24 ms·

My personal recommendation would be to stay away from anything that ends in ".js" and do it the good old way with HTML & CSS. No customer ever asked for React,

My personal recommendation would be to stay away from anything that ends in ".js" and do it the good old way with HTML & CSS. No customer ever asked for React, or Angular, etc. I have never heard someone say "I wanted to buy your product/service but I'm not going to because you use boring HTML instead of React". Use the good old proven stuff until you can't, and then look at your options. There are scenarios where using React/Angular/etc makes sense. But for 99% of websites, it doesn't, especially if your website is a way to showcase content/goods instead of being an application itself.

guitarbill 8y ago
Agreed. Whatever happened to progressive enhancement or graceful degradation? Many a website and user experience is not enhanced by using Javascript at all.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  Not only is a lot of Javascript useless, but it actually degrades the user experience. The "new" Reddit completely kills my 12-inch MacBook when I load a page, and it still feels sluggish afterwards. That pile of garbage literally loads more code than content. YouTube's crap navigation system is the same - if you click on a video it will actually load it & update the page within the client using JS, and in my case it's considerably slower than just loading the server-generated page from scratch. I often find myself opening videos in new tabs (and closing the old ones) or hitting refresh as soon as the URL bar is updated just to avoid this shit because fetching & loading a brand new page is actually faster than their so-called "improvement".
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    I really hate the new Youtube experience, taking several seconds to display a full page.
  - mdewar 8y ago
    It seems the main slow down that users are experiencing on new reddit is due to two reasons. 1. Number of components 2. CSS-in-JS Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/redesign/comments/8smbob/an_update_on_performance/ https://www.reddit.com/r/redesign/comments/8smbob/an_update_...
- LarryL 8y ago
  Not to mention that MANY (too many!) websites don't display anything AT ALL, if you don't have Javascript enabled. Why? I'm not talking about "app"-like sites (like Gmail), where it -somewhat- makes sense to use Javascript, but blogs or information sites (i.e. text + images). The worst is that when you look at the domains to unblock, you often get dozens (not counting the Ads networks that I have already marked as untrusted)! This is crazy, a pretty simple page should NOT require all that complex (and slow) architecture. And don't get me started about the comments sections! Not only do they usually require Javascript to see anything (which is stupid since just reading them should not require it), but ALL their UIs seem to compete for the title of "most aggravating interface ever". They always seem to try their hardest to be slow, confusing, and once you get more than a few dozen messages on the page (as they load on demand), they become simply so difficult to use that it's a chore then a torture to try to reach the last (or first) one. I could also rant about the loss of bookmarking functionalities (because of infinite scrolling for instance), and of the previous/forward browsers' buttons... In summary: in many cases, if not most, Javascript is used in a way that kills the user experience instead of enhancing it. And I don't see things getting any better, quite the opposite.
  - Klover 8y ago
    The HTML version of Gmail works just fine without javascript. Which is funny because that's a webapp and the simple page websites that don't work could simply be a Word document usually. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049
pjmlp 8y ago
The majority of web development that I do still makes mostly use of server side rendering in Java and .NET frameworks, with the minimum JavaScript required for some dynamic behaviors. Works pretty well. On the .NET front MS is even bringing back a saner script management for Web devs. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/2018/04/17/library-manager-client-side-content-manager-for-web-apps/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/2018/04/17/library-m...
Hroble 8y ago
I have a story about a team that did this. They built an app using "good old" stuff and spaghetti features into it until it's impossible to add anything more, then spent a year rewriting everything in angular just so they could continue working on the product. It was probably not only a problem of a tech stack, but if you know that you need an SPA that is going to need to scale and have more components, it's only a waste of time to try to do it with vanillajs/css/html imo.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  > if you know that you need an SPA The problem is that every site out there thinks they need one while in fact only 1% truly needs one.
kowdermeister 8y ago
That's true for prototypes, 3 view web apps and simple stuff like that, but if you are building something more complex that you have to maintain for years with a team, then you better have some battle tested scaffolding.
onion2k 8y ago
No customer ever asked for React, or Angular, etc. Loads of mine have, but I write things for other software companies.

guitarbill 8y ago

Agreed. Whatever happened to progressive enhancement or graceful degradation? Many a website and user experience is not enhanced by using Javascript at all.

Rjevski 8y ago
Not only is a lot of Javascript useless, but it actually degrades the user experience. The "new" Reddit completely kills my 12-inch MacBook when I load a page, and it still feels sluggish afterwards. That pile of garbage literally loads more code than content. YouTube's crap navigation system is the same - if you click on a video it will actually load it & update the page within the client using JS, and in my case it's considerably slower than just loading the server-generated page from scratch. I often find myself opening videos in new tabs (and closing the old ones) or hitting refresh as soon as the URL bar is updated just to avoid this shit because fetching & loading a brand new page is actually faster than their so-called "improvement".
- pjmlp 8y ago
  I really hate the new Youtube experience, taking several seconds to display a full page.
- mdewar 8y ago
  It seems the main slow down that users are experiencing on new reddit is due to two reasons. 1. Number of components 2. CSS-in-JS Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/redesign/comments/8smbob/an_update_on_performance/ https://www.reddit.com/r/redesign/comments/8smbob/an_update_...
LarryL 8y ago
Not to mention that MANY (too many!) websites don't display anything AT ALL, if you don't have Javascript enabled. Why? I'm not talking about "app"-like sites (like Gmail), where it -somewhat- makes sense to use Javascript, but blogs or information sites (i.e. text + images). The worst is that when you look at the domains to unblock, you often get dozens (not counting the Ads networks that I have already marked as untrusted)! This is crazy, a pretty simple page should NOT require all that complex (and slow) architecture. And don't get me started about the comments sections! Not only do they usually require Javascript to see anything (which is stupid since just reading them should not require it), but ALL their UIs seem to compete for the title of "most aggravating interface ever". They always seem to try their hardest to be slow, confusing, and once you get more than a few dozen messages on the page (as they load on demand), they become simply so difficult to use that it's a chore then a torture to try to reach the last (or first) one. I could also rant about the loss of bookmarking functionalities (because of infinite scrolling for instance), and of the previous/forward browsers' buttons... In summary: in many cases, if not most, Javascript is used in a way that kills the user experience instead of enhancing it. And I don't see things getting any better, quite the opposite.
- Klover 8y ago
  The HTML version of Gmail works just fine without javascript. Which is funny because that's a webapp and the simple page websites that don't work could simply be a Word document usually. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049

pjmlp 8y ago

The majority of web development that I do still makes mostly use of server side rendering in Java and .NET frameworks, with the minimum JavaScript required for some dynamic behaviors. Works pretty well. On the .NET front MS is even bringing back a saner script management for Web devs. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/2018/04/17/library-manager-client-side-content-manager-for-web-apps/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/2018/04/17/library-m...

Hroble 8y ago

I have a story about a team that did this. They built an app using "good old" stuff and spaghetti features into it until it's impossible to add anything more, then spent a year rewriting everything in angular just so they could continue working on the product. It was probably not only a problem of a tech stack, but if you know that you need an SPA that is going to need to scale and have more components, it's only a waste of time to try to do it with vanillajs/css/html imo.

Rjevski 8y ago
> if you know that you need an SPA The problem is that every site out there thinks they need one while in fact only 1% truly needs one.

kowdermeister 8y ago

That's true for prototypes, 3 view web apps and simple stuff like that, but if you are building something more complex that you have to maintain for years with a team, then you better have some battle tested scaffolding.

onion2k 8y ago

No customer ever asked for React, or Angular, etc. Loads of mine have, but I write things for other software companies.