A masterful rant about the shit state of the web from a front-end dev perspective
There’s a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn’t possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSR only in the context of Node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air2.
Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shitty div soup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere.
Server-side rendering means it’s rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.
Lemmy, e.g. this here site, uses React too. Probably about as weirdly as they use Rust, even as the site appears to present an ok front end.
it’d be very nice to have a progressively enhanced static frontend instead since there’s really nothing about any of this that should require JavaScript (and something like unpoly would give us react SPA style functionality strictly as an enhancement on top of plain HTML)
this might be a cool project for someone to pick up once work on Philthy gets going; most of the alternative Lemmy frontends still have an unnecessary JS framework dependency, or are lacking features for essentially no reason
The main reason companies use frontend frameworks is it’s easier to continue development through employee turnover. If your app was written in react or angular you just have to hire someone who knows how those work and they can get up to speed pretty quickly. Modularity also allows for code reuse. It increases maintainability. Labor isbtye major cost of software development, so making things easier and faster to develop and maintain is better from a business perspective than ensuring your app can run on a 15 year old iphone.
If you wanna go frameworkless, JS-less, or whatever on your personal projects then fine. If you insist on it in a professional team environment, you’re making everyone’s lives more difficult.
I’ve heard this exact same bullshit spun defending choosing golang too, and it’s just as bullshit there as it is here
and that’s not even touching on the aspect of this being based on the extremely toxic “oh yeah just burn them up and find the next one” mentality that has become far more prevalent in the world under the umbrella of zirp-funded bayfuckery gaining international traction
I beg you to go consider whether this is your actual position, or some shit you picked up from someone else. to consider what the effects of this stance are, not just today but in 5/10/15y+. it should be quite easy to see both how it helped us get into the collective pile of shit we now do have, as well as why it won’t ever be good
I’ve been forced to do react for years and I still don’t like or understand it. Most times plain JavaScript is easier and quicker to write and quite maintainable if people can resist the urge to take the piss with nested anonymous functions.
I honestly can’t get my head around the idea that people can hit the ground running with react, but can’t write unabstracted JavaScript. It’s like a MotoGP rider not being able to ride a push bike.
as a developer my favourite thing about react componentisation is how it makes me and my team more readily replaceable
thank fuck neither myself nor this instance have employees, turnover, or shitty little project managers that get heartburn when the stack’s HTML5, CSS, and a non-shitty templating language instead of HTML5, react/angular/svelte/whichever frontend framework the market decided is in demand this quarter, a CSS in JS library, an ORM, webpack, and whichever npm clone tweaks your nipples the most
and you’d better hope you chose “right” on all of those pieces of the stack, cause you’re infantilizing your devs so much you think it’s impossible for them to learn a new frontend framework, or how to do modularity or maintainability in a basic fucking backend templating language. do they also have to ask your permission to take a piss?
but why are you posting here? it’s almost Monday and you’ve got an hour-long, unproductive standup to preside over
i keep finding so much that’s done with JS that there’s perfectly good CSS for
it turns out browser rendering is fucking fast in 2024
fucking exactly! I’ve been doing a lot of CSS-only work for the sneer archive rewrite, and it’s shocking how fast everything renders without JS, and how much functionality you can retain with a good enough CSS framework and careful markup
I’m also working on a JavaScript library and associated rant named fuckery because it turns out you can’t use Web Components without some utterly unnecessary JavaScript, because the W3C decided to do a fuckery
we used to strive for minimum possible front-end payload, and it was an embarrassment to do anything with JS that wasn’t backed up by a non-js default. Will never forget how suddenly React removed all those things from front-end team meetings.
They were solid industry-wide concerns that just… disappeared
