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I made my last webpage in 1999 using HTML tables and cut-up "design" jpgs so I am a bit out of date in this area. I see all these preprocessors and crap for "w

by tyfon 7y ago

I made my last webpage in 1999 using HTML tables and cut-up "design" jpgs so I am a bit out of date in this area. I see all these preprocessors and crap for "web apps" and I wonder why nobody just writes HTML/CSS/Javascript instead of all of these other "languages" and abstractions or is the base web language now so bad that nobody touches it manually?

Eric_WVGG 7y ago
Web apps, basically. You couldn’t make Google Sheets that way, for example.
- tyfon 7y ago
  So it would be impossible to write google sheets in pure html/javascript (except for the server bits that is)?
  - adventured 7y ago
    The matter is that it wouldn't make sense to do it. It's certainly possible. If you try building a large scale application (not merely a website or simple CRUD-style service), something as complex and demanding as a Google Sheets in pure html/javascript, you're going to reinvent a lot of wheels in the process and waste an enormous amount of time, for reasons (hopeful performance gains, and minimizing external requirements) that will not be strong enough to justify the time cost. More likely in the process of reinventing wheels, you'll lose a lot of your hoped for performance and simplification gains, as you create your own monsters and bloat.
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      Well, the issue these days is that JavaScript is becoming a serious security problem. Hopefully more and more people will just start blocking JavaScript outright, and this will just have been a misguided attempt to try and turn the web browser into a full blown virtual machine...
  - herbstein 7y ago
    It's not impossible. That's obvious since the frameworks ultimately compile down to plain HTML/CSS/JS. The consideration is around how workable the codebase becomes/is.
    - Eric_WVGG 7y ago
      Seconded. I mean, computers made of rubber bands and tinker toys that play tic tac toe exist, but I wouldn’t make a chess playing computer that way. After a few years of mostly doing React apps, I’m considering vanilla js for a new thing. It’ll be best for performance purposes, but man, I’m gonna miss components.
westedcrean 7y ago
No, base HTML/CSS/JS are currently brilliant - however when you are building complex interfaces, web editors, React/Angular allow you to do it much easier
- tyfon 7y ago
  Yes so you have libraries to help. But what I don't really understand is why do you have to have all the "build tools" that translates one language into another and a lot of all the other stuff. I have no idea what they really do, but it seems so strange that it would be a large process for a scripting language that runs directly in the browser. Wouldn't be easier to specify the UI directly in javascript using this library like with C++/qt? C++/qt also has something similar to html for declaring UI/UI actions called QML but I never managed to see the improvement over just writing code.
  - srgpqt 7y ago
    Sure you can use plain JS, but then you don’t get async/await, destructuring, module system, type checking, JSX, and countless other modern affordances that make writing JS more palatable. If you can stomach OldJS, then yeah, none of this has much use for you.
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      Well, last time I checked, you could use a lot of these out of the box, as long as you didn't mind dropping support for old Internet Explorer versions?
      - Drdrdrq 7y ago
        A lot of these, but not all (JSX for example). And then you have to worry about support - caniuse is great help, but it gets very tiring. But to me the main benefit is something else. React & co. let you define the state and then rendering based on that. It is incredible what this means for code maintainability... Try it, it really is worth the effort.
earthboundkid 7y ago
Four issues: 1) JavaScript has to be sent over the wire, so it should be minified. 2) Caching is easier if you hash your assets, ie put the MD5 into the URL so browsers know if they’ve downloaded it before or not. 3) Old browsers don’t support modern JS syntax but it can pretty much all be backported by eg turning () => {} into function() {} etc. 4) It’s convenient to use other people’s code by importing it from open source libraries with NPM. Small issues individually but they add up to meaning any non-hobbyist project ends up needing a bundler.
wruza 7y ago
Desktop-to-web deserter here, I’ll try to sum it all up. - Browsers still have bad and ugly environments. You don’t have all features everywhere, even in recent versions. Things like “class Foo { static x = new this }”-level are missing, not some rare magic (like proper modules). Node.js is a different beast, despite a [vaguely stated] promise to be indistinguishable. Lots of env-neutral code written in node doesn’t work in a browser as is. Think msvc vs gcc/c99. - CSS is just too low-level, people do like sass, less, etc very much. These have “includes”, functions, variables, flow control, non-css inheritance, bem-related isolation, common shorthands for a syntax. Modular apps cannot live without that. - DOM is so flipping slow that it requires precise differential updates to it if you don’t want to charge your battery four times a day. It is also much less “cool” than desktop ui data-controls, and it requires a framework, which usually comes from node_modules for reasons above (prebundled versions exist for syntaxless fws). Also, too few people like to write a big single html (again, no “includes” etc) and bind it to the code directly, so there is vue, jsx, pug, etc. The more you abstract it away (dom, not html), the better it is for everyone. In terms of programming, if you want an analogy, pure browser feels like a single qbasic file on steroids, while bundlers make it feel almost like a visual studio project (put here any decent ide if you don’t like vs).
- tyfon 7y ago
  Thanks for this it makes it a bit more clear, but I'm now never going to touch web again lol. It sounds like hell to me. However, what you describe above sounds like what you need to write a full blown application. Why does one need this to display simple information like a blog or news? Tasks that I used the HTML tables stuff for. Nowadays I can enter a personal blog with maybe 100 lines of actual text but it still pulls several megabytes of javascript. I just can't wrap my head around why all this is necessary when all you want is to display information that could be equally served by a text or html file.
  - grayed-down 7y ago
    I feel your disdain! I'm an old-timer and remember complaining about using those new-fangled cascading style sheets instead of just putting everything in html tag attributes. And don't get me started about having been forced to use div's for layouts instead of tables. In fact, I still don't understand why the html table construct couldn't have been evolved to accommodate a layout role.
maple3142 7y ago
I think it legacy browsers is to blame. You can certainly write web apps in plain HTML/CSS/JavaScript, but it will be limited. So, some transpiler are invented to solve this problem, and bundler is built to solve module problem. Of course, you don't have to use them if you don't care about old browsers, but many companies do care.

by tyfon 7y ago

Eric_WVGG 7y ago

Web apps, basically. You couldn’t make Google Sheets that way, for example.

tyfon 7y ago
So it would be impossible to write google sheets in pure html/javascript (except for the server bits that is)?
- adventured 7y ago
  The matter is that it wouldn't make sense to do it. It's certainly possible. If you try building a large scale application (not merely a website or simple CRUD-style service), something as complex and demanding as a Google Sheets in pure html/javascript, you're going to reinvent a lot of wheels in the process and waste an enormous amount of time, for reasons (hopeful performance gains, and minimizing external requirements) that will not be strong enough to justify the time cost. More likely in the process of reinventing wheels, you'll lose a lot of your hoped for performance and simplification gains, as you create your own monsters and bloat.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Well, the issue these days is that JavaScript is becoming a serious security problem. Hopefully more and more people will just start blocking JavaScript outright, and this will just have been a misguided attempt to try and turn the web browser into a full blown virtual machine...
- herbstein 7y ago
  It's not impossible. That's obvious since the frameworks ultimately compile down to plain HTML/CSS/JS. The consideration is around how workable the codebase becomes/is.
  - Eric_WVGG 7y ago
    Seconded. I mean, computers made of rubber bands and tinker toys that play tic tac toe exist, but I wouldn’t make a chess playing computer that way. After a few years of mostly doing React apps, I’m considering vanilla js for a new thing. It’ll be best for performance purposes, but man, I’m gonna miss components.

westedcrean 7y ago

No, base HTML/CSS/JS are currently brilliant - however when you are building complex interfaces, web editors, React/Angular allow you to do it much easier

tyfon 7y ago
Yes so you have libraries to help. But what I don't really understand is why do you have to have all the "build tools" that translates one language into another and a lot of all the other stuff. I have no idea what they really do, but it seems so strange that it would be a large process for a scripting language that runs directly in the browser. Wouldn't be easier to specify the UI directly in javascript using this library like with C++/qt? C++/qt also has something similar to html for declaring UI/UI actions called QML but I never managed to see the improvement over just writing code.
- srgpqt 7y ago
  Sure you can use plain JS, but then you don’t get async/await, destructuring, module system, type checking, JSX, and countless other modern affordances that make writing JS more palatable. If you can stomach OldJS, then yeah, none of this has much use for you.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Well, last time I checked, you could use a lot of these out of the box, as long as you didn't mind dropping support for old Internet Explorer versions?
    - Drdrdrq 7y ago
      A lot of these, but not all (JSX for example). And then you have to worry about support - caniuse is great help, but it gets very tiring. But to me the main benefit is something else. React & co. let you define the state and then rendering based on that. It is incredible what this means for code maintainability... Try it, it really is worth the effort.

earthboundkid 7y ago

Four issues: 1) JavaScript has to be sent over the wire, so it should be minified. 2) Caching is easier if you hash your assets, ie put the MD5 into the URL so browsers know if they’ve downloaded it before or not. 3) Old browsers don’t support modern JS syntax but it can pretty much all be backported by eg turning () => {} into function() {} etc. 4) It’s convenient to use other people’s code by importing it from open source libraries with NPM. Small issues individually but they add up to meaning any non-hobbyist project ends up needing a bundler.

wruza 7y ago

Desktop-to-web deserter here, I’ll try to sum it all up. - Browsers still have bad and ugly environments. You don’t have all features everywhere, even in recent versions. Things like “class Foo { static x = new this }”-level are missing, not some rare magic (like proper modules). Node.js is a different beast, despite a [vaguely stated] promise to be indistinguishable. Lots of env-neutral code written in node doesn’t work in a browser as is. Think msvc vs gcc/c99. - CSS is just too low-level, people do like sass, less, etc very much. These have “includes”, functions, variables, flow control, non-css inheritance, bem-related isolation, common shorthands for a syntax. Modular apps cannot live without that. - DOM is so flipping slow that it requires precise differential updates to it if you don’t want to charge your battery four times a day. It is also much less “cool” than desktop ui data-controls, and it requires a framework, which usually comes from node_modules for reasons above (prebundled versions exist for syntaxless fws). Also, too few people like to write a big single html (again, no “includes” etc) and bind it to the code directly, so there is vue, jsx, pug, etc. The more you abstract it away (dom, not html), the better it is for everyone. In terms of programming, if you want an analogy, pure browser feels like a single qbasic file on steroids, while bundlers make it feel almost like a visual studio project (put here any decent ide if you don’t like vs).

tyfon 7y ago
Thanks for this it makes it a bit more clear, but I'm now never going to touch web again lol. It sounds like hell to me. However, what you describe above sounds like what you need to write a full blown application. Why does one need this to display simple information like a blog or news? Tasks that I used the HTML tables stuff for. Nowadays I can enter a personal blog with maybe 100 lines of actual text but it still pulls several megabytes of javascript. I just can't wrap my head around why all this is necessary when all you want is to display information that could be equally served by a text or html file.
- grayed-down 7y ago
  I feel your disdain! I'm an old-timer and remember complaining about using those new-fangled cascading style sheets instead of just putting everything in html tag attributes. And don't get me started about having been forced to use div's for layouts instead of tables. In fact, I still don't understand why the html table construct couldn't have been evolved to accommodate a layout role.

maple3142 7y ago

I think it legacy browsers is to blame. You can certainly write web apps in plain HTML/CSS/JavaScript, but it will be limited. So, some transpiler are invented to solve this problem, and bundler is built to solve module problem. Of course, you don't have to use them if you don't care about old browsers, but many companies do care.