3 ms·

Are you saying that we shouldn't have the advanced web applications that we do today?

DougWebb 7y ago
I would say that we shouldn't have an advanced web application unless we need an advanced web application. Most of the time, we really don't need it.
- andai 7y ago
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bdcravens 7y ago
This presumes that heavy toolchains are a prerequisite of advanced web applications. The toolchains seem to be more about ergonomics than creating new capabilities.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  A large part of the toolchains are also bandaids on a lot of unnecessary friction caused by changing standards and moving targets. The web platform is almost to the point where a lot of those bandaids could just be ripped off: ES2015 modules are directly supported in most browsers today, same with CSS modules / syntax through ES2017 or more recent / and so forth, and protocol upgrades in HTTP2 and HTTP3 remove a lot of the performance-specific needs for things like bundling and minification. The biggest hurdle to ripping off the bandaids (as with so many things in software development) is the rough edges of the long tail of legacy code. The biggest example being that there's still so much code written for CommonJS (or AMD) that needs shims to play well in ES2015 module worlds. (Because no one wants to stop the Node world and rewrite everything all at once.)
  - fwip 7y ago
    pika.dev is coming really close to shimming a ton of existing libraries into module world.
thrower123 7y ago
I can't think of a case in the past decade where I've really wanted to have a web application rather than a proper native thick client. I understand the attraction, and I've had to build my fair share of them, but I don't like it at all.
mrec 7y ago
I'm not at all convinced that the heavyweight toolchains have led to any improvement in webapp quality. Maybe there are rockstar apps out there I just haven't seen, but for the most part the web these days is vastly more bloated and somewhat less stable than it used to be, without doing anything more that any user actually wants. This is not progress.
pjmlp 7y ago
Actually yes, we don't need SPAs to display basic blocks of text with some animation.

I would say that we shouldn't have an advanced web application unless we need an advanced web application. Most of the time, we really don't need it.

andai 7y ago
You must enable JavaScript to view this static text blog.

bdcravens 7y ago

This presumes that heavy toolchains are a prerequisite of advanced web applications. The toolchains seem to be more about ergonomics than creating new capabilities.

WorldMaker 7y ago
A large part of the toolchains are also bandaids on a lot of unnecessary friction caused by changing standards and moving targets. The web platform is almost to the point where a lot of those bandaids could just be ripped off: ES2015 modules are directly supported in most browsers today, same with CSS modules / syntax through ES2017 or more recent / and so forth, and protocol upgrades in HTTP2 and HTTP3 remove a lot of the performance-specific needs for things like bundling and minification. The biggest hurdle to ripping off the bandaids (as with so many things in software development) is the rough edges of the long tail of legacy code. The biggest example being that there's still so much code written for CommonJS (or AMD) that needs shims to play well in ES2015 module worlds. (Because no one wants to stop the Node world and rewrite everything all at once.)
- fwip 7y ago
  pika.dev is coming really close to shimming a ton of existing libraries into module world.

thrower123 7y ago

I can't think of a case in the past decade where I've really wanted to have a web application rather than a proper native thick client. I understand the attraction, and I've had to build my fair share of them, but I don't like it at all.

mrec 7y ago

I'm not at all convinced that the heavyweight toolchains have led to any improvement in webapp quality. Maybe there are rockstar apps out there I just haven't seen, but for the most part the web these days is vastly more bloated and somewhat less stable than it used to be, without doing anything more that any user actually wants. This is not progress.

pjmlp 7y ago

Actually yes, we don't need SPAs to display basic blocks of text with some animation.