8 ms·

Maybe I'm just getting old, but Javascript jumped the shark at some point. Hydration, lazy loading, managing flashes of unstyled content, a lot of this is built

by aliqot 4y ago

Maybe I'm just getting old, but Javascript jumped the shark at some point. Hydration, lazy loading, managing flashes of unstyled content, a lot of this is built to address things that wouldn't be problems if we treated the browser as the dojo that it is and not be so dang wasteful. im sure someone with shinier boots than mine will pop in and tell me how im wrong, and perhaps youre right, but the web was a much better place without all the toolchain and shenanigans. We must return to fundamentals.

guipsp 4y ago
I thoroughly agree, society was much better before computers came along.
- xjose97x 4y ago
  Can't tell if this is is a joke or not lol
  - julianbuse 4y ago
    poe's law strikes again
  - aliqot 4y ago
    There is some bias in this comment, perhaps Ordnung is what compels it, but simpler was better, and though collectively we were less informed, we were also less burdened. There is value in a plain lifestyle and community. We've lost a sense of community because of this pervasive false-familiarity that the internet and phones have created. You no longer need to see your relatives and community members because you can 'see' them on a website or app or call them. Whether it gets acknowledged or not, for all of the positives this connectivity brought, there were an equal amount of problems. Our advances in telecommunications led to an uncomfortable truth that not everyone's innermost feelings should be foisted upon the greater community. Everyone knows someone who's consumed with worry/negative-excitement over the struggles currently taking place. We will never again have another private thought, another uninterrupted conversation, eye contact, feeling someones hands as you tell them how much their being means to you. All of that are the incontrovertible consequences of the Internet, our prodigal problem child.
    - personalidea 4y ago
      > We will never again have another private thought, another uninterrupted conversation, eye contact, feeling someones hands as you tell them how much their being means to you. I disagree. It is just that these now need a conscious decision from us. My thoughts are still private until I choose to publish them. My conversations are only interrupted if I allow them to be. We make eye contact when we decide to. The intimate moments with my partner are there when we create them. True, it’s easy to loose that and growing up today, you need someone to show you that it can be done. Which is why I agree that we stand to loose that, but we are not there yet.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - pdimitar 4y ago
      This sort of generalization really doesn't help any discourse. While it's indeed easy to lose the things you mentioned we're still not forced to do so. Many are already stepping back and reconsidering their choices, and rediscovering various real-life elements. I'm seeing it around me. And this: > We've lost a sense of community ...is extremely one-sided. I started my life in a small town where if a bunch of prejudiced people didn't like you then God help you because they could even make sure grocery stores will not be selling you food. I wish you luck even existing on a basic level there. For people who don't have the approval of their small communities, internet (or physically moving) has been a blessing. So while your point is valid, you went way too far without regard for nuance. The fact that a lot of people waste their precious time on bullshit on the net does not in any shape or form mean internet hasn't been extremely helpful and enabling for many people.
  - guipsp 4y ago
    (it is)
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  Whoa whoa whoa, let's not get carried away. The peak of technology obviously occurred in $YEAR_AUTHOR_GRADUATED_UNIVERSITY and it's all been downhill from there.
  - jokethrowaway 4y ago
    I would add a -50 to that. We want to live in golden age
- jozzy-james 4y ago
  agreed, wouldn't be able to read this comment
scrollaway 4y ago
> Hydration, lazy loading, managing flashes of unstyled content, a lot of this is built to address things that wouldn't be problems if we treated the browser as the dojo that it is and not be so dang wasteful. What's your point here, exactly? That if random wordpress blogs and recipe websites were less wasteful, the problems these solutions are addressing would not exist? I can make you an extremely non-wasteful webapp which still needs to display a hundred images on a page (because reasons), so lazy-loading the images is still important. I can find you a very well-optimized website that is only a few kilobytes, but still loads slow as shit because their network is bad and I'm on a terrible 3G link. FOUC would still be an issue.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  HTML has native support for lazy-loading images these days. No need for added JS.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    You can lazy-load a lot more than images. In my example, yes I wouldn't use js for it, but it's irrelevant to the point I was making. My read of GGP is that "lazy loading is useless because you shouldn't have so much content that it's needed, ever", which is a bad take.
  - jozzy-james 4y ago
    it does, but when design and top brass say it needs to fade in - back to some JS you go
- quest88 4y ago
  I think the point is people should use the correct tool for the job. Instead, sites that should (or can) be static sites are unnecessarily using some JS framework.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    Newer JS frameworks like Svelte and SolidJS can be almost transparent to the user, though - with no need for bootstrapping a complex codebase in the client before they can interact with the site. I'm guessing that OP describes a further development along these lines.
intothemild 4y ago
Developers, just coding their websites, not a toolchain in sight.
qsort 4y ago
You're not wrong, the websites I enjoy the most are basically all static. I think the problem is that the "web fundamentals" aren't that good to begin with. A web application is very often the least bad solution, but you're not going to have "rich" web applications without tons of JS. Show the average user HN and they won't like the interface.
SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
> if we treated the browser as the dojo that it is I have no idea what this means. Isn't a dojo a place for learning or meditation? I don't understand how that fits the browser, the internet, or web development.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tmnvix 4y ago
  My take was something along the lines of 'the browser is a place to strive for simplicity and mastery' instead of 'move fast and break things'.
phailhaus 4y ago
"Am I out of touch? No, it is the children who are wrong." This is an old, tired take that boils down to "we should be ashamed for wanting nice things." If only everyone would just accept simple websites like HackerNews! This is backwards, it is user-blaming. It turns out that the web is an incredible platform that has revolutionized the world, and thousands of people have worked hard to build tools that make it easier to develop on. "Web fundamentals" can't give you Google Docs.
- morelisp 4y ago
  Users don't want this shit, startups do.
  - phailhaus 4y ago
    This is an incredibly broad statement based on practically nothing. You don't think it's weird that most of the largest, most successful websites have mountains of tooling and frameworks to help them remain performant and reliable? All these tools either help the user directly, or solve real problems for companies to help them build more quickly. I also think you grossly overestimate the average user's abilities. They literally cannot tell what is possible and what is not. They don't want simple, they want something to solve everything, as easily as possible.
    - swatcoder 4y ago
      > You don't think it's weird that most of the largest, most successful websites have mountains of tooling and frameworks to help them remain performant and reliable? I don't fully agree with the person you're responding too, but it feels like you're making their point for them with this. Users are engaging with a tool or some content for themselves and today. Startups are the ones dreaming of standing among the "largest, most successful websites" someday. Users don't care how efficient or inefficient your development process is, or how much technical debt you carry, or how many concurrent users or requests you can run, or how scalable you are if things go well. If your service stands up and works for them today, none of those things are relevant to them at all. That's not to say that the startups concerns aren't critical to making sure that the service is still capable tomorrow and the day after, and that the company doesn't collapse under bad process and inefficiencies, and that the service maintains utility rather than becoming data and stale. They're valid concerns. But the users are so far removed from those concerns that it can be legitimately frustrating when pursuit of those long-term concerns degrades their immediate experience.
waboremo 4y ago
Do you have any proposed solutions for the problems that exist? Going back to fundamentals doesn't eradicate the problems, it will only recreate them in a slightly altered state. One of the most commonly proposed solutions is we keep the web to only static content. Well now we've just shifted all the media-heavy interactive content onto a dedicated app instead of the browser, shifting all the same exact problems onto a new platform instead.
- joshmanders 4y ago
  > Well now we've just shifted all the media-heavy interactive content onto a dedicated app instead of the browser And then they complain because "This could have just been a PWA, why do I have to install an app for every website I use!?"
erokar 4y ago
I agree with you from a technical standpoint — something created for displaying and navigating between documents is being misused for distributing apps. At the same time though none other model affords the same distribution, write once run everywhere. No other distribution platform can compete. And users have become accustomed to the web being apps as well as documents. In fact, many have become accustomed to more or less treating their web browser as an OS (or more realistically, not giving the distinction any thought). Maybe an interesting way forward could be a web model specifically for apps, which of course many would say would be WebAssembly. The HTML/CSS/JS combo has been remarkably successful and resilient though, so I'm not convinced it will be dethroned easily.
- hakre 4y ago
  It existed in the platform. But Mozilla has lost the first _and_ the second Browser War and has been sentenced to shepherd some "web developer" Wiki and tell everyone how fun that all is. Yes it can make your day sad, but I'm sure, out there is a crowd that is just amazed by all of it. And its told that the payment was not that bad as well, so we truly only have winners.
sopooneo 4y ago
I remember when HTML5 and CSS3 were just in the RFC phase and many web developers thought they would make their jobs simpler. Because the things they were being asked to do, for which they were currently creating tortured workarounds, could be done directly with the new standards. But of course the job did not become simpler. The fixed value turned out not to be what clients would demand, but the quantity of tortured workarounds devs could be enticed to endure.
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  Almost got back into webdev but the technical interview was 100% JavaScript.
- mattwad 4y ago
  I'll be an anecdote: I literally only came back because of CSS3 and jQuery. Managing layout with tables and all hover effects with javascript did not sound like a fun career choice when I first started. And now I've fully embraced flexbox and grid and styled components - I rarely have to think about classes anymore. New tools have been making my job a lot more fun over the years.
swatcoder 4y ago
My boots are pretty dusty too, and a web browser isn’t usually how I usually want to engage with a tool or toy. But the systems architecture model of infinitely beefy backends with simply-adequate thin clients predates both of us. Browsers, the cloud, and all this obnoxious javascript tooling are the contemporary implementation of that and not without reason. They do it pretty well! Like with any new tool, people get carried away and start using it for things that really don’t need it. I’m with you that most websites don’t need all this stuff and get caught up in it anyway. But that’ll burn off, and in the meantime, we’ll end up with a rich, mature thin client system for the solutions that need it and that system will be around for decades. No sharks jumped.
- hakre 4y ago
  Browsers of today are begging so much for new clothes, they ain't browsers anymore. Gib dem Affen Zucker.
cxr 4y ago
> but Javascript jumped the shark at some point Contemporary frontend, in-browser app development, you mean. JS is a programming language. By conflating a language with a particular culture of software development, you implicitly transfer more power to that culture, the people in it, and their practices, even though your message expresses a clear desire for the opposite.
pier25 4y ago
The core issue is that browsers were not made to provide the sophisticated features we require these days. Because of this fundamental problem, you can't build something like Gmail or Spotify without increasing the complexity of development exponentially. The "SSR + sprinkled JS" paradigm is still totally valid though for many use cases.
wruza 4y ago
We must return to fundamentals. These are not fundamentals. Overtone window has shifted out of its initial position completely, but browsers ignored it for two decades and offloaded that to webapp developers. Web 2.0 is not a browser, it is what became possible with everything people have built outside of it, on top of “take it or leave it” attitude. Web 1 is an archaic network of winword-level documents that is a huge step backwards in ui, ux, common sense. We must not return to anything, browsers must get their ass up and running towards what other people achieved through hard work despite all the obstacles.

by aliqot 4y ago

guipsp 4y ago

I thoroughly agree, society was much better before computers came along.

xjose97x 4y ago
Can't tell if this is is a joke or not lol
- julianbuse 4y ago
  poe's law strikes again
- aliqot 4y ago
  There is some bias in this comment, perhaps Ordnung is what compels it, but simpler was better, and though collectively we were less informed, we were also less burdened. There is value in a plain lifestyle and community. We've lost a sense of community because of this pervasive false-familiarity that the internet and phones have created. You no longer need to see your relatives and community members because you can 'see' them on a website or app or call them. Whether it gets acknowledged or not, for all of the positives this connectivity brought, there were an equal amount of problems. Our advances in telecommunications led to an uncomfortable truth that not everyone's innermost feelings should be foisted upon the greater community. Everyone knows someone who's consumed with worry/negative-excitement over the struggles currently taking place. We will never again have another private thought, another uninterrupted conversation, eye contact, feeling someones hands as you tell them how much their being means to you. All of that are the incontrovertible consequences of the Internet, our prodigal problem child.
  - personalidea 4y ago
    > We will never again have another private thought, another uninterrupted conversation, eye contact, feeling someones hands as you tell them how much their being means to you. I disagree. It is just that these now need a conscious decision from us. My thoughts are still private until I choose to publish them. My conversations are only interrupted if I allow them to be. We make eye contact when we decide to. The intimate moments with my partner are there when we create them. True, it’s easy to loose that and growing up today, you need someone to show you that it can be done. Which is why I agree that we stand to loose that, but we are not there yet.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    This sort of generalization really doesn't help any discourse. While it's indeed easy to lose the things you mentioned we're still not forced to do so. Many are already stepping back and reconsidering their choices, and rediscovering various real-life elements. I'm seeing it around me. And this: > We've lost a sense of community ...is extremely one-sided. I started my life in a small town where if a bunch of prejudiced people didn't like you then God help you because they could even make sure grocery stores will not be selling you food. I wish you luck even existing on a basic level there. For people who don't have the approval of their small communities, internet (or physically moving) has been a blessing. So while your point is valid, you went way too far without regard for nuance. The fact that a lot of people waste their precious time on bullshit on the net does not in any shape or form mean internet hasn't been extremely helpful and enabling for many people.
- guipsp 4y ago
  (it is)
mikepurvis 4y ago
Whoa whoa whoa, let's not get carried away. The peak of technology obviously occurred in $YEAR_AUTHOR_GRADUATED_UNIVERSITY and it's all been downhill from there.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  I would add a -50 to that. We want to live in golden age
jozzy-james 4y ago
agreed, wouldn't be able to read this comment

scrollaway 4y ago

> Hydration, lazy loading, managing flashes of unstyled content, a lot of this is built to address things that wouldn't be problems if we treated the browser as the dojo that it is and not be so dang wasteful. What's your point here, exactly? That if random wordpress blogs and recipe websites were less wasteful, the problems these solutions are addressing would not exist? I can make you an extremely non-wasteful webapp which still needs to display a hundred images on a page (because reasons), so lazy-loading the images is still important. I can find you a very well-optimized website that is only a few kilobytes, but still loads slow as shit because their network is bad and I'm on a terrible 3G link. FOUC would still be an issue.

zozbot234 4y ago
HTML has native support for lazy-loading images these days. No need for added JS.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  You can lazy-load a lot more than images. In my example, yes I wouldn't use js for it, but it's irrelevant to the point I was making. My read of GGP is that "lazy loading is useless because you shouldn't have so much content that it's needed, ever", which is a bad take.
- jozzy-james 4y ago
  it does, but when design and top brass say it needs to fade in - back to some JS you go
quest88 4y ago
I think the point is people should use the correct tool for the job. Instead, sites that should (or can) be static sites are unnecessarily using some JS framework.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Newer JS frameworks like Svelte and SolidJS can be almost transparent to the user, though - with no need for bootstrapping a complex codebase in the client before they can interact with the site. I'm guessing that OP describes a further development along these lines.

intothemild 4y ago

Developers, just coding their websites, not a toolchain in sight.

qsort 4y ago

You're not wrong, the websites I enjoy the most are basically all static. I think the problem is that the "web fundamentals" aren't that good to begin with. A web application is very often the least bad solution, but you're not going to have "rich" web applications without tons of JS. Show the average user HN and they won't like the interface.

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago

> if we treated the browser as the dojo that it is I have no idea what this means. Isn't a dojo a place for learning or meditation? I don't understand how that fits the browser, the internet, or web development.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tmnvix 4y ago
My take was something along the lines of 'the browser is a place to strive for simplicity and mastery' instead of 'move fast and break things'.

phailhaus 4y ago

"Am I out of touch? No, it is the children who are wrong." This is an old, tired take that boils down to "we should be ashamed for wanting nice things." If only everyone would just accept simple websites like HackerNews! This is backwards, it is user-blaming. It turns out that the web is an incredible platform that has revolutionized the world, and thousands of people have worked hard to build tools that make it easier to develop on. "Web fundamentals" can't give you Google Docs.

morelisp 4y ago
Users don't want this shit, startups do.
- phailhaus 4y ago
  This is an incredibly broad statement based on practically nothing. You don't think it's weird that most of the largest, most successful websites have mountains of tooling and frameworks to help them remain performant and reliable? All these tools either help the user directly, or solve real problems for companies to help them build more quickly. I also think you grossly overestimate the average user's abilities. They literally cannot tell what is possible and what is not. They don't want simple, they want something to solve everything, as easily as possible.
  - swatcoder 4y ago
    > You don't think it's weird that most of the largest, most successful websites have mountains of tooling and frameworks to help them remain performant and reliable? I don't fully agree with the person you're responding too, but it feels like you're making their point for them with this. Users are engaging with a tool or some content for themselves and today. Startups are the ones dreaming of standing among the "largest, most successful websites" someday. Users don't care how efficient or inefficient your development process is, or how much technical debt you carry, or how many concurrent users or requests you can run, or how scalable you are if things go well. If your service stands up and works for them today, none of those things are relevant to them at all. That's not to say that the startups concerns aren't critical to making sure that the service is still capable tomorrow and the day after, and that the company doesn't collapse under bad process and inefficiencies, and that the service maintains utility rather than becoming data and stale. They're valid concerns. But the users are so far removed from those concerns that it can be legitimately frustrating when pursuit of those long-term concerns degrades their immediate experience.

waboremo 4y ago

Do you have any proposed solutions for the problems that exist? Going back to fundamentals doesn't eradicate the problems, it will only recreate them in a slightly altered state. One of the most commonly proposed solutions is we keep the web to only static content. Well now we've just shifted all the media-heavy interactive content onto a dedicated app instead of the browser, shifting all the same exact problems onto a new platform instead.

joshmanders 4y ago
> Well now we've just shifted all the media-heavy interactive content onto a dedicated app instead of the browser And then they complain because "This could have just been a PWA, why do I have to install an app for every website I use!?"

erokar 4y ago

I agree with you from a technical standpoint — something created for displaying and navigating between documents is being misused for distributing apps. At the same time though none other model affords the same distribution, write once run everywhere. No other distribution platform can compete. And users have become accustomed to the web being apps as well as documents. In fact, many have become accustomed to more or less treating their web browser as an OS (or more realistically, not giving the distinction any thought). Maybe an interesting way forward could be a web model specifically for apps, which of course many would say would be WebAssembly. The HTML/CSS/JS combo has been remarkably successful and resilient though, so I'm not convinced it will be dethroned easily.

hakre 4y ago
It existed in the platform. But Mozilla has lost the first _and_ the second Browser War and has been sentenced to shepherd some "web developer" Wiki and tell everyone how fun that all is. Yes it can make your day sad, but I'm sure, out there is a crowd that is just amazed by all of it. And its told that the payment was not that bad as well, so we truly only have winners.

sopooneo 4y ago

I remember when HTML5 and CSS3 were just in the RFC phase and many web developers thought they would make their jobs simpler. Because the things they were being asked to do, for which they were currently creating tortured workarounds, could be done directly with the new standards. But of course the job did not become simpler. The fixed value turned out not to be what clients would demand, but the quantity of tortured workarounds devs could be enticed to endure.

hypertele-Xii 4y ago
Almost got back into webdev but the technical interview was 100% JavaScript.
mattwad 4y ago
I'll be an anecdote: I literally only came back because of CSS3 and jQuery. Managing layout with tables and all hover effects with javascript did not sound like a fun career choice when I first started. And now I've fully embraced flexbox and grid and styled components - I rarely have to think about classes anymore. New tools have been making my job a lot more fun over the years.

swatcoder 4y ago

My boots are pretty dusty too, and a web browser isn’t usually how I usually want to engage with a tool or toy. But the systems architecture model of infinitely beefy backends with simply-adequate thin clients predates both of us. Browsers, the cloud, and all this obnoxious javascript tooling are the contemporary implementation of that and not without reason. They do it pretty well! Like with any new tool, people get carried away and start using it for things that really don’t need it. I’m with you that most websites don’t need all this stuff and get caught up in it anyway. But that’ll burn off, and in the meantime, we’ll end up with a rich, mature thin client system for the solutions that need it and that system will be around for decades. No sharks jumped.

hakre 4y ago
Browsers of today are begging so much for new clothes, they ain't browsers anymore. Gib dem Affen Zucker.

cxr 4y ago

> but Javascript jumped the shark at some point Contemporary frontend, in-browser app development, you mean. JS is a programming language. By conflating a language with a particular culture of software development, you implicitly transfer more power to that culture, the people in it, and their practices, even though your message expresses a clear desire for the opposite.

pier25 4y ago

The core issue is that browsers were not made to provide the sophisticated features we require these days. Because of this fundamental problem, you can't build something like Gmail or Spotify without increasing the complexity of development exponentially. The "SSR + sprinkled JS" paradigm is still totally valid though for many use cases.

wruza 4y ago

We must return to fundamentals. These are not fundamentals. Overtone window has shifted out of its initial position completely, but browsers ignored it for two decades and offloaded that to webapp developers. Web 2.0 is not a browser, it is what became possible with everything people have built outside of it, on top of “take it or leave it” attitude. Web 1 is an archaic network of winword-level documents that is a huge step backwards in ui, ux, common sense. We must not return to anything, browsers must get their ass up and running towards what other people achieved through hard work despite all the obstacles.