5 ms·

> Someone else mentioned SPAs. I 100% guarantee that no user in the world ever wished for their “back” button not to work as they expected. This opinion invali

by ng12 7y ago

> Someone else mentioned SPAs. I 100% guarantee that no user in the world ever wished for their “back” button not to work as they expected. This opinion invalidates the rest of your post. If you lack a fundamental understanding what people are building obviously it seems overcomplicated.

asark 7y ago
> If you lack a fundamental understanding what people are building obviously it seems overcomplicated. Hi. I have a fundamental understanding of what people are building. Most of it's overcomplicated and the "web app or not?" decision's very often made due to hype, résumé padding, or making a project look more impressive to other internal folks. Some of it's justifiable as a "webapp" is truly a decent choice but still usually performs worse than is reasonable, indicating overcomplication under the hood—look at various Google "webapp"s performance dropping steadily over the years as features remain similar or drop off, and that's not even comparing them to older non-webapp incarnations which are universally much snappier (though usually missing some features, to be fair).
- ng12 7y ago
  You think an _entire industry_ has been built up around a desire to pad resumes? I don't even know how to respond to that.
  - asark 7y ago
    No, web development overall hasn't. Web apps specifically are largely fad-chasing vanity (manager, organizational level) or that, yeah. Which is cool because there's all kinds of dumb money flying around for them now—that part's been amazing. But it's not serving users well. Peacock feathers.
    - ng12 7y ago
      So a thing nobody wants or needs became extremely commonplace because JS devs (and only JS devs, I guess the Java guys have yet to discover this) realized they could invent some new frameworks and managers would gladly pay six-figures a head for them to play around with it?
      - asark 7y ago
        I don't think the JS devs drove it, at least not primarily. I think they're largely eager to exploit the enthusiasm of others (and probably they should be) and I've seen it happen. I do think it's peculiar to the web. Most other GUI app ecosystems are content not to invent their own visual vocabularies over and over or twist every mundane little program or UI element into an "experience", for instance—I think that has something to do with it. It's the set of norms and (self-imposed, to a significant extent) expectations of the web, of the fear of "falling behind" (see again: peacock feathers). I think the background of the Web in bespoke brochure-type graphic design and marketing has an absolute ton to do with it. I think a lot of the cost has to do with the underlying tech not really being that great for what it's being made to do, in concert with everyone feeling the need to try to be special in even the tinies little looks and behaviors. It's also where a lot of the audience is so will tend to experience oddities like this more exaggeratedly than other fields. Your manager or project owner or whoever says "we want a webapp" are you gonna stick your neck out and argue against it? "But it's what google's doing", "but Gartner", but whatever. It's cheaper! OK, sure, here's my bill. It's absolutely follow-the-leader behavior, damn the cliff. And it works well enough that it does get the job done, eventually. It's just not necessarily doing the users any favors, or your bottom line. Decision makers do strange stuff all the time because they think it makes them look better—and, to the extent and in the way they expect it to, they are probably right more often than not. This is just one example. Whole world's run by guesswork, personal quirks of taste or incentive, and blame-avoidance (follow the trends), more than anything else, from what I've seen. It's just people, running around doing funny people stuff, hoping no-one calls their bluff. [EDIT] actually, look at Java Applets and, more so, Flash. Folks hated the way lots of those were used, but the worst and least-justifiable uses of them happened anyway, for a long time, because managers wanted the bling. That was, seriously, it. And developers went "oh sweet I can add Flash 5 and Actionscript to my résumé, I've been wanting to play with that". That's exactly what happened then. This is exactly the same thing, just much bigger. And in both cases sometimes the tech was used well.
  - wolco 7y ago
    It's a filter during interviews to filter out the older candidates with a different culture. Bootcamps are something that grows out of this desire to pad your resume with newer tech.
buboard 7y ago
sorry, but if a front end interface is not easily understood, it is bad. its entire purpose is to have usability attributes, like predictability. SPAs break back buttons , new tab buttons, scrolling positions etc, the most basic stuff of web navigation
- buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
  I think SPAss are much like special effects in movies: You only notice them when you bad. I build SPAs as part of my job. Good SPAs do not break the back button. Insisting they do is silly.
  - buboard 7y ago
    Can i middle-click open in new tab in your app?
    - Stoids 7y ago
      Yes, almost any routing library will expose a Link component wrapper that properly sets those attributes.
    - azernik 7y ago
      Chiming in with "yes". When you can't, it's a bug; routing frameworks like e.g. react-router render to normal HTML, and only intercept left-clicks to override default browser behavior for those specific actions.

by ng12 7y ago

asark 7y ago

> If you lack a fundamental understanding what people are building obviously it seems overcomplicated. Hi. I have a fundamental understanding of what people are building. Most of it's overcomplicated and the "web app or not?" decision's very often made due to hype, résumé padding, or making a project look more impressive to other internal folks. Some of it's justifiable as a "webapp" is truly a decent choice but still usually performs worse than is reasonable, indicating overcomplication under the hood—look at various Google "webapp"s performance dropping steadily over the years as features remain similar or drop off, and that's not even comparing them to older non-webapp incarnations which are universally much snappier (though usually missing some features, to be fair).

ng12 7y ago
You think an _entire industry_ has been built up around a desire to pad resumes? I don't even know how to respond to that.
- asark 7y ago
  No, web development overall hasn't. Web apps specifically are largely fad-chasing vanity (manager, organizational level) or that, yeah. Which is cool because there's all kinds of dumb money flying around for them now—that part's been amazing. But it's not serving users well. Peacock feathers.
  - ng12 7y ago
    So a thing nobody wants or needs became extremely commonplace because JS devs (and only JS devs, I guess the Java guys have yet to discover this) realized they could invent some new frameworks and managers would gladly pay six-figures a head for them to play around with it?
    - asark 7y ago
      I don't think the JS devs drove it, at least not primarily. I think they're largely eager to exploit the enthusiasm of others (and probably they should be) and I've seen it happen. I do think it's peculiar to the web. Most other GUI app ecosystems are content not to invent their own visual vocabularies over and over or twist every mundane little program or UI element into an "experience", for instance—I think that has something to do with it. It's the set of norms and (self-imposed, to a significant extent) expectations of the web, of the fear of "falling behind" (see again: peacock feathers). I think the background of the Web in bespoke brochure-type graphic design and marketing has an absolute ton to do with it. I think a lot of the cost has to do with the underlying tech not really being that great for what it's being made to do, in concert with everyone feeling the need to try to be special in even the tinies little looks and behaviors. It's also where a lot of the audience is so will tend to experience oddities like this more exaggeratedly than other fields. Your manager or project owner or whoever says "we want a webapp" are you gonna stick your neck out and argue against it? "But it's what google's doing", "but Gartner", but whatever. It's cheaper! OK, sure, here's my bill. It's absolutely follow-the-leader behavior, damn the cliff. And it works well enough that it does get the job done, eventually. It's just not necessarily doing the users any favors, or your bottom line. Decision makers do strange stuff all the time because they think it makes them look better—and, to the extent and in the way they expect it to, they are probably right more often than not. This is just one example. Whole world's run by guesswork, personal quirks of taste or incentive, and blame-avoidance (follow the trends), more than anything else, from what I've seen. It's just people, running around doing funny people stuff, hoping no-one calls their bluff. [EDIT] actually, look at Java Applets and, more so, Flash. Folks hated the way lots of those were used, but the worst and least-justifiable uses of them happened anyway, for a long time, because managers wanted the bling. That was, seriously, it. And developers went "oh sweet I can add Flash 5 and Actionscript to my résumé, I've been wanting to play with that". That's exactly what happened then. This is exactly the same thing, just much bigger. And in both cases sometimes the tech was used well.
- wolco 7y ago
  It's a filter during interviews to filter out the older candidates with a different culture. Bootcamps are something that grows out of this desire to pad your resume with newer tech.

buboard 7y ago

sorry, but if a front end interface is not easily understood, it is bad. its entire purpose is to have usability attributes, like predictability. SPAs break back buttons , new tab buttons, scrolling positions etc, the most basic stuff of web navigation

buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
I think SPAss are much like special effects in movies: You only notice them when you bad. I build SPAs as part of my job. Good SPAs do not break the back button. Insisting they do is silly.
- buboard 7y ago
  Can i middle-click open in new tab in your app?
  - Stoids 7y ago
    Yes, almost any routing library will expose a Link component wrapper that properly sets those attributes.
  - azernik 7y ago
    Chiming in with "yes". When you can't, it's a bug; routing frameworks like e.g. react-router render to normal HTML, and only intercept left-clicks to override default browser behavior for those specific actions.