Why does anyone use Angular in production?

http://blog.worldmaker.net/2021/06/26/angular/

by WorldMaker • 5 years ago

80 145 5 years ago

blog.worldmaker.net

Zealotux• 5 years ago

In case you're wondering: there's more to the article if you scroll horizontally, I won't comment on the irony of the thing.

WorldMaker19• 5 years ago

Or shrink to mobile size or use your browser's Reader View.

Horizontal scrolling multi-column was a weird aesthetic choice based on personal preference (despite bad and growing worse browser support, sigh), but it's a personal blog and as "a 90s web kid" I strongly believe weird aesthetic choices are what makes blogs personal and not just another walled garden like most of social media (or Medium).

LarrySellers• 5 years ago

Unfortunately it makes them inaccessible in this case, I wouldn't even know how to scroll sideways unless you actually expect a user to click and drag a scrollbar. Even if the site was usable the the text is still illegible.

ebruchez• 5 years ago

I intend the following as friendly feedback. Personal is fine but that doesn't have to imply impossible to use.

The main problem is that it's not discoverable, at least on MacOS where there are no scrollbars. I found the horizontal scrolling by chance after trying every key on the keyboard. In the meanwhile I had already scanned the article using the Reader mode in Safari.

dentemple• 5 years ago

The first section just needs a little note that the user needs to scroll horizontally to continue.

Certain browsers make it completely non-obvious that you have to do so to see more content, and it's no longer "intuitive" UX for most users.

Alex3917• 5 years ago

I'd agree with you if hitting the spacebar or the arrow keys made it scroll over a full page. But honestly this is pretty ridiculous.

kevin_thibedeau• 5 years ago

The 90's web was broken with bad assumptions about the viewport for what was supposed to be a flexible layout engine. This is no different that hardcoding for 640x480 and making everyone else suffer.

halfeatenpie• 5 years ago

I see your point and that's up to you. But I do think factoring in the end user's experience is important here if you want them to listen to your argument.

You're trying to sell someone that your idea is right, but having the desktop experience be a bit difficult (and putting it on the end user to deal with it) doesn't really help you in communicating your points. It also makes it harder for them to digest your content, therefore people might just skip over it.

But again, it's a personal blog so all these decisions are up to you and your liking!

SahAssar• 5 years ago

I strongly believe weird aesthetic choices are what makes blogs personal and not just another walled garden like most of social media (or Medium).

Sure, but in this case the choice also strongly sacrifices usability. Even on non-MacOS desktop firefox I didn't know there was more to the article before reading the parent comment.

If you want people to read more of the article then perhaps make it easier to find out that there is more of it.

riidom• 5 years ago

Admittedly I like the column-based layout. Just the scrolling should work via mouse wheel and stop at whole columns. Not sure if I would want this on every website I visit, but it's a nice change. At least it doesn't scream "materialize!" or "bootstrap!" :)

WorldMaker19• 5 years ago

I still think it is a shame that Microsoft's proposed scroll-translation CSS still hasn't made it into the CSS multi-column standard (and also didn't survive Edge Classic to Chromium Edge shift either).

It's been on my backlog for a while to find a good JS replacement but haven't been happy with the ones I've tested: https://github.com/WorldMaker/lcars-moderne/issues/1

nimih2• 5 years ago

If you make your window small enough to hit the tablet/mobile breakpoint, it collapses into a vertical layout, which is much more pleasant. I honestly cannot fathom what would possess a person to make horizontally scrollable columns like this, since it's both difficult to use and introduces novel typographical defects such as widows and orphans.

itronitron2• 5 years ago

While the horizontal scroll isn't immediately obvious I found it easy and enjoyable to use as I can just start reading at the top of the next page instead of concentrating on not losing my place during a vertical scroll.

Also, if a typographical defect has a name (widows and orphans) can it truly be novel?

YetAnotherNick• 5 years ago

Missed chance to use "In case someone doesn't know it, ..."

hodgesrm• 5 years ago

Thanks, I would have missed that completely without your comment.

charles_f• 5 years ago

Also ironic, the justified text alignment, huge font and large padding which leaves room for 3 unreadable words per line on mobile.

earthboundkid• 5 years ago

If the author is out there: Add scroll snap to the text box! Without it, you're constantly misaligned, making it hard to read. Scroll snap is one of those great new CSS properties that makes thing that used to be hard easy.

jonny_eh• 5 years ago

or… I dunno… vertical scrolling like literally every other web page?

WorldMaker19• 5 years ago

I've considered that, but I feel scroll snap is actually the opposite of the intended affordance for what I was going for. I don't want the scroll to be exact. I want columns to peek out just a little bit in either direction in a "more to see" way. (I had that for a while with this CSS but browsers dropped some support for it.)

tedmiston• 5 years ago

To save some awkward scrolling: https://outline.com/mhWdLS.

akmittal2• 5 years ago

I don't know where the author lives but I haven't seem that everyone claim to know Angular. Quite the contrary everyone claim to know React.

Yes Angular is not great and most people know it. I just see almost all new applications using React/Next/vue

kemiller2002• 5 years ago

Interesting. I'm in the U.S. Midwest and most C# devs I talk to don't want to touch React, because they "already know Angular"

akmittal2• 5 years ago

Typescript was largely inspired by C#. Because of Angular following OOPS patterns it is relatively popular in C# developers.

In pure front end developer land Angular is quite behind React in popularity.

tluyben2• 5 years ago

Most devs from India that I talk to are learning react but know angular. They would like to continue with angular but it is not something that is excepted to companies we sell to anymore.

smnrchrds• 5 years ago

I did a quick search on Indeed and compared the number of results found. It's not scientifically rigorous or anything, but it should give us a rough idea of where Angular and React stand compared to each other. The search terms where "Angular JavaScript" and "React JavaScript" and similar without the quotation marks.

Angular, Anywhere in US: 25,248

React, Anywhere in US: 29,197

Vue, Anywhere in US: 8,032

Angular, California: 2,658

React, California: 4,643

Vue, California: 1,134

It seems like Angular and React are both very popular, but Angular is a bit less popular in California than elsewhere in the US. Vue is less popular than both, but it is a bit more popular in California than the rest of the US.

laurent922• 5 years ago

In 2020 I searched for employees and 90% were Angular, 10% React. Now it is the 30-70 (because the skills market is delayed compared to things people are currently learning).

cphoover• 5 years ago

This website is so hard to read from contrast to the scrolling. Can someone copy the text here?

*EDIT*: I did it here (and for the most part I mainly agree with the sentiment behind this article):

# Angular is Rotten to the Core

I find Angular an impressive front-end framework for just how badly it is designed, top to bottom, and yet how large of a cult-ish following it has. There exists a weird “everyone knows it” mentality that in practice seems to be entirely an illusion. There is the strange “no one got fired for picking Google” echo of ancient ibm mistakes exacerbated by Google barely dogfooding Angular (and arguably never successfully). There is the awful internal politics of Google that have produced many horror stories from former Angular developers, former open source community contributors, and combinations in between, and an impression that the rabbit hole goes only deeper if you could dig beneath Google NDAs and secrecy.