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The react conference videos are great. The technology seems awesome. But there was one quip that caught me off guard, the presenter said something like: "if you

The react conference videos are great. The technology seems awesome. But there was one quip that caught me off guard, the presenter said something like: "if your application still has urls to back up every action, like it's the 90s...," I instantly thought about how and why that would be a bad thing and how and why progressive enhancement is a great thing. I look forward to a time where JavaScript performance is as "free" as CSS, but we are no where near it.

justinmk 12y ago
> I look forward to a time where JavaScript performance is as "free" as CSS, but we are no where near it. Actually, it seems the converse is true. Ray Cromwell recently commented[1] regarding Google Inbox: > It's nothing to do with JS code execution, the problem is in the rendering engine, essentially too much repainting and rendering stalls, and too little GPU accelerated animation paths. > Javascript is in a very good state these days in terms of cross browser compatibility, and while CSS support has converged between browsers in terms of correctness, CSS support has not converged on performance between browsers. Safari, Chrome Firefox, and IE have wildly different animation performance hazards on the same markup and debugging this often isn't trivial, for example, finding out that the GPU is stalling on texture uploads deep inside of the render loop. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8999716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8999716
lstamour 12y ago
The quote in context was referring to how thanks to JavaScript rendering server-side and client-side using the same routing, where every action had a URL (like the 90s), you could then browse the site powered by JS, without JS or until it actually loads. It went on to talk about how cool URIs don't change ... JavaScript performance is thus free because content is delivered in pre-rendered HTML, then JS is loaded for further manipulation later, and if it doesn't load in time, the site still works. The "like the 90s" comment refers to using JS to behave more like static webpages do, which is still a novelty for some single page apps. The funny part is we probably don't even know how common it is -- if a website doesn't break our understanding of the web and also renders server-side, how would most know that JavaScript is even involved?

justinmk 12y ago

> I look forward to a time where JavaScript performance is as "free" as CSS, but we are no where near it. Actually, it seems the converse is true. Ray Cromwell recently commented[1] regarding Google Inbox: > It's nothing to do with JS code execution, the problem is in the rendering engine, essentially too much repainting and rendering stalls, and too little GPU accelerated animation paths. > Javascript is in a very good state these days in terms of cross browser compatibility, and while CSS support has converged between browsers in terms of correctness, CSS support has not converged on performance between browsers. Safari, Chrome Firefox, and IE have wildly different animation performance hazards on the same markup and debugging this often isn't trivial, for example, finding out that the GPU is stalling on texture uploads deep inside of the render loop. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8999716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8999716

lstamour 12y ago

The quote in context was referring to how thanks to JavaScript rendering server-side and client-side using the same routing, where every action had a URL (like the 90s), you could then browse the site powered by JS, without JS or until it actually loads. It went on to talk about how cool URIs don't change ... JavaScript performance is thus free because content is delivered in pre-rendered HTML, then JS is loaded for further manipulation later, and if it doesn't load in time, the site still works. The "like the 90s" comment refers to using JS to behave more like static webpages do, which is still a novelty for some single page apps. The funny part is we probably don't even know how common it is -- if a website doesn't break our understanding of the web and also renders server-side, how would most know that JavaScript is even involved?