5 ms·

I work for about 2k users, they do not give a shit about reactivity... build a monolith, make it comfy, embrace page refresh (nobody gives a fuck about that in

I work for about 2k users, they do not give a shit about reactivity... build a monolith, make it comfy, embrace page refresh (nobody gives a fuck about that in the real world), and get shit done.

thenthenthen 1y ago
Unless the page refresh is fast, I tend to agree with you!
gjsman-1000 1y ago
I have seen more broken SPAs than MPAs, by far. Ironic, considering SPAs are supposed to improve conversion rates and user experience. Even from big companies with no excuse - Reddit is almost unusable on phones, X was straight up broken for a month straight with image loading on mobile. If you’re writing an SPA, and it isn’t Twitter or a content consumption platform, and it isn’t necessary to be API-driven, seriously just stop. You’re not clever, you’re not improving the experience, you’re only appealing to the tastes of other programmers. If billion-dollar companies can’t get them working perfectly, you certainly won’t.
- pelagicAustral 1y ago
  We created a generation of developers that AIM to over-engineer requirements... and we also came up with extremely pervasive frameworks to go with it... My firm cannot hire people with no React experience... people REALLY only know how to build cruft these days...
  - gjsman-1000 1y ago
    I have no React, Vue, or Angular experience. My websites were built with Livewire, some HTMX (basically Hotwire in the Rails world, server rendered HTML partials; or maybe Blazor SSR in the .NET world). I use Tailwind and a Laravel backend, but have some experience with C#. If you think that’s interesting, send me your firm’s URL, I’ll consider applying. (Edit: or really anyone reading this who is interested - government of a foreign nation outside the US is not viable, unfortunately.)
    - pelagicAustral 1y ago
      my firm is government, so do not expect too much... email to {trafalgar battle british general's last name]@rails.cl
  - bradly 1y ago
    As a Rails developer with no desire to work in a React codebase, I'm not qualified for about 50-60% of the Rails jobs postings. My lastest full time was at Shopify where I said over an over that I was Ruby only and not interested in a React position only to be told a few months in I needed to know React to get promoted. It is exhausting.
    - zelphirkalt 1y ago
      I have given up on doing frontend work for the time being, because of this crap. I used to do full stack with modern JS, TS, CSS, HTML and whatnot, but then someone made it all go to shit by advertising for NextJS and React, while there was zero interactivity on the whole platform, except for a couple of checkboxes. A few years later, there still isn't much. Some page transitions for when things happen in the backend. I told them in the beginning, that there is not much interactive stuff, but they all got flashed by some one minute low effort Material Design shit, and the idea of the whole thing being "modern" and hiring more React devs. So I stepped away from that while frontend part and let them dig their own hole. Moving a navigation/menu from one app to another takes 3 people 2-3 weeks by now. Changing the "router" to update the TS version is just as time consuming. Things that would have taken 1 day max. take now 2-3 weeks. That is 1/14th of the productivity and people get paid for that, more than I did. Oh and did I mention the menu responsiveness was broken for months at a certain viewport width? I did report it, but apparently it was so hard to fix, that it could not be done in a quiet hour, so it took months laying around in the queue of things to fix.
- panstromek 1y ago
  Might be a bit of a selection bias though. I certainly remember a lot of crappy MPAs before SPAs got big. The crappines just moved to SPAs as they became mainstream. Overall I agree that MPAs are better default, though, good SPAs are hard to build.
  - listenallyall 1y ago
    Part of the complaints about MPAs originally was that navigating all the different pages was slow, because loading new pages was slow. But plenty of today's SPAs deliver content even slower and the user is staring at a spinner for lengthy stretches. The key is quick, efficient server responses, whether using SPA or MPA approaches.
    - whstl 1y ago
      Yeah. In theory SPAs should be faster, but in practice rendering/sending the whole template is not as bad. And as you mention, both can be slow, due to the non-cached API/DB call, so...
      - const_cast 1y ago
        Even in theory, producing json is just typically slower than producing HTML. It seems unintuitive, but traversing an object tree using reflection to generate json is just slower than using an HTML template, which is probably a rope data structure.
        zelphirkalt 1y ago
        Rendering the template or JSON response is the last and probably often the least computationally expensive step though.
        whstl 1y ago
        I guess the rendering itself is pretty much the same for both SPAs and MPAs, since in the end it can be pretty much the same markup, but the SPA is also at a disadvantage here because it has to combine template/components + JSON to generate the HTML :/
arccy 1y ago
You can get smooth transitions with just css too with @view-transition https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@view-transition https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@view-trans...
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  The view transitions can even do most of the in-page or cross-page animations marketing wants. Just with way, way less code or things to break. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jnYjIDKyKHw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jnYjIDKyKHw
- trwired 1y ago
  Worth mentioning @view-transition is still not supported in Firefox.
  - paranoidxprod 1y ago
    I believe it’s finally enabled by default in nightly builds, so it should be standard soon. I may be wrong and it may have been scoped css enabled, but both are available by feature flags on nightly and plan to be enabled by default by the end of the year.
  - mvdtnz 1y ago
    No one uses Firefox (within the margin of error). Use them to your heart's content.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    This just means that user doesn't get the animation tho, right? The actual page transition still happens, so you get graceful fallback without the need to do anything special.
- 8organicbits 1y ago
  This feels like bringing the annoying transitions people used to use between slides in PowerPoint to the web. There's nothing smooth about the transition in the linked demo, it's quite jarring.
nico 1y ago
Also, it’s a mess separating stuff between react and the server, especially when building with express/node as the backend and the whole codebase together It’s such a pain having clear separation in development where everything runs off of the react server by default, but then it won’t when deploying, so either you end up doing all sorts of weird stuff or you need to be building and running production locally constantly, thus defeating the whole convenience of having a dev server that can hot reload the changes
giancarlostoro 1y ago
Even so you can do insanely simple refreshing dynamics with CSS and JS without importing any npm packages.
- cmonBro22 1y ago
  Sure, but the runtime is not exactly designed to guide you to the best way to do this. Hence the prevalence of frameworks to paper over the runtime. I openly admit that I'd rather learn a new framework than touch anything to do with figuring out how the browser is intended to behave in practice. What an abomination and insult to humanity. Edit: holy shit y'all do not like the earnest approach to technology
  - hdjrudni 1y ago
    Huh? The built-in APIs aren't perfect, but we're talking about something simple as ``` fetch('/my-content').then(async res => { if(res.ok) { document.getElementById('my-element').innerHtml = await res.text(); } }) ``` Something like that. Doesn't get much easier. Gone are the days of browser inconsistencies, at least of you stick to "Baseline Widely available" APIs which is now prominently displayed on MDN.
    - rhet0rica 1y ago
      No-framework web tinkerer here. If I had a nickel for every second of my life I've spent typing document.getElementById, I'd be able to afford new fingers. Should've been renamed to getId() and put in global scope two decades ago, if not three. At least querySelector() is a few characters shorter, but I always feel bad using such an alarmingly overdesigned tool for anything trivial.
      - pests 1y ago
        You don’t have to call getElementById or querySelector on document. You can narrow the search by starting at a specific node, just most people default into document as it’s already a global.
mikebelanger 1y ago
The nice thing about the plain "vanilla" approach is it can be used to enhance a more traditional SSR-rendered site. And it doesn't need a complete rewrite in React or whatever. The author of this article blog is describing some more advanced SPA-like scenarios, but those are completely optional
- zelphirkalt 1y ago
  React aficionados will disagree though, and tell you to move your logic into the React framework using code.
smokel 1y ago
As a counterpoint, many systems that were originally implemented as native desktop applications have since been migrated to the web. The motivation for this shift is not particularly strong from a technical standpoint, but it is a practical one: deploying native applications is simply too costly. The web finally provides a widespread standard for deploying applications inexpensively. Unfortunately, the technology used to build user interfaces for the web remains somewhat mediocre. It’s unfortunate that history took some wrong turns with X11, Java, Flash, Silverlight, .NET, and countless other alternatives that I haven’t personally lived through. Hopefully, someone will eventually find a way to make developing web applications comfortable and the broader community will embrace it.
- c-linkage 1y ago
  > deploying native applications is simply too costly. I do not understand why people hold this impression, especially in corporate environments. Windows supports both system and per-user deployments; the latter so you don't even need administrator rights. And with Intune, deployments can be pulled or pushed. Many desktop applications are written in .Net so you don't even need to install the runtime because it's preinstalled on the operating system. Even ClickOnce deployments -- which you can deploy on the web or on a file share -- pretty much make deployments painless. EDIT: For the naysayers: please then explain to me why Steam is so successful at deploying large games on multiple platforms?
  - hdjrudni 1y ago
    That sounds nice and it probably works fine if you're targeting a single business running Windows, but targeting Mac, Windows and Linux remains more difficult, no? And is there even a guarantee that your deploy will be rolled out in X minutes? Version skew remains one of the biggest sources of catastrophic bugs at the company I work for, and that's not even taking into client app ver, just skew between the several services we have. Once you add client app ver, we have to support things for 3 years. At my one-person company I just do a Kubernetes deploy, it goes out in a couple minutes and everyone has the latest ver whether they like it or not. I don't have the resources to maintain a dozen versions simultaneously.
spoonsort 1y ago
Not going to lie, that's a pretty out of touch opinion in the current decade, where most software feels an order of magnitude slower and less reactive than a mechanical device made 120 years ago.
- zelphirkalt 1y ago
  Most of that software are bloated SPAs that somehow manage to be slower than a complete page reload of any website or app, that is rendered server side using any traditional web framework statically rendering HTML templates.
  - aziaziazi 1y ago
    And adTech. I’ve been a happy user or the local gumtree [0] that always worked fine with my 9yo iPhone… until last year: the business model seems to have changed as they added in-list advertisement and I can only scroll the products list until the first ad wrapper shows up. Then the UI freeze and never gets back to life. I don’t even see the advertisements itself. [0] https://www.leboncoin.fr/ https://www.leboncoin.fr/ Edit: just tried it again and seems they fixed it! The ads stays in loading state forever but the site is usable again. Wonder if they did something on their side or if they changed ad provider.
esafak 1y ago
How do you know? Are you surveying them, including the ones who noped out of your site?
kgwxd 1y ago
People looking to get shit done don't really care but, when they're just mindlessly clicking, they'll hit the back button to the main feed way before the time it takes to fetch a modern framework if your site happens to be the first they hit with that particular version from the CDN.
chenster 1y ago
Still the case in most Asian countries where UIs are all Craigslist alike and UX is just shit. People just got use to it. Apparently westerns willing to pay a premium for better UX. It's a culture gap.
- notfed 1y ago
  Side note but as a buyer looking to buy used tools from locals, Craigslist's UX could not be better. I just started using it recently (after forgetting about it for a decade). Absolutely the opposite of shit. Though I think maybe if one is using it for a different purpose, like looking for apartments or roommates then that's probably shit.
lmm 1y ago
Page refresh between pages is ok. Lag when updating a form based on your inputs isn't. Frontend UI is like a bigger monitor or faster PC - you may not have known what you were missing, but once you've experienced it it's very frustrating to go back to the clunky old thing.
- Yhippa 1y ago
  > Lag when updating a form based on your inputs isn't. Why not?
  - lmm 1y ago
    > Why not? It's really irritating for your users. They might not consciously be able to point it out as the cause of their irritation, but they'll like your app a lot less.
firemelt 1y ago
page refresh is good. spa is shit.

I work for about 2k users, they do not give a shit about reactivity... build a monolith, make it comfy, embrace page refresh (nobody gives a fuck about that in the real world), and get shit done.

thenthenthen 1y ago

Unless the page refresh is fast, I tend to agree with you!

gjsman-1000 1y ago

I have seen more broken SPAs than MPAs, by far. Ironic, considering SPAs are supposed to improve conversion rates and user experience. Even from big companies with no excuse - Reddit is almost unusable on phones, X was straight up broken for a month straight with image loading on mobile. If you’re writing an SPA, and it isn’t Twitter or a content consumption platform, and it isn’t necessary to be API-driven, seriously just stop. You’re not clever, you’re not improving the experience, you’re only appealing to the tastes of other programmers. If billion-dollar companies can’t get them working perfectly, you certainly won’t.

pelagicAustral 1y ago
We created a generation of developers that AIM to over-engineer requirements... and we also came up with extremely pervasive frameworks to go with it... My firm cannot hire people with no React experience... people REALLY only know how to build cruft these days...
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  I have no React, Vue, or Angular experience. My websites were built with Livewire, some HTMX (basically Hotwire in the Rails world, server rendered HTML partials; or maybe Blazor SSR in the .NET world). I use Tailwind and a Laravel backend, but have some experience with C#. If you think that’s interesting, send me your firm’s URL, I’ll consider applying. (Edit: or really anyone reading this who is interested - government of a foreign nation outside the US is not viable, unfortunately.)
  - pelagicAustral 1y ago
    my firm is government, so do not expect too much... email to {trafalgar battle british general's last name]@rails.cl
- bradly 1y ago
  As a Rails developer with no desire to work in a React codebase, I'm not qualified for about 50-60% of the Rails jobs postings. My lastest full time was at Shopify where I said over an over that I was Ruby only and not interested in a React position only to be told a few months in I needed to know React to get promoted. It is exhausting.
  - zelphirkalt 1y ago
    I have given up on doing frontend work for the time being, because of this crap. I used to do full stack with modern JS, TS, CSS, HTML and whatnot, but then someone made it all go to shit by advertising for NextJS and React, while there was zero interactivity on the whole platform, except for a couple of checkboxes. A few years later, there still isn't much. Some page transitions for when things happen in the backend. I told them in the beginning, that there is not much interactive stuff, but they all got flashed by some one minute low effort Material Design shit, and the idea of the whole thing being "modern" and hiring more React devs. So I stepped away from that while frontend part and let them dig their own hole. Moving a navigation/menu from one app to another takes 3 people 2-3 weeks by now. Changing the "router" to update the TS version is just as time consuming. Things that would have taken 1 day max. take now 2-3 weeks. That is 1/14th of the productivity and people get paid for that, more than I did. Oh and did I mention the menu responsiveness was broken for months at a certain viewport width? I did report it, but apparently it was so hard to fix, that it could not be done in a quiet hour, so it took months laying around in the queue of things to fix.
panstromek 1y ago
Might be a bit of a selection bias though. I certainly remember a lot of crappy MPAs before SPAs got big. The crappines just moved to SPAs as they became mainstream. Overall I agree that MPAs are better default, though, good SPAs are hard to build.
- listenallyall 1y ago
  Part of the complaints about MPAs originally was that navigating all the different pages was slow, because loading new pages was slow. But plenty of today's SPAs deliver content even slower and the user is staring at a spinner for lengthy stretches. The key is quick, efficient server responses, whether using SPA or MPA approaches.
  - whstl 1y ago
    Yeah. In theory SPAs should be faster, but in practice rendering/sending the whole template is not as bad. And as you mention, both can be slow, due to the non-cached API/DB call, so...
    - const_cast 1y ago
      Even in theory, producing json is just typically slower than producing HTML. It seems unintuitive, but traversing an object tree using reflection to generate json is just slower than using an HTML template, which is probably a rope data structure.
      - zelphirkalt 1y ago
        Rendering the template or JSON response is the last and probably often the least computationally expensive step though.
        whstl 1y ago
        I guess the rendering itself is pretty much the same for both SPAs and MPAs, since in the end it can be pretty much the same markup, but the SPA is also at a disadvantage here because it has to combine template/components + JSON to generate the HTML :/

arccy 1y ago

You can get smooth transitions with just css too with @view-transition https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@view-transition https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@view-trans...

gjsman-1000 1y ago
The view transitions can even do most of the in-page or cross-page animations marketing wants. Just with way, way less code or things to break. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jnYjIDKyKHw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jnYjIDKyKHw
trwired 1y ago
Worth mentioning @view-transition is still not supported in Firefox.
- paranoidxprod 1y ago
  I believe it’s finally enabled by default in nightly builds, so it should be standard soon. I may be wrong and it may have been scoped css enabled, but both are available by feature flags on nightly and plan to be enabled by default by the end of the year.
- mvdtnz 1y ago
  No one uses Firefox (within the margin of error). Use them to your heart's content.
- int_19h 1y ago
  This just means that user doesn't get the animation tho, right? The actual page transition still happens, so you get graceful fallback without the need to do anything special.
8organicbits 1y ago
This feels like bringing the annoying transitions people used to use between slides in PowerPoint to the web. There's nothing smooth about the transition in the linked demo, it's quite jarring.

nico 1y ago

Also, it’s a mess separating stuff between react and the server, especially when building with express/node as the backend and the whole codebase together It’s such a pain having clear separation in development where everything runs off of the react server by default, but then it won’t when deploying, so either you end up doing all sorts of weird stuff or you need to be building and running production locally constantly, thus defeating the whole convenience of having a dev server that can hot reload the changes

giancarlostoro 1y ago

Even so you can do insanely simple refreshing dynamics with CSS and JS without importing any npm packages.

cmonBro22 1y ago
Sure, but the runtime is not exactly designed to guide you to the best way to do this. Hence the prevalence of frameworks to paper over the runtime. I openly admit that I'd rather learn a new framework than touch anything to do with figuring out how the browser is intended to behave in practice. What an abomination and insult to humanity. Edit: holy shit y'all do not like the earnest approach to technology
- hdjrudni 1y ago
  Huh? The built-in APIs aren't perfect, but we're talking about something simple as ``` fetch('/my-content').then(async res => { if(res.ok) { document.getElementById('my-element').innerHtml = await res.text(); } }) ``` Something like that. Doesn't get much easier. Gone are the days of browser inconsistencies, at least of you stick to "Baseline Widely available" APIs which is now prominently displayed on MDN.
  - rhet0rica 1y ago
    No-framework web tinkerer here. If I had a nickel for every second of my life I've spent typing document.getElementById, I'd be able to afford new fingers. Should've been renamed to getId() and put in global scope two decades ago, if not three. At least querySelector() is a few characters shorter, but I always feel bad using such an alarmingly overdesigned tool for anything trivial.
    - pests 1y ago
      You don’t have to call getElementById or querySelector on document. You can narrow the search by starting at a specific node, just most people default into document as it’s already a global.

mikebelanger 1y ago

The nice thing about the plain "vanilla" approach is it can be used to enhance a more traditional SSR-rendered site. And it doesn't need a complete rewrite in React or whatever. The author of this article blog is describing some more advanced SPA-like scenarios, but those are completely optional

zelphirkalt 1y ago
React aficionados will disagree though, and tell you to move your logic into the React framework using code.

smokel 1y ago

As a counterpoint, many systems that were originally implemented as native desktop applications have since been migrated to the web. The motivation for this shift is not particularly strong from a technical standpoint, but it is a practical one: deploying native applications is simply too costly. The web finally provides a widespread standard for deploying applications inexpensively. Unfortunately, the technology used to build user interfaces for the web remains somewhat mediocre. It’s unfortunate that history took some wrong turns with X11, Java, Flash, Silverlight, .NET, and countless other alternatives that I haven’t personally lived through. Hopefully, someone will eventually find a way to make developing web applications comfortable and the broader community will embrace it.

c-linkage 1y ago
> deploying native applications is simply too costly. I do not understand why people hold this impression, especially in corporate environments. Windows supports both system and per-user deployments; the latter so you don't even need administrator rights. And with Intune, deployments can be pulled or pushed. Many desktop applications are written in .Net so you don't even need to install the runtime because it's preinstalled on the operating system. Even ClickOnce deployments -- which you can deploy on the web or on a file share -- pretty much make deployments painless. EDIT: For the naysayers: please then explain to me why Steam is so successful at deploying large games on multiple platforms?
- hdjrudni 1y ago
  That sounds nice and it probably works fine if you're targeting a single business running Windows, but targeting Mac, Windows and Linux remains more difficult, no? And is there even a guarantee that your deploy will be rolled out in X minutes? Version skew remains one of the biggest sources of catastrophic bugs at the company I work for, and that's not even taking into client app ver, just skew between the several services we have. Once you add client app ver, we have to support things for 3 years. At my one-person company I just do a Kubernetes deploy, it goes out in a couple minutes and everyone has the latest ver whether they like it or not. I don't have the resources to maintain a dozen versions simultaneously.

spoonsort 1y ago

Not going to lie, that's a pretty out of touch opinion in the current decade, where most software feels an order of magnitude slower and less reactive than a mechanical device made 120 years ago.

zelphirkalt 1y ago
Most of that software are bloated SPAs that somehow manage to be slower than a complete page reload of any website or app, that is rendered server side using any traditional web framework statically rendering HTML templates.
- aziaziazi 1y ago
  And adTech. I’ve been a happy user or the local gumtree [0] that always worked fine with my 9yo iPhone… until last year: the business model seems to have changed as they added in-list advertisement and I can only scroll the products list until the first ad wrapper shows up. Then the UI freeze and never gets back to life. I don’t even see the advertisements itself. [0] https://www.leboncoin.fr/ https://www.leboncoin.fr/ Edit: just tried it again and seems they fixed it! The ads stays in loading state forever but the site is usable again. Wonder if they did something on their side or if they changed ad provider.

esafak 1y ago

How do you know? Are you surveying them, including the ones who noped out of your site?

kgwxd 1y ago

People looking to get shit done don't really care but, when they're just mindlessly clicking, they'll hit the back button to the main feed way before the time it takes to fetch a modern framework if your site happens to be the first they hit with that particular version from the CDN.

chenster 1y ago

Still the case in most Asian countries where UIs are all Craigslist alike and UX is just shit. People just got use to it. Apparently westerns willing to pay a premium for better UX. It's a culture gap.

notfed 1y ago
Side note but as a buyer looking to buy used tools from locals, Craigslist's UX could not be better. I just started using it recently (after forgetting about it for a decade). Absolutely the opposite of shit. Though I think maybe if one is using it for a different purpose, like looking for apartments or roommates then that's probably shit.

lmm 1y ago

Page refresh between pages is ok. Lag when updating a form based on your inputs isn't. Frontend UI is like a bigger monitor or faster PC - you may not have known what you were missing, but once you've experienced it it's very frustrating to go back to the clunky old thing.

Yhippa 1y ago
> Lag when updating a form based on your inputs isn't. Why not?
- lmm 1y ago
  > Why not? It's really irritating for your users. They might not consciously be able to point it out as the cause of their irritation, but they'll like your app a lot less.

firemelt 1y ago

page refresh is good. spa is shit.