers competent.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1cqhr4i/what_is_up...
Out in Cali they have ring of fire conditions.
Too much crowding can do it too. A decade ago I was going to Cali a lot and thought it was funny to see so many ads for geospatial apps on TV that always showed a map of San Francisco when for me SF was where GIS went to die. Taking my Garmin handheld to the roof of the Moscone center because it was the only place it could get a clear view of the sky to sync up with GPS, so many twisty little streets that routing algorithms would struggle…. Being guided around to closed restaurant after closed restaurant and walking past 10+ open ones because a co-worker was using Yelp, etc.
HTTP 2 has been adopted by browsers for like 10 years now and its multiplexing makes packaging large single bundles of JS irrelevant. SPA’s that use packaging of large bundles doesn’t leverage modern browser and server capabilities.
H2 doesn’t make packing irrelevant… there’s still an IPC overhead with many small files… and larger bundles tend to compress better (though compression dictionaries might help here)
Large Js bundles are a huge problem though
Any Turing-complete system is spaghetti in the hands of bad programmers. And simple & clear in the hands of good ones who know how to design.
My bet is that everyone here both agrees with you and is able to replace "jQuery" with "HTML", "CSS", and "JavaScript" to reach similar conclusions about the cultures of each. The problem is bad programmers, not the tech.
It isn’t really equipped or opinionated on statefulness, which means that everybody was at one point kludging stuff onto it that didn’t make sense.
Now I used to hate uncontrolled forms but now I like react-hook-form.
There is a certain level of complexity beyond which you need to load data on the fly (instead of all up front on page load) and you literally cannot avoid an SPA. Choosing to build an SPA is not just some arbitrary whimsical decision that you can always avoid.
Sometimes people just go straight to SPA because they're unsure about the level of complexity of the app they're building and they build an SPA just to be sure it can handle all the requirements which might come up later.
One of my first jobs involved rebuilding a multi-page EdTech 'website' as an SPA, the multi-page site was extremely limiting, slow and not user-friendly for the complex use cases which had to be supported. There was a lot of overlay functionality which wouldn't make sense as separate pages. Also, complex state had to be maintained in the URL and the access controls were nuanced (more secure, easier enforce and monitor via remote API calls than serving up HTML which can mix and match data from a range of sources).
I think a lot of the critiques of SPAs are actually about specific front end frameworks like React. A lot of developers do not like React for many of the reasons mentioned like 'resetting scrollbars' etc... React is literally a hack to try to bypass the DOM. It was built on the assumption that the DOM would always be unwieldy and impossible to extend, but that did not turn out to the the case.
Nowadays, with custom web components, the DOM is actually pretty easy to work with directly but info about this seems to be suppressed due to React's popularity. Having worked with a wide range of front end frameworks including React for many years, the developer experience with Web Components is incomparably superior; it works exactly as you expect, there are no weird rendering glitches or timing issues or weird gotchas that you have to dig into to. You can have complex nested components; it's fast and you have full control over the rendering order... You can implement your own reactivity easily by watching attributes from inside a Web Component. The level of flexibility and reliability you get is incomparable to frameworks like React; also you don't need to download anything, you don't need to bundle any libraries (or if you do, you can choose how to bundle them and to what extent; you have fine-grained control over the pre-loading of scripts/modules), the code is idiomatic.
what do you do about the lack of (i assume) ecosystem? due to the ready ubiquity there's practically a library for everything. do you find that using WC you are having to hand roll a lot? i don't mean to be a package slave but for complex and tedious things like graphs / charts.
I presume Web Components are so great they haven't had anything happen since 2018
Ehm... define the Web Component render blocking in the head, because you want to prevent FOUCs. Then try to access the .innerHTML of your Web Component in the connectedCallback
https://dev.to/dannyengelman/web-component-developers-do-not...
With React, the component either gets rendered or it doesn't get rendered; all or nothing and React fully controls this. With web components you can also just nit-pick a single element within the component's DOM and only update that one. It gives you more opportunities in terms of performance optimization and how you split up your components... But you can also achieve a similar result as React by just re-rendering the whole component if necessary.
The one difficulty which is actually an advantage IMO is that you cannot pass JavaScript object or function references to Web Components via HTML attributes; you have to pass primitive values... But IMO this a BENEFIT because it forces separation of concerns and it makes the DOM way easier to debug in the dev console. For advanced use cases you can still pass JS refs to a child component by calling methods on it but I try to avoid this because it makes it harder to understand the state of a component.
I like it when I can understand the state of a component just by looking at its attributes and I like those values to be as simple and human-readable as possible. I love opening up my dev console and just tweaking the HTML attributes directly and see the change happening. Makes debugging a breeze. Kind of tricky to do with React and you get into all sorts of weird situations where a render may not trigger when you expect when you change properties of an object without changing the reference itself. React adds a lot of unnecessary complexity there.
(I love this silly site for downvoting this question.)
Being able to reliably and programmatically interact with client-side storage and the url, as well as improvements in DOM apis and commodification of hardware with more ram and faster faster CPUs, among many others factors, seem to have contributed.
Workforce market forces like that have a vastly greater effect than “bandwidth optimisation”.
My evidence for this is simple: every SPA app I’ve ever seen is two orders of magnitude slower than ordinary HTML would have been. There is almost never a bandwidth benefit in practice. Theoretically, sure, but every app I come across just dumps half the database down the wire and picks out a few dozen bytes in JS code. There's a comment right here in this discussion advocating for this! [1]
Another angle is this: if you had a top 100 site with massive bandwidth costs, then sure, converting your app to a SPA might make financial sense. But instead what I see is tiny projects start as a SPA from day one, and no chance that their bandwidth considerations — either cost or performance — will ever be a factor. Think internal apps accessed only over gigabit Ethernet.
I’ve seen static content presented as a SPA, which is just nuts to me.
[1] "It's much better ux when a user downloads the whole catalogue" from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44688834
I'd argue then you don't have an SPA. However I don't see how you could have a application like Figma or Discord and say "ordinary HTML is faster" (or even possible).
Every popular technology has been over implemented - these same enterprises probably have a 100-node Spark cluster to process 1GiB of data.
YouTube, for me, is unfathomably slow. It takes about a minute before I can get a specific song in one of my playlists playing. Every view change is 5-20 seconds, easily.
Facebook and the like now show polyfills for 10-30 characters of text, because hundreds of thousands of servers struggle to deliver half a line of text over terabits of fibre uplinks. Meanwhile my 2400 baud modem in the 1990s filled the screen with text faster!
Jira famously was so slow that this would never fail to be mentioned here any time it was mentioned. Service Now is better, but still slow for my tastes.
Etc...
If you disagree, link to me a fast SPA app that you use on a regular basis.
PS: Just after writing this, I opened a Medium article, which used -- I assume -- SSR to show me the text of the article quickly, then replaced it with grey polyfills, and then 6 full seconds later it re-rendered... the same static text with a client-side JavaScript SPA app. 100 requests, 7 MB, for 2 KB of plain text.
If you limit history to the most recent message (and have an link to the archive at the top) you could simply reload the entire page on some interval that declines with message frequency (and when you submit the form)
Since the html document is pretty much empty the reload happens so fast you won't see the flashing. With transitions it would be perfectly smooth.
With modern css you can put the elements out of order. You can simply append the new line to the end of the html document that represents the channel. (And to the archive) Purging a few old lines can be done less frequently.
I haven't tried it but it should work just fine. I will have to build it.
Initial load will be 100x faster. The page reloads will be larger but also insanely robust.
No, I mean discord. An application where you can chat, recieve phone calls and watch a live stream all at the same time.
A pure html chat client is uninteresting - there have been realtime html chat clients since I was teenager, even before the release of jquery.
Phone calls and live streams are things for which a tab needs to stay open. If you want to do other things simultaneously both the browser and the OS could facilitate it - but do so rather poorly.
It's not why people make spa's it seems?
Calling Discord "a chat cliënt [sic]" is barely one step removed from "I could build that in a weekend". So go ahead. Wait, what is stopping you?
If you have a huge org working on the project you might actually succeed in sticking to that architecture even when serving as plain old HTML, but smaller teams are likely to eventually write full stack spaghetti (which might still be fine for some use cases!). Once there was a fashionable term "progressive web app", with manifest workers optionally moving some backend stuff into the browser for offline-ish operation, and these days I also see a parallel pattern: progressively moving a browser UI into an electron-esque environment, where you can features requiring more local access than the browser would allow.
This never happens, for some values of never.
When a SPA app is initially developed, the "client" and the "API" are moulded to each other, like a bespoke piece of couture tailored to an individual's figure. Hand-in-glove. A puddle in a depression.
There is absolutely no way that some other category of platform can smoothly utilise such a specialised, single-purpose API without significant changes.
The reality is that most SPA apps are monoliths, even if the client app and the API app are in different Git repos in order to pretend that this is not the case.
I'd love to see examples of where this is actually the case and it's drastically different from just sending HTML on the wire.
Most SPAs I've worked on/with end up making dozens of large calls after loading and are far far slower than just sending the equivalent final HTML across from the start. And you can't say that JSON magically compresses somehow better than HTML because HTML compresses incredibly well.
Most arguments about network concerns making SPAs a better choice are either propaganda or superstition that doesn't pan out in practice.
There are complete CAD applications running in browsers for PCB and mechanical design with many layers, 3D view, thousands of components, etc.
For example: https://easyeda.com/ https://www.onshape.com
> because HTML compresses incredibly well
Haven't compression under TLS have been mostly disabled after CRIME and BREACH attack?
It's a vanishingly small number of things that are actually vulnerable to this attack, and I've never even heard of a successful real-world exploit (tho it's not like the attackers that might use this go and tell everyone).
JS is fine to use too as needed. Generally, it's not needed. Small snippets to pop open modals or flyouts of whatever covers a huge number of use cases.
Your comment then falls under my "superstition" label.
My experience has been that the HTML version will send overall less data since it contains precisely what is required by the UI and nothing more. The JSON APIs try to be "generic" across clients and either send more than the client needs or send less and cause the client to wait on a waterfall of requests to load everything.
You should always run benchmarks for your use case but the majority of web projects are not Figma or AutoCAD and benefit drastically from simpler approaches. A single compressed HTML response will beat a cascade of JSON ones every time.
Cascading is a separate problem. You can bundle all the data into a single request if you want.
You can even send JSON along with the HTML in the first request.
For requests after the first, you can still continue to send the rendered HTML to be placed into the document. Here's an example using HTMX: https://htmx.org/examples/lazy-load/
Use JS to patch over things the browser doesn't implement and let it handle the rest.
This implies or assumes that sending the template again is a problem. In practice, it's not. HTML compresses well and the difference between the compressed JSON and HTML response is often on the order of hundreds of bytes. That assumes equivalent data content which, as I've said above, is often not the case. JSON payloads tend to be larger and we need more of them to render the same UI.
Agreed. The article was a frustrating read. The author is an SEO consultant. SEO consultants likely have a heavy focus on marketing websites. Actual apps and not marketing websites do benefit significantly from SPA. Imagine building Google Maps without SPA. You can animate page transitions all you want, the experience will suck!
he has a really warped view that SPAs are somehow purely about routing.
he does correctly point out that a lot of sites could and should be treated as sites not apps.
IMO it will be hard for some traditional sites to adapt to the new browser capabilities, since we've built an entire ecosystem around SPAs. The author's advice should've been: use the browser's built-in capabilities instead of client-side libraries whenever possible.
Also, keep in mind he's sharing his own experience, which might be different from ours. I've used some great SPAs and some terrible ones. The bad ones usually come down to inexperience from developers and hiring managers who don't understand performance, don't measure it, don't handle errors properly, and ignore edge cases.
Some devs build traditional sites as SPAs and leave behind a horrible UX and tech debt the size of Mount Everest. If you don't know much about software architecture, you're more likely to make mistakes, no matter what language or framework you're using.
I realised years ago there's no "better" language, framework, platform, or architecture, just different sets of problems. That's why developers spend so much time debating implementation details instead of focusing on the actual problems or ideas. And that's fine, debates can be useful as long as we don't lose sight of what we're trying to solve and why.
For example: Amazon's developers went with an MPA. Airbnb started as an MPA but now uses a hybrid approach. Google Maps was built as an SPA, while the team behind Search went with an MPA.
It's usually inevitable, so it's easier to scaffold a Vite template and get cracking without any additional setup. The time-to-deploy is fast using something like Netlify or Vercel, and then I have the peace of mind knowing I can add additional routes or features in a consistent, predictable way that fits the framework's patterns.
I'd hate to develop an MPA and realize after the fact that now I need complex, shared data across routes and for the UX to be less disrupted by page loads. Once you've dug that hole, you either have to live with it, or face a painful rewrite later.
The exception I often see is targeting mobile devices in low-bandwidth areas where larger application bundles take longer to load, but I have to wonder how often this is the target audience. I live in a place where mobile data speeds are horrible, and access to WiFi is abundant, but even so, I rarely have a situation where I *need* to load up a non-critical site on the go — and having apps pre-installed doesn't really help either when the data they're requesting is barely trickling in on mobile.
So this oft-used exception doesn't really make sense to me unless I learned why this is so critical for some people.
At my company, our React SPA uses just over 500+ components across maybe ~30 views, with many smaller components alongside many of them in the same files. Our bundle size is obscene, but our customers are using fast PCs on fast connections. Once it's cached, they're good -- and each new release is roughly every 2-4 weeks, so fresh visits are painless.
As for server-side rendering from RSC, Next, Nuxt, and SvelteKit, I'd say they're overkill in most situations. The amount of people deploying simple sites on Vercel using Next.js, not really using its features, is just silly (and costly).
The cost of speculating a highly interactive site that users will want to interact with is a suboptimal baseline experience until you get there. Provided you get there without losing users, it'll still be a subset of your audience that use your thing in a way that truly offsets all of these costs. If that works for your product/business, then awesome! But if these costs are too high and will hurt your product, then you need to be a lot more deliberate about how you engineer it.
I typically approach the problem first and see what tools work best to solve the problem, rather than work backwards from my preferred set of tools.
> Once you've dug that hole, you either have to live with it, or face a painful rewrite later.
Based on the tools you mentioned familiarity with, wouldn't something like Astro be a happy middle ground? You start as an MPA by default and only add complexity to parts (entire routes or parts of a page) of the application that require it? Also, this hole goes both ways. If you've built your site as a SPA, and you realise that your product just needs to be HTML to stay competitive, it's a painful road to unpick the layers of abstraction you've bought if you don't wanna rewrite it.
> dynamic features, anything from basic showing / hiding of content, list / configuration-based rendering, or requesting data
What would a highly dynamic feature be in your opinion and how does a SPA framework help you? All of the examples mentioned here, in my opinion, are fantastic candidates for server side templating and progressive enhancement. I don't need see the need for the SPA architecture here.
> mobile devices in low-bandwidth areas
Curious to know what kind of devices are present in your area? The implications of larger applications is both network and CPU [1], so if you live in a relatively wealthy area (say over 75% of users had iPhones) you'd notice the negative effects of too much JS less. If you're in the public sector or building for the public, then you can't get away with the excuse that people on slow devices and networks aren't your target audience; you need to meet everyone where they're at. A HTML-first architecture is a better and more inclusive baseline for all.
[1] https://infrequently.org/2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-...
Absolutely, but it is additional boilerplate I have to worry about that serves as another layer alongside whatever SPA framework I prefer; whereas spinning up a Vite template with Vue, writing a few routes + components, and getting it built + deployed is easier. It's at such a low cost (bundle size, time, boilerplate) that the optimizations gained from Astro aren't even in my purview unless I'm experiencing a significant enough scale that justifies static rendering.
When my apps are feeling and behaving perfectly already, why optimize? It only comes with increased scope and cost to bend around another layer.
> If you've built your site as a SPA, and you realize that your product just needs to be HTML to stay competitive
This does go both ways, yes, but with SPAs, I have more flexibility around client-side features like transitions, animations, pagination for smaller datasets, and state-based views that depend on a lot of different interactions, user selections, etc. that all drive what gets displayed instantly, without making a single network request just to complete the interaction. The Venn diagram between the two shows SPAs doing more out of the box, at such a low cost to commit.
Whereas with MPAs and server-side templating, a better-feeling UI isn't a luxury you can enjoy without some form of JavaScript to wire up page interactions. Given these are often a requirement, you'll find yourself haphazardly adding an SPA library to an existing MPA to enhance the perceived UX that it couldn't provide. Then you're not only juggling 2 scripting languages, but also reconciling the separation of concerns between your client/server now.
Although, happy-mediums have emerged: 37signals created Hotwire to help bridge this gap, Laravel has a similar library Intertia.js, and htmx+Alpine is another interesting solution.
Lastly on this point, Svelte's build step strips your SPA into the smallest possible runtime. Svelte was actually built for creating SPAs intended to run on low-power devices [1] typically seen in places like LATAM. React also has an official compiler that memoizes component data and callbacks. Preact is a 3kb alternative to React (40kb) for low-power devices, sharing the same APIs with only a few minor differences.
React, Vue, and Svelte all have server-side rendering where you can comfortably write sites/apps that serve up smaller bundles and stream updates to the client as needed, without sacrificing a pleasant UX. So, to answer your question "what if your SPA needs to be HTML to stay competitive?" -- these are all the most sustainable paths with the lowest costs.
>> You may be asking, "why don't you learn + use some of the alternatives you listed?"
As any reasonably tired, middle-aged engineer would say: I'm happy with the language(s), tools, libraries, and frameworks I'm comfortable using. The incessant drive to learn new tools that pretty much do the same thing with dubious (and likely negligible) benefit at smaller scale feels like a distraction when I could just be building and shipping something with familiar tech that thousands of other developers enjoy using. I also benefit from the community support as well, not to mention, AI tools are best used in TypeScript codebases currently.
Server-side templating requires dedicated hosting / VPS, which is a whole 'nother layer of deploying, managing, and debugging. Static sites and SPAs can be hosted with a static host for free (unless you scale like crazy), and any data-related needs are solved with serverless services like Supabase, Convex, lambdas/functions, and any number of others -- all with generous free plans and some level of portability.
In my case, I'm only developing SaaS applications not needing mobile support, that are only used by companies that buy decent computers for their employees. Otherwise I'm building small webapps for personal use and some that may become a hit among niche communities. Even my personal site is a tiny Vue app, and only because it's familiar and easy to change. The performance fiends can cry all they want that it isn't purely static, and in many ways, that amuses me.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...
It's a reimagination of ye Olde three tier approach. Perfect for apps.
Incorrect.
> It's also certainly the cause of the broken navigation, just like the original article explains.
Also incorrect.
The Google Maps app is also total garbage. It’s not an SPA, so that’s clearly not the cause.
Being able to come back to a webpage with previous directions? I think it would be glorious.
Many websites simply have some session/state dependent page.
They are either the worst developers in the world or it is not simple.
I don’t rule any of the two possibilities out.
Some things you get for free with the correct architecture. For whatever reason, SPA does not have a great track record with their users.
Or they have a good reason to not do it (in some PMs mind).
At a guess, resetting the view, and displaying the nearest Domino's Pizza sponsored highlight pin on the map, could be one of them.
If this is an intentional choice, all in an effort to show me more local ads… ugh. I really hope this isn’t the case.
https://datasette-tiles-demo.datasette.io/-/tiles/basemap?no...
I wish I could take full credit but it was a PR by dracos: https://github.com/simonw/datasette-tiles/pull/16
these days there's a "copy link" button for directions which you can save / share
(viper.pl 2000, philips.pl 2001 .. - are.. 'unreal' ??
'µloJSON': https://web.archive.org/web/20020702120539js_/http://www.vip...
historised chained htmls restart onerror: https://web.archive.org/web/20020402025320js_/http://www.aut... )
jQuery 2006, React 2013
Only for certain types of applications… the route change time for many SPA’s is way higher than for the equivalent MPA
SPAs also make sense when you want to decouple the front end from the back end, so that you have a stable interface like a RESTful API and once AngularJS gets deprecated you can move to something else, or that when your outdated Spring app needs to be updated, you'll have no server side rendering related dependencies to update (or that will realistically prevent you from doing updates, especially when JSF behavior has changed between versions, breaking your entire app when you update).
> When it is worth the pain to load a large bundle in exchange for having really small network requests after the load.
The slight difference in user experience might not even enter the equation, compared to the pain that you'd have 5 years down the line maintaining the project. As for loading the app, bundle splitting is very much a thing and often times you also get the advantage of scoped CSS (e.g. works nicely in Vue) and a bunch of other things.
What is the cause of this?
1. Bad experiences with JavaScript apps that have aggregated complexity (be it essential or incidental complexity)?
2. Non-JS developers mystified and irritated at a bunch of practices they've never really internalised?
3. The undercurrent of "frontend is not real programming" prejudice that existed long before React etc al. and will continue to exist long after it?
Modern CSS is powerful, and HTML is the way to deliver web content.
Every web framework is _literally_ a hack to make the web something it isn’t. People who haven’t seen the evolution often pick up the bad habits as best practice.
For thise JavaScript people, I recommend trying Laravel or Ruby/Rails. And then once you realize that JavaScript sucks you’ll minimize it.
What I find interesting though is the assumption that web dev is done by "JavaScript people", that even the best "JavaScript people" have no technical breadth, and therefore fester in a cesspool of bad ideas, unlike your median backend dev who swims in the azure lakes of programming wisdom.
Now, I've done plenty of SPAs, but I've also done plenty of other things (distributed systems, WebVR apps, metaprogramming tools, DSLs, CLIs, STB software, mobile apps, a smidgeon of embedded and hobbyist PSOne games). Which gives me the benefit of a generalist perspective.
One thing I have observed is that in each silo, there are certain programmers who assume they are the only sane group in the industry. They aren't interested in what problems the other siloes are solving and they assume any solution "over there" they don't understand is bad / decadent / crazy.
These groups all regard each other with contempt, even though they are largely addressing similar fundamental issues in different guises.
It's a social dynamic as much as any technical one.
Without a cohesive community, mutual respect, and recognition of a shared body of knowledge, we don’t have the solidarity to make it happen.
As for Laravel, I’d say people were making complex applications (Ebay, Amazon, Yahoo) in 1999 —- Google Maps were better than Mapquest, which drew each image with a cgi-bin, but many SPA applications are form handling applications that could have been implemented with the IBM 360 and 3270 terminal.
The OG web was missing a few things. Forms were usually written on one HTML page and received by a separate cgi-script. To redraw the form in case of errors you need one script that draws the form and draws the response and a router that choose which one to draw. You need two handfuls of helper functions, for instance
<? draw_select($options,$selected_options,$attributes) ?>
As for performance, web sites today really are bloated, it’s not just the ads and trackers, it’s shocking how big the <head/> of documents get when you are including three copies of the metadata. If you are just drawing a form and nothing else, it’s amazing how fast you can redraw the whole page —- if you are able to delete the junk, old school apps can be as fast as desktop apps on the LAN and still be snappy over mobile.
Yes, I was there, I wrote and used these pages. It sucked. Things are better now.
> So the knowledge to build the form applications we were building in 1999 is lost like the knowledge of how the pyramids were built.
Building a form with zero user affordances is not difficult. It just isn't good.
We absolutely know how the pyramids were built. You get a whole bunch of humans to move a very large amount of stone and then stack it up in a big pile. The reason nobody builds pyramids today is because we have better alternatives.
I've worked on some where it was valid choice but boy the annoyances, like not being able to test your components because you're on an old version of React where your test framework can never know when the last render happened because you depend on a large number of components which don't believe they'd run on the current react but probably would if you could just vendorize 30 or so packages and patch their package.json files.
Or depending on a test framework that refuses to look up components by class, id or selector because they want to force you to use aria, even when it doesn't make sense such as in three.js.
Or depending on a routing framework that doesn't get maintained, instead they've been through 7 incompatible versions of it which leaves me thinking that they didn't ever believe in what they were doing.
Or having to understand the internals of 5 CSS frameworks (including JS-heavy frameworks like Emotion) to handle all the components you've sucked in and still understand raw CSS through-and-through to fill the gaps.
I worked on one system which was frankly experimental at a startup that was doing two week sprints building a tool called "Themis" for building ML training sets. The thing was that we were always having to add new tasks and between Docker and an overengineered back end and front end it took 20 minutes to go from source code to being able to interact with the thing, so it took a 20 person team and lots of coordination between FE and BE engineers to do the simplest things.
I sketched out an alternative called "Nemesis" which grew into an HTMX-based system where it takes one programmer an hour to code a task and there is no build, and between Flask and the 15-or-so helpers it is easy. I've hacked it to be an RSS reader, an image sorter, and several other centaurs:
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114887102728039235
this feels like a desktop app when I am on the LAN and loads well under a second on a mobile hotspot the first time and every time. The key is that the tasks are nearly completely independent of each other, there are no builds and no dependencies, so writing a new task can't break old tasks. That system has plenty of screens that use d3.js for awesome visualizations and if I wanted to make a task that did something complicated which would really deserve React or Svelte or something I could do it, again, without breaking the the other tasks.
My argument here is basically creating that is really, really hard, and there's no framework or library that will make it easy.
React and friends are a mess because they're dealing with hard problems, kinda like systemd or kubernetes.
Writing code that lives entirely inside the machine is a lot easier than having to interface with the messy real world.
A lot of coders have realized there's social credit in trashing other programmers. I regularly see comments from people claiming to have a singular custodial spirit for their craft, unrivaled by their peers. There's obviously advantages to telling people that everyone else is holding it wrong.
Then their advice is
- Some niche trick that's completely irrelevant to most situations
- Something that sounds obvious and uncontroversial, but is so broad and vague that it's not even worth arguing about.
And I realize the irony of me making this comment. But I wish we'd get over this phase where everyone thinks they're an expert, and that every bad codebase or slow app was the result of someone who didn't care. I have yet to work with someone who didn't care about their code.
I can only speak to my own experience, but it’s been this way for the entire 18 years I’ve been doing this professionally and I can’t see it stopping anytime soon.
I just ignore it and write off people who openly think that way. It shows a lack of experience and empathy.
As opposed to Javascript, the pinnacle of tight standards and high quality performative code...
The same arguments that can be made against PHP/Laravel absolutely apply to Javascript equaly, if not more so due to the pretty well know shiny object syndrome issues that many JS devs get caught up in.
It's an entirely different concept. It's certainly not the right technology for a news site, but days ago in a different place, there was for example the discussion about how an SPA and minimalistic API services fit a lot better with your average embedded device.
A distribution and installation system that works on almost any device?
Theres next to no reason why the vast majority of sites on the web would ever need to be heavily reliant on JS. Rendered HTML/CSS with JS being used sparingly for page functionality is a far better user experience. I'll never understand the obsession with JS for the sake of JS.
your comment is funny, because you are so wrong you aren't even aware how and why you are wrong. It's in "not even wrong" territory. I'll explain you why.
> Modern CSS is powerful, and HTML is the way to deliver web content.
Irrelevant. That's not why the world uses JavaScript frameworks. It seems you aren't even aware of the most basic reasons why the world migrated to SPAs. The most basic reasons are performance (and perceived performance), not only because the require less data to be moved around the internet but also every flow doesn't require full page reloads.
Also, classic old timey server-side rendered WebApps end up being far more complex to develop and maintain as you mix everything together and you are unable to have separation of concerns regarding how your platform is deployed and ran and how your frontend works. SPAs even allow your frontend team to go to the extent of handing your backend as if it was a third-party service, and some SPAs are even just that. There are plenty of CMSs out there which eliminate the need for a backend by providing all content needs through their commercial APIs. This makes webapppp projects greatly cheaper and simpler to finance and support as you can simply bother about developing and maintaining your SPA.
Lastly, those JavaScript frameworks you're trying to criticize also use CSS and HTML, by the way. So as you may understand your point is moot.
> Every web framework is _literally_ a hack to make the web something it isn’t.
You are clearly talking about things you have no understanding over. It matters nothing if you specify a DOM with a static file or procedurally. Updating only specific elements or branches of a DOM is a very basic usecases. In fact if you had any frontend experience at all you'd be aware that all mainstream GUI frameworks, including desktop, represent their UIs with a DOM.
So here you are trying to argue that frontend development is not frontend development just because you have an irrational axe to grind regarding a specific class of web development technologies?
> For thise JavaScript people, I recommend trying Laravel or Ruby/Rails.
If you hadn't already proven you are completely ignorant and detached from reality, this argument alone would leave no room for doubt.
If you call every hierarchy of visual items with some kind of layout manager(s) a DOM, then yes. Notably, the D doesn't really apply because GUIs aren't documents, and that's exactly why HTML is kind of awkward for GUI programming: it was initially designed for documents.
Edit: Sibling comment makes the good point that the main difference is that GUIs have mutable state while documents don't. I would add that GUIs also have controls to change that mutable state, which is a more superficial difference, but well, web-based GUIs are still extremely varied in their interaction styles, which not necessarily good.
> The most basic reasons are performance (and perceived performance), not only because the require less data to be moved around the internet but also every flow doesn't require full page reloads.
I can't keep a straight face at this one. If there's one thing the web isn't anymore, it's "fast." Presumably what you are getting at is server performance, because it's pushing all the work to the client.
Anyway there's a good talk on this - https://veryinteractive.net/pdfs/ceglowski-thewebsiteobesity...
> > Every web framework is _literally_ a hack to make the web something it isn’t.
> You are clearly talking about things you have no understanding over. It matters nothing if you specify a DOM with a static file or procedural
Don't be so dismissive. This is like the old anecdote about one fish saying to the other, "how's the water." The "something it isn't" is stateful. The web was not designed to be stateful, and every web framework is indeed a hack to work around that.
This sentence is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting that doesn't fit with reality
You could maybe say "every framework is a hack to workaround protocols primarily designed in the 90's before we really understood the full application of the web"
Not this old grumpy person take again.
Yes, the web is developing beyond delivering html content.
I work on an app, the front-end of which essentially consists of 6 nav tabs, 3 of which show an index of records with corresponding add/edit forms. We don't have any hyper-fancy interactive components that would require heavy JS libraries. And yet... we develop in React.
Yesterday, I needed to add 1 new field (representing by a checkbox input) to both our app and a corresponding back-end application we have, which uses Rails views.
I checked the git logs after to see how long each took. The Rails view took me literally 2 minutes to update (add field to model, add field to controller, add input to HAML with a class on the parent div). The React view took me 52 minutes, plus I later found out that I'd forgotten a damn type on some interface that's a shallow copy of our model.
Is this a problem with React itself? Not really. But it's a problem in the way that it's used, and our 6 nav tabs and 3 forms don't need all the overhead of React. So for people in a similar situation, this article really rings true.
React is far from the best tool for most jobs (if any), but it has a shitload of inertia.
I can highly recommend looking into Lit (used to be Polymer): https://lit.dev/docs/
IMHO it allows just the right amount of encapsulation and structure, whilst building on W3C web components and being highly interoperable with other javascript libraries/vanilla code. It's pretty much what web components should be out of the box.
Is React really a "heavy" library? https://bundlephobia.com/package/[email protected]
> The React view took me 52 minutes, plus I later found out that I'd forgotten a damn type on some interface that's a shallow copy of our model.
This sounds like bad architecture, nothing about React would necessitate this. And if your typechecker isn't catching missing types, then it sounds like your types aren't adding much value.
Ok, so why is it possible to do it so wrong so often then? That sounds like a downside of the tool. It is a sharp knife. That doesn’t mean there is no place for react, but it also doesn’t mean we have to wipe it under the rug and pretend like it is everybody else’s fault.
I never read a story about it taking an hour to add a field to a form in Rails and it only taking 2 minutes in react. I’ve experienced the other way around for years though. So there is some truth to it. Let’s embrace the truth and look for what react brings us despite this.
My objection is not that they are doing React wrong, it’s that their complaint is incoherent because there is literally nothing about React that could make this task take an hour. React isn’t a form library. You write the markup for an html input element, if it’s a controlled input you have a trivial one-line change event handler, and you have a submit event handler. Any additional complexity here isn’t coming from React, and managing to overcomplicate such a basic thing and misidentify the source of the complexity absolutely speaks to a skill issue.
This is especially funny in a thread where posters hold up Rails as a paragon of quality and efficiency.
I do like front end libs. I use them sometimes for the right context. But all the business apps I've worked on have never needed a front end lib. With web components even less so than before as the state based interactions that are local to that input element or some other element doesn't need a full blown framework.
My favorite front end lib right now is VanJS. It feels like writing straight vanilla JS without the cruft of writing actual vanilla JS. HTMX is good too, if you are working with back end state but need a little more smooth interaction. Of course, Datastar, html-form, etc all work too.
At the same time, the part of the program that interfaces with the physical world (e.g., people) is always going to be far more complex and thus harder than the bits that get to live entirely inside the computer world.
Also, I'm not the biggest fan of React and think there are options that are a million times better like Vue & Svelte, but React is not heavy. Yes, JS frontends pull in a lot of libraries, but React (or any other framework except for probably Angular and Ember) is far from being the biggest or heaviest dependency in any project. In fact, especially React does this amazingly, React itself has 0 external dependencies. Usually people will also want react-dom, so for the simplest possible application, that's a grand total of 2 very lightweight dependencies, and for usecases like yours of a few forms, that's literally all you'd need.
Sure, maybe your 3 forms don't need React, but it sounds like you're actively adding stuff to it (and even caught a type issue from the sound of it). The non React version of this work would've entailed targeting a querySelector's inner `.value` key, and then having to parse it if it's not a simple string and safe guard against the element not being there, or targeting a shifting ID or class or all the other numerous and tedious problems that arise. Or, you stick a `v-model` on it, send it as JSON and call it a day, I categorically refuse to pretend the old universe pre-SPA frameworks was in any way a good way of working.
My current explanation goes something like this:
"I'm a smart guy. Front end development looks simple. If I find it hard to do, that must be the fault of javascript somehow"
Sometimes I'd be working with my team on something and they'd be like "why is this needed?" and I'm like "because javascript" or "because react."
While I agree with your sentiment that FE dev is certainly not simple, JS and front end architecture ad a whole does have its faults. That's why highly skilled FE devs who can build scalable, beautiful FE apps (whether using SPA or SSR) can be highly paid.
Analogy: imagine trying to give a good presentation with a horrible text-to-speech (or translation) system. Just because good presentations are hard that doesn't mean you don't get to complain about the program being terrible.
There are obviously flaws and issues and annoyances in js world, but a lot of those come from having to solve much harder problems (compared to say, do a sql query and turn the results into json).
Think about the presenting data part of it. Perhaps you have a table of data, prices of tickets or some such. You could literally just wrap each item in a <td> tag and each row in a <tr> tag and that would indeed be easy.
But people generally want and expect more. How about color coding the rows to make them easier to scan left to right or sorting the table by each column or paginating through more data than can easily displayed on one screen or maybe you're doing "infinite scroll" instead.
None of these things are impossible of course, and people have done them so many times and in so many different ways that there are dozens of libraries you can use and hundreds of tutorials, but even so, compare that to the "select from table turn to json" equivalent.
The SQL can be more than a bit tricky, but aside from that, JSON is extremely well defined and specified, even without a library you can just read the specs and do it. Wrapping it in a HTTP response and returning it and so on is likewise very well specified and if you can read, you can follow the instructions on how to do it.
Creating a UI that works the way a user wants to is the opposite of all that.
Of course, one of the major differences here is that at any point you can just stop improving the UI. Maybe you stop after wrapping it in the table html. The UI will certainly work, for a very specific definition of work. JSON is considerably more boolean. It either is a valid JSON document or it isn't. You can ask a computer to check for you. You can't ask a computer to check if your users enjoy using your table.
But there's been this really sharp over-correction to where now an obvious thing that is just common knowledge and that was never taboo is now considered impolite to even allude to. Frontend programming is among the easier kinds of software work as measured by the number of people who can do it? I bet if I tried really hard, I could probably be pretty kickass at pickleball, small court, not a lot moving around. But to be like, that's the same thing as the NFL. No, no it's not. I would never have been able to try out for the NFL, not if I live a thousand times.
There's pickleball and pro football in programming too.
That’s a poor measure. It proves only that there’s a demand for such programming. I have programmed in tens of languages professionally and many more for fun.
Programming is programming. I haven’t found much difference in difficulty between any of the stacks I’ve worked with. Except, maybe C++, but that’s just C++ being garbage. I now happily use Zig as an alternative, and it’s no more difficult— easier in fact— than building a well-architected, complex UI application of any kind.
I don’t share that confidence for the inverse in the nominal case
It's sad that so many seems to fall into the trap of 2).
(I've done both types of development for 20+ years)
Haswell <- Borg Hypervisor <- Borg Pod <- KVM Hypervisor <- QEMU guest <- docker-compose <- docker <- golang
?
I'm talking about hackers. I remember being like 24 and and a colleague of mine (legend) had never worked in JavaScript or really the web before was on our pod that got tasked with writing a browser for J2ME and BREW that implemented real web pages.
He goes home that weekend, and he comes back on Monday with a stack machine written in JavaScript (ECMA-262, we ran it on Rhino back then because Spidermonkey was a whole thing) that executed a very cute subset of JavaScript, including lambda closure and therefore Church encoding / untyped System 1. I was like whoa, why in JS? "If I have to implement it in a month, I'm already two months late to start learning it."
Is that guy a frontend developer? Backend? Full Stack? He had worked on DSPs and audio before, and on video codecs and embedded.
My comment above about some of this stuff is harder isn't a diss to anyone, it doesn't make me a millimeter shorter that Carmack is so tall, walking around in some rarefied air of genius I can't even formulate a picture of: it inspires me to work harder, try more ambitious things, push every day a little past yesterday's limit, and it has for more than 30 years now.
There's nothing wrong with programming be a job, it's a perfectly reasonable life choice and a very sensible one in light of life's other demands and opportunities. But some of us fucking love it, think about it all the time, live to be good at it. That's a different set of outcomes. And it does grate a bit to have everyone pushing this "it's all the same, we're all the same, it's one equivalent thing", that's my passion you're talking about, I take great pride in my life's singular ambition and pursuit. We're equal but we're not the same.
Well except the end user, but depending on the app they can often be low-priority (internal apps, apps with captive audiences like online banking or airline websites, etc.).
Given ramp up time, most backend engineers could build a bad frontend, or build a good one if they have a really good UX team that thought through everything and are just implementing their work.
In the real world though where UX is understaffed and often focused on the wrong problems - I've had to rescue too many frontends built by backend focused teams to share your confidence.
1. Very high output
2. Lots of AI images
3. Weird writing and editing lapses in several posts
I am moderately confident this post was written with an AI. It may not be totally AI produced, I think the author has probably edited the work, but I think we are mostly debating synthetic content.
I agree with the author. I love React. I shouldn’t need two dozen more dependencies. We ditched server side for client side in 2010 for speed. Now that we have 200x more compute power, more powerful CSS, more robust html (with web components), we can go back to server side rendering and only send what’s required for the user at the time of action.
...and yet, i keep running into web (and even mobile apps) that load the bundle, and subsequent navigation is just as slow, or _even slower_. Many banking websites, checking T-Mobile balance... you wait for the bundle to load on their super-slow website, ok, React, Angular, hundreds of megs, whatever. Click then to check the balance, just one number pulled in as tiny JSON, right? No, the website starts flashing another skeleton forever, why? You could say, no true SPA that is properly built would do that, but I run into this daily, many websites and apps made by companies with thousands of developers each.
Why would the browser have to reload the code (JS files) on every page transition, with proper caching headers?
Smooth transitions are a nice side effect, but not the reason for an SPA. The core argument of the article, that client-side routing is a solution for page transitions, is a complete misunderstanding of what problems SPAs solve. So absolutely, if you shared that misunderstanding of SPAs and used them to solve the wrong problem, this article is 100% correct.
But SPAs came about in the days of jQuery, not React. You'd have a complex app, and load up a giant pile of jQuery spaghetti, which would then treat each div of your app is its own little mini-app, with lots of small network requests keeping everything in sync. It solved a real problem, of not wanting to reload all that code every time a user on an old browser, with a slow connection, changed some data. jQuery made it feasible to do SPAs instead.
Later, React and other frameworks made it less spaghetti-like. And it really took off. Often, for sketchy reasons. But the strongest argument for SPAs remains using them as a solution to provide a single-load of a large code bundle, that can be cached, to provide minimal network traffic subsequent to the load when the expected session time of a user is long enough to be worth the trouble of the complexity of an SPA.