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Big Web Frameworks aren't there to "keep code bases organized and consistent", they're there to do stuff like render state changes into a complicated DOM withou

by fenomas 10y ago

Silhouette 10y ago
Big Web Frameworks aren't there to "keep code bases organized and consistent", they're there to do stuff like render state changes into a complicated DOM without causing jank, without FOUCs, without crashing IE9, etc. Those aren't problems that "adopting good coding standards" can solve. I respectfully disagree. You don't need a framework to do any of those things. I do a lot of work with relatively complicated browser-based UIs. In my experience, the DOM/layout thrashing and jank issues that have been getting a lot of attention lately only became a big deal in the first place because the early frameworks were so horrifically slow compared to just doing manual updates of exactly what you needed to change. Even in the most demanding applications -- and not many web apps actually are this demanding -- you could achieve pleasant, smooth results with some modest attention to how you applied updates so you didn't cause the browser to regenerate layout unnecessarily. (This would be an example of a useful coding standard, BTW.) Flashes of unstyled content/text/whatever are a symptom of serving web pages in chunks and how browsers render incrementally as more of the chunks are available. Again, dealing with these effects just requires some understanding of what causes them and a little care in how your site/app is served and does its initial setup. The frameworks don't do anything magic that you can't do in your own code. And finally, we were solving cross-browser portability problems with script repositories and then libraries like jQuery a long time before any of the modern frameworks were on the scene, and in a much more varied environment in the early days. IE has certainly had its issues over the years, but for the most part at least the issues were well known and you could just work around them. And again, there weren't really that many horrible issues, and this was an area where having some basic coding standards worked OK even if for some reason you didn't want to just use one of the many utility libraries.

by fenomas 10y ago

Silhouette 10y ago

Big Web Frameworks aren't there to "keep code bases organized and consistent", they're there to do stuff like render state changes into a complicated DOM without causing jank, without FOUCs, without crashing IE9, etc. Those aren't problems that "adopting good coding standards" can solve. I respectfully disagree. You don't need a framework to do any of those things. I do a lot of work with relatively complicated browser-based UIs. In my experience, the DOM/layout thrashing and jank issues that have been getting a lot of attention lately only became a big deal in the first place because the early frameworks were so horrifically slow compared to just doing manual updates of exactly what you needed to change. Even in the most demanding applications -- and not many web apps actually are this demanding -- you could achieve pleasant, smooth results with some modest attention to how you applied updates so you didn't cause the browser to regenerate layout unnecessarily. (This would be an example of a useful coding standard, BTW.) Flashes of unstyled content/text/whatever are a symptom of serving web pages in chunks and how browsers render incrementally as more of the chunks are available. Again, dealing with these effects just requires some understanding of what causes them and a little care in how your site/app is served and does its initial setup. The frameworks don't do anything magic that you can't do in your own code. And finally, we were solving cross-browser portability problems with script repositories and then libraries like jQuery a long time before any of the modern frameworks were on the scene, and in a much more varied environment in the early days. IE has certainly had its issues over the years, but for the most part at least the issues were well known and you could just work around them. And again, there weren't really that many horrible issues, and this was an area where having some basic coding standards worked OK even if for some reason you didn't want to just use one of the many utility libraries.