Things engineers believe about Web development

https://birtles.blog/2024/01/06/weird-things-engineers-believe-about-development/

by jnord • 3 years ago

155 249 3 years ago

troupo7• 3 years ago

While I agree with "web engine developers and web spec deveopers have little-to-no idea about web development" I disagree with "web browsers are good at handling complex and long-lived DOM trees with dynamic changes now"

hyperhello• 3 years ago

They are certainly better than before at handling the memory and bookkeeping of a large DOM tree. Every browser had so many unexplainable little bugs, but nowadays they can be relied on to correctly handle their own internal data without crashing. It’s a huge improvement.

diggan8• 3 years ago

"web browsers are good at handling complex and long-lived DOM trees with dynamic changes now"

Is there an alternative renderer/something that handles "complex and long-lived $something-trees with dynamic changes" better than web engines does?

They've been optimized for just that during decades at this point, with huge investments both in human-hours and money. Hard to imagine there is something else that can handle that better than browser engines.

Const-me2• 3 years ago

On Windows, WPF is better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundatio...

The critical features missing from HTML are data binding and data templates. Last time I checked, many modern frontend frameworks contain overcomplicated, incomplete, and inefficient implementations of these features on top of HTML DOM.

troupo7• 3 years ago

Is there an alternative renderer/something that handles "complex and long-lived $something-trees with dynamic changes" better than web engines does?

Literally everything else.

My favorite recent example is: 1000 objects with complex behaviour, lighting and animations takes 4 microseconds to render, at 9:36: https://youtu.be/kXd0VDZDSks?si=PjqeFVoSTPSsbdIk

They've been optimized for just that during decades at this point

You can't optimize beyond the limitiations of the ad-hoc hackish nature of the web. There's only so much optimisation you can do when even the simplest of things will cause re-flow and re-render o the entire page.

Well, games redraw the entire screen, but they can draw thousands of objects in a fraction of time it takes the web browser to figure out how to layout them.

Edit:

- Figma had to reimplement everything from scratch in WebGL because browsers (that is, DOM) are just bad

- Google Docs and Google Sheets reimplemented everything in canvas, once again bypassing the "greatest renderer on earth" to be able to render and control the rendering.

draw_down• 3 years ago

Who said every site should work without JS, even Figma?

Honestly, who is saying that? Who is saying these things?

diggan8• 3 years ago

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... (25 results)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... (28 results)

So at least some are saying something along those lines. I'm sure if you search Xitter you'll find even more hits.

I think the argument is usually not made in isolation like that though, and usually with exceptions. "Websites without heavy user interaction should work without JS", "Websites should work without JavaScript, unless based on live data" and so on, which makes a lot more sense.

croisillon2• 3 years ago

fyi you are shadowbanned, write hn an email to clear that up

gumballindie• 3 years ago

I think the points in this blog are made up. No one with a bit of experience “believes” such things.

brightball• 3 years ago

“Every” is a bit extreme but I’ve been a believer in Graceful Degradation for years. This is where jQuery excelled.

blackoil5• 3 years ago

A ridiculously small but very vocal minority which is active on forums like HN.

ryanbrunner22• 3 years ago

I tend to make all my pages function without Javascript even if I don't expect my users to turn off Javascript. It makes things easier to cover with automated tests if I can just exercise my backend servers with scripts vs. a headless browser, and if something does go wrong with serving Javascript or something it's nice to know my site is functional.

Generally speaking the experience will be horrible (what should be a modal or a partial page reload will be a full reload) but using the technologies I use it's not that hard and it makes my development experience easier while delivering some (rarely needed) benefits to end users, so it's an unqualified win for my particular use case.

croisillon2• 3 years ago

"it’s hard to imagine how [Figma and Photoshop for web] could work without JavaScript" is a bit of a strawman

ryanbrunner22• 3 years ago

The refrain against the "we should go back to MPA apps with server rendered HTML" is often "well what about Figma and Photoshop", which of course, yes those don't really work in the MPA, server rendered HTML model.

The problem isn't so much those but how most developers lump themselves in with the incredibly interactive sites because it sounds sexier and cooler to work on something complex than something simple. The phrase becomes "well, what about Figma and Photoshop (and my mostly CRUD SaaS)?"

I think a valuable insight that the MPA / minimal JS crowd is bringing to the table is the idea is that you shouldn't strive for cool and complicated tools, you should strive for the simplest tool possible, and even further, you should strive to make solutions that require the simplest tools possible whenever you can.

endisneigh6• 3 years ago

you should strive for the simplest tool possible, and even further, you should strive to make solutions that require the simplest tools possible whenever you can.

Why do you believe this? I couldn’t disagree more. People should strive for the most effective tool, and most of the time that’s what they already know, unless some new tools’ efficacy outweighs cost to learn it

ryanbrunner22• 3 years ago

Fair point that my point was overly reductive. But given you understand multiple tools, you should reach for the simplest tool possible to solve the problem. And in some cases you should still reach for the simplest tool possible even if you don't understand it yet. If you've only ever used Kubernetes but someone asks you to host a static HTML file at an address, you should learn how to use a simpler solution for that.

Xeamek3• 3 years ago

most of the time that’s what they already know, unless some new tools effficacy outweighs cost to learn it

....which any proponent of the new tool will argue it does

christophilus8• 3 years ago

It also depends on your definition of simple. The architectural model of Preact is simple. You change state, your application renders correctly. The architectural model of an MPA with interactivity sprinkled in seems as simple, but quickly becomes more complex over time, and has ultimately not been as simple in my experience.

diggan8• 3 years ago

Agree, too many believe in the silver-bullet that solves all their problems. Different problems require different solutions, it's kind of simple but hard to realize when you're deep into the woods.

If you want to build a vector editor in the browser then yes, probably you want to leverage webassembly, canvas, webgl or whatever you fancy.

But if you're building a more basic application (like most CRUD SaaS actually are) then probably you don't want to over-complicate it, as you instead want to be able to change and iterate quickly, so simplest tools and solutions gives you the most velocity for changes, until you've figured out the best way forward.

Trouble is to recognize where on the scale of "Figma <> news.ycombinator.com" you should be, and it's hard to identify exactly where the line gets drawn where you can justify upfront technical innovation in favor of true-and-tested approaches.

The_Colonel• 3 years ago

I think there's a similar dynamic as behind "nobody got fired for choosing Oracle" - it's safer to choose a more complex, but also more flexible technology.

If you're a tech lead, your worst nightmare is when you have to say - "this is very difficult to do with the current stack. When we were choosing this stack, we assumed you'll never want these things". You're not going to extract a binding promise from product/business that they will never want a certain class of things - you can only guess, and then hope, that the product will remain a dumb CRUD.

toasted-subs2• 3 years ago

The core of what differentiates applications isn't what happens on the front end. Putting all the focus on the client which gets delivered seems like a misappropriation of funds.

Especially as one man teams it just doesn't make sense. Any on teams with multiple people having relatively static HTML is a really effective abstraction.

ko27• 3 years ago

It's funny that you, and probably a lot of HN folk, consider MPA simpler than SPA. It's opposite in my experience. The name itself is actually telling you that it has more complexity (multi page vs single page).

In practice, you can make both as complicated as you want, but SPA seems like a simpler starting point.

rileymat2• 3 years ago

The complications are not coming from the M or S part of the acronym, it comes from the words “Page” and “App” being intertwined. Or in other words 18 years of trying to hammer the web browser (conceived for “pages”) into an app platform.

ryanbrunner22• 3 years ago

It can definitely seem this way if you only consider the front end. But a challenge that many SPA apps run into is that for the vast majority of SPA apps you end up in a situation where the front end and back end need to share business logic, and this can be a very complex thing to model and maintain, with either duplicated effort (and the potential of drift) or complicated solutions to keep them in sync, particularly if your front end and back end technologies aren't identical.

Most MPA apps treat the browser and front end as dumb clients basically - strictly responsible for putting stuff on a screen

sidlls2• 3 years ago

How is SPA a simpler starting point? It requires more code and more abstractions in the client from the onset. One might argue that that complexity would just exist in the backend in an MPA, but that's not true: there is some additional backend complexity, but not nearly as much as required to support the multitude of clients that exist for the baseline in an MPA.

icedchai2• 3 years ago

The earliest web apps I worked on were multi-page apps, with pages generated by Perl CGIs, later PHP. There was almost nothing going on on the client side except form submissions and a bit of JS-based form validation. I can tell you with 100% certainty this was simpler to build than most anything I see today with React SPAs and REST APIs. Even a simple form submission can be a PITA with modern tools.

blackoil5• 3 years ago

It is the spectrum of interactivity. If you are a CPP/AI/Go dev who needs a static blog with simple form, you'll believe server rendered MPA are way to go. If your site has interactivity and dynamic status/notifications, you'll believe SPA makes sense. Unfortunately like in everything now days people assume other side is idiot and pick up pitchfork.

dustingetz3• 3 years ago

"the problem" "you should" – this is the language of special interests

developers are salarymaxxing first, second virtue signaling to support their case in their employers' selection process, third work-minimization and pain-minimization. Even the Simplicity Paladins are min/maxxing the same three priorities, perhaps weighing pain-minimization above salarymaxxing, yet still subject to the same invisible macro forces that shape our lives. and I postulate that this is a complete explanation of developer behavior at scale.

diggan8• 3 years ago

I feel like I understand 50% of your comment, is this some DSL from a different ecosystem being used to explain developer behavior, or something like that?

JackMorgan4• 3 years ago

A great mental framework that holds up to my experience as well.

seszett2• 3 years ago

I feel like we live in completely different worlds.

traverseda4• 3 years ago

For stuff like figma and photoshop I can't help but suspect that the creators would be better of writing their program in CPP with the GUI toolkit of their choice, and compiling it for the web with emscripten.

diggan8• 3 years ago

I don't think that workflow was even a realistic option when Figma development was initiated, or even when it first launched.

chilli_axe• 3 years ago

The existing C++ Photoshop codebase was largely ported to WASM with Emscripten https://web.dev/articles/ps-on-the-web

grose• 3 years ago

I believe Figma is indeed written in C++ and uses emscripten. It's pretty much the polar opposite of your standard CRUD app.

Old article: https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

lacerrr3• 3 years ago

I tend to dislike this approach for the simple reason that it's an extra "compatibility layer" where you give up control. If you're developing for the web you may every now and then want to do things a specific way or use a specific feature and be unable to do so because the transpiler doesn't support it or is programmed not to.

mardifoufs3• 3 years ago

Why? If there's one thing JavaScript and browser tech is good at, it's making GUI dev easier. Just look at how even Qt is basically pivoting completely towards QML which to my naive eyes look very very similar to how GUI/Layouts/styling is done with html5/Js. Why would you purposefully use something worse just to not use browser related tech? I would agree if this was about raw number crunching, where compiling to wasm makes sense and where a html5 GUI can be used as a frontend, but the GUI itself has no reason to be built with CPP.

christophilus8• 3 years ago

That’s not why. In my experience, applications accumulate interactivity over time. At some point, they hit a threshold where you (as a developer— not an end user) wish you had gone with an interactive development model.

Also, for me, the statically typed, component-based approach to UI development that I get with Preact is my favorite way to build UIs. I’ve used Rails, PHP, ASP (the og), ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, along with old-school native windows development in VB6, C# Winforms, whatever garbage Microsoft came up with after Winforms (I forget what it was called), and probably other stacks I’m forgetting. VB6 and C# Winforms were the peak of my productivity. But for the web, the UI model of Preact is my favorite.

davidmurdoch2• 3 years ago

Styling with WPF (the thing after winforms) was so confusing, at least from someone coming from CSS.

zelphirkalt4• 3 years ago

I don't see why you cannot add interactivity later on. Frameworks like VueJS provide an easy way to deliver interactive widgets on a subset of rendered pages of a traditional website. If you need an API on the backend, you need to write that API one way or another anyway.

This way people who are just looking for some information on a website can go visit, get, and leave, without having to enable intrusive JS blobs, while those in for the interative things on the website can get their preferred experience as well. Instead many websites are developed with only the second group in mind, often intentionally forcing you to run their code on your computer, or not delivering useful information at all.

jayceedenton• 3 years ago

This is motte-and-bailey argumentation in my opinion.

The motte: SPAs are a good way to write highly complex applications in the browser, like Photoshop and Figma, to compete with desktop apps.

The bailey: SPAs are a good way to write most web applications.

If you attack the bailey, proponents retreat to the motte, which is hard to disagree with. With the motte successfully defended, proponents return to the bailey, beneficial for those enthusiastic about SPAs but much harder to defend.

The only way to tease this issue apart is to stick to specifics and avoid casting SPAs or MPAs as universally good or bad. Show me the use-case and we can decide which route is best.

danielvaughn2• 3 years ago

Or even avoid discussing SPAs or MPAs entirely.

At the end of the day, we're talking about whether a specific interaction (or a set of interactions) can be handled over the network or not.

If you need the interaction to fully resolve (as in the state is updated and the success or failure of the interaction is visible to the user) within 800ms or so, then it shouldn't be performed over the network.

For interactive editors like Figma, you often have interactions based on key repeats, which usually fire at 50-200ms intervals. So client-side rendering is really the only feasible option.

aatd86• 3 years ago

Strangely enough, this dichotomy seems to exist only for the web platform.

Everywhere else (desktop, mobile etc) the model is SPAs.

The only reason people distinguish it for web is because of legacy: html + DOM, i.e. Documents.

Documents don't generally require programmers even if using lateX.

Both models can coexist. I believe that SPAs somewhat supersede MPAs and that an MPA can be a simplification sometimes for a specific kind of apps, a website being simply an app that has been broken apart and is sent piece by piece.

xpe3• 3 years ago

A fun metaphor. A SPA-inclined team/consultancy/department will retreat to their motte when necessary. They'll live to fight another day. Given a chance, they'll return to the bailey, advocating for SPAs under a relaxed standard.

Using this metaphor can imply significant disingenuity: a lack of honesty about one's true belief.

cabalamat2• 3 years ago

beneficial for those enthusiastic about SPAs

It's almost as if some developers choose technologies based on "what'll look good on my CV"

marcosdumay• 3 years ago

Oh, here we go.

When we start to even think about debate fallacies when comparing engineering methodologies, it's completely clear we already lost the game. In fact, we also lost the meta game, and probably some 2 or 3 outer meta layers of it.

So yes, we should design software for the specifics of the function it will provide. Do not let people evade their competency by talking in generalities.

blackoil5• 3 years ago

The problem isn't so much those but how most developers lump themselves in with the incredibly interactive sites

It is not only Figma or Photoshop. Any site with multiple steps of interactions or complex filters over search result etc. benefit from SPA and declarative code. The experience is smoother and development of anything, but simple forms is much faster.

People disabling JS or working on satellite internet from a remote island are fringe cases and are not relevant for the business.

xigoi4• 3 years ago

People disabling JS or working on satellite internet from a remote island are fringe cases and are not relevant for the business.

How about people working on a train?

t8sr2• 3 years ago

This attitude is the reason why I now dread filling out any random web form, because a poorly implemented crappy JavaScript ”flow” will take over my browser, break the back button, accessibility and autofill features and randomly fail and start over in step 6 out of 19. It’s the reason why a simple web form requires 100 MB of bandwidth to deal with.

People working from a train or on data roaming are not a fringe case. They have amounts of bandwidth that, 20 years ago, were enough to serve any complex web experience. It’s not acceptable that we now require more data than is contained in all the books in the library of congress to buy a ticket on Ticketmaster.

I can’t understand how someone looks at the ratio of useful action to code size, sees it’s something like 1:1e6, and thinks this is fine.

The modern web’s usability, efficiency and reliability are terrible, and worse each year. Defending the tech stack that led to this with “it’s a good UX” is both wrong and makes me feel like web devs live on another planet from the rest of us.

ryanbrunner22• 3 years ago

Stuff like filtering search results is very easily accomplished by a MPA with query parameters to a results page. The specific elements that allow you to specify query parameters often require more interactivity, but this is easy to layer on with a progressive enhancement type approach on top of a fundamentally MPA application.

squidbeak• 3 years ago

Accessibility workers have to hear rather too much of the "these people aren't relevant to the business" arguments. And while every business has its own concerns and priorities, standards based on exclusion don't belong on the web.

Aurornis2• 3 years ago

People disabling JS or working on satellite internet from a remote island are fringe cases and are not relevant for the business.

Satellite internet (even before Starlink) is actually plenty fast for a modern website, as long as delivery is halfway optimized to avoid a thousand round trips.

It’s people on mobile phones in 3rd-world countries that suffer the most, but they end up with specially optimized websites and even separate mobile apps if they’re a target market.

People who disable JS are virtually non-existent in the real world, outside of bubbles like HN comments. Building technology strategies to cater to this tiny minority is not a good decision.

ksec2• 3 years ago

From my brief look at my log and history usage and generally my estimate, 95%, or dare I say 99% in terms of my traffic could be a MPA. Currently the only site I go regularly that are JS SPAs are Feedly, Youtube, Discourse Forums and Twitter. And apart from Twitter the others could have been MPAs and still be perfectly fine. ( Although Youtube is debatable ) I did like to think 80-90% of the web population browsing usage dont deviate from mine that much.

The thing about JS SPA is that they are hard to make it 100% right. Even the simplest thing. And this goes back to the topic about Web Development and computing. Modern day web is designed by Google for Google. Making things easier for 98% of the web simply isn't their thing. And that is not just on the Web but everything else they do as well. And since no one gets fired for using what Google uses, we then end up with additional tools to solve the complexity of what Google uses.

Depending on how you count it we are now fast coming close to 20 years of Google dominance on the web. And there hasn't been a single day I didn't wish for an alternative to compete with them. I know this sounds stupid. But may be I should start another Yahoo.

troupo7• 3 years ago

Although Youtube is debatable

It can definitely be an MPA. The only somewhat dynamic part it has is the comments.

And now it's so egregiously bad that it's the single source of bad scores in Google's own metrics: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1742669322487533801 and https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1742670032113402049 (yes, it loads 47KB of CSS/2.7 MB on desktop among other things)

jameshart5• 3 years ago

"Currently the only site I go regularly that are JS SPAs are ...."

Are you sure about that? Well made SPAs don't look like apps. They navigate seamlessly and instantly because they're not redownloading and parsing all their header and footer HTML, re-constructing a brand new DOM, loading and reinterpreting CSS, and bootstrapping a new Javascript runtime on every click.

Look at https://react.dev/learn, click around the documentation pages - do you think that's an SPA or an MPA?

Open up your network tab, and you'll find out what's happening: When you hover over a nav header, it starts preloading a JSON file containing the content for that page. When you click on a navigation link, that content's loaded into the react DOM and some more prefetches of just JSON content for likely next pages are loaded up. Your browser navi is updated, but you are still in the same original page context you started in. It is insanely snappy to interact with.

Yaina2• 3 years ago

I think it's (increasingly) not as binary as either MPA or SPA. Although it has been for quite some time now.

A lot of web developers strive for some amount of templating and client-side interactivity on their websites. And when frameworks like React came up they solved interactivity issues but made it hard to integrate into existing server-side templating systems, which were mostly using different programming languages.

So because integrating the frameworks for client-side interactivity was hard, the frameworks also took on the job of templating the entire site and suddenly SPAs were popular. I think a big draw here was that the entire tooling became JavaScript.

But the drawbacks were apparent, I guess a big one was that search engines could not index these sites and of course performance, so the frameworks got SSR support. The site was still written in the framework, rendered to HTML on the server and then hydrated back to a SPA on the client.

Now, even more recently we got stuff like islands, where you still use the handy web framework but can choose which parts of your site should actually be interactive (i.e. hydrated) on the client. And I believe this is the capability that has just long been missing. Some sites require no JS on the client (could even be SSGs), others require a little interactivity, and some make most sense as full blown SPAs.

We're finally entering the era where the developer has that choice even though they use the same underlying framework.

kgdiem2• 3 years ago

you should strive to make solutions that require the simplest tools possible whenever you can

I’ve gone back to making MPA apps with minimal JS. It helps me actually ship my projects rather than tinkering and having an over complicated setup for mostly CRUD tasks.

In one project that is a bit more data intensive and interactive I’m using Laravel Breeze / Laravel + inertajs (SSR react pages).

I’m also a big fan of Jekyll lately, I made my own theme on Thursday with only 2 tiny scripts for the mobile menu and submission of the contact form.

Using DOM APIs and managing a little bit of state is fine for many, many projects.

OTOH when you don’t control the requirements and the business asks for a ton of stateful widgets progressive enhancement can become a mess of spaghetti in the UI and API unless very carefully managed and well thought out. At that point you might as well go all in on React/Angular/Vue, especially when you have to account for a mix of skill levels and turnover.

jwells892• 3 years ago

A big factor in that “tinkeriness” of SPAs is how nearly every part of making an SPA well-behaved and pleasant to use falls almost entirely on the shoulders of the developer. Due to how little browsers provide on that front, well-behaved polished SPAs are very much not on the happy path or default. Even if you use the big popular libraries, special care must be taken to not build a product that’s a frustrating mess for users.

In comparison a server-side MPA will probably be at least decent to use unless the dev has been entirely careless, because that model better matches what browsers have been built for.

The takeaway is that for SPAs to be consistently good for both devs and users, browsers need to do the bulk of the heavy lifting and provide a “happy path”, largely eliminating the need for overwrought JS libraries that try to paper over browser inadequacies.

palata10• 3 years ago

well what about Figma and Photoshop

I, for one, don't want them rendered in my browser. I have an OS that can run apps, and I want my browser to be an app that renders simple HTML pages. If you want an app, make a damn Desktop app that can run on my OS.

dstroot• 3 years ago

Well… if you have ever supported a desktop app you know how difficult “version dispersion”, users that never update their OS, users that always update their OS, different hardware, other hostile software, etc. can be. If you know, you know.

throwitaway11239• 3 years ago

I couldn't disagree more. Desktop apps are often so invasive that they almost feel like malware. Every time I install a desktop app I have to ensure that it isn't reading random files from my filesystem, snooping on my clipboard, or making itself persistent so that it restarts automatically every time I reboot my computer.

Adobe apps like Photoshop are some of the worst offenders. Sometimes I'll kill an Adobe process running in the background, only to realize that there's an additional background process ready to restart the first one. It's like playing whack a mole trying to stop all of the creative cloud junk processes. I would much rather sandbox software like that in the browser where I can close a tab and be done with it (and where I'll be prompted before an app tries to read passwords from my clipboard or access files from my filesystem).

acdha2• 3 years ago

The problem isn't so much those but how most developers lump themselves in with the incredibly interactive sites because it sounds sexier and cooler to work on something complex than something simple.

This is very similar to the NoSQL arc. Some people at prestigious places posted about some cool problems they had, and a generation of inexperienced developers started that they needed MongoDB and Cassandra to build a CRUD app with several orders of magnitude fewer users, transactions, or developers. One of the biggest things our field needs to mature on is the idea of focusing on the problem our users have rather than what would look cool when applying for a new job.

The SPA obsession has been frustrating that way for me because I work with public-focused information-heavy sites where the benefits are usually negative and there’s a cost to users on older hardware – e.g. the median American user has JavaScript performance on par with an iPhone 6S so not requiring 4MB of JS to display text and pictures has real value – but that conflicts with hiring since every contractor is thinking about what’ll sound “modern” on their CV.

jauntywundrkind• 3 years ago

Simplest feels like a folly. No project of significance stays in a simple phase. They all grow and expand.

Having a stable reliable generally applicable decision/toolset you can apply beats this hunt for optimization to smithereens. Don't optimize case by case. Optimize for your org, for your life, lean into good tools you can use universally and stop special casing your stuff. There's nearly no reason to complicate things by hounding for "simplicity." Other people won't be happier if you keep doing side quests for simple, and you won't be either.

(Do learn to get good with a front-end router, so you can avoid >50% of the practical downsides of SPAs. And I hope over time I can recommend WebComponents as a good-for-all un-framework.)

amadeuspagel2• 3 years ago

When you vote on a HN comment while writing a reply, it reloads and you lose your reply. That's the kind of problem you have with MPAs, even if you aren't building the next Figma.

yetanother12345• 3 years ago

" ... is bringing to the table is the idea ..."

Wikipedia states that

    "Keep it simple, stupid!", is a design principle first noted by the U.S. Navy in 1960 [0]

... but some coders, including yours truly, has been brought up with that principle as a keystone of programming from day one (which was decades ago). It is related to the more modern DRY principle.

If this is brought to the table now it is only seemingly so, caused by the fact that those at the table must have forgot it, or never learned it. Of course, there are also commercial interests in keeping things as complicated as possible - it could just be that these have had too much influence for too long.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

jefftk5• 3 years ago

As an example, the Eleventy documentation seems to avoid using client-side JavaScript for the most part. As Eleventy supports various templating languages it provides code samples in each of the different languages. Unfortunately, it doesn’t record which language you’ve selected so if your chosen language is not the default one, you are forced to change tabs on every single code sample. A little client-side JavaScript here would make the experience so much more pleasant for users.

This may actually be an ePrivacy limitation (cookie law) not a desire to avoid JS. Persisting the setting across pages requires client size storage, which in ePrivacy countries requires either that the setting be obvious to the user that it's persisted, getting per-action consent (ex: a "preferred language" setting) or site-wide user consent (a cookie pop-up).

Gustek• 3 years ago

My understanding of ePrivacy (mostly GDPR) is that this kind of feature does not require consent. It's only features that would allow you for tracking of the user that require consent. Storing some setting in a local storage, never sending it to the server is fine.

Things get a bit muddy when sending to server but even then you may not need a consent if it is a feature that is required for correct working of the website or better experience without tracking and profiling.

diggan8• 3 years ago

This is correct. Unless it involves personal data and/or tracking the user somehow, then GDPR isn't relevant.

Example: If you're storing lightOrDarkTheme in a cookie/localStorage, then there is no need to try to follow any directives, nor are you required to inform the user about that you're storing the preference.

jefftk5• 3 years ago

GDPR and ePrivacy are different regulations. Under the latter even purely local data storage still requires consent unless it's "strictly necessary" to implement something the user has requested.

For example, see the discussion the sibling commenter linked around storing UI customization choices for only the duration of the current session: https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinio...

gbuk20133• 3 years ago

As long as it’s implemented as a session cookie (or local storage as IIRC it also behaves as a session cookie) it should not need consent (as per 3.6 “UI customisation cookies” of https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinio...)

jefftk5• 3 years ago

I agree for something that's clearly customizing the UI of the whole site, but if it looks like you're choosing a language only for the currently displayed snippet then I think that wouldn't qualify?

mjburgess• 3 years ago

“Web development shouldn’t need a build step”

Everything running in a browser is interpreted. There is no reason for webdev to require a build step, and it largely does so because JS standards haven't delivered anything around static typing. Even a "this syntax is valid but ignored" would enable IDEs to provide checks via LSPs, but for no-build running.

Build steps and development iteration overhead is something to be avoided at all costs. For it to have been introduced, with multi-second latency, to web dev. is a sign of developer experience dropping off a cliff.

Time-to-iterate, tool quality, release speed, etc. are essential to being able to build mental models of code (etc.)

toasted-subs2• 3 years ago

Ease of deploying is a huge thing which gets lost. Over focusing on a single area of an application makes things really obvious the big picture was lost somewhere.

croes• 3 years ago

Everything running in a browser is interpreted.

That's exactly the reason for a build step.

In a build step the code can be optimized to reduce and/or accelerate the code that needs to be interpreted.

ryanbrunner22• 3 years ago

JS builds today do not appreciably accelerate code, and minimization is of marginal benefit when served assets are appropriately compressed using technologies browsers already support.

eugenekolo• 3 years ago

A build step is fine. I think the point misses the real issue: that build step changing every 6 months in the web world.

pseudosavant• 3 years ago

Every time you have to go back to an "old" project you haven't worked on in six months there is a webpack/npm dependency hell greeting you.

pgorczak• 3 years ago

I appreciate the build step in setups like Vite/Vue because the development server can automatically and accurately hotpatch the application when I make changes. I don’t think you’d want to change the standards to couple DOM and js in the way that makes this possible in Vue but it’s an iteration speed improvement nonetheless.

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

I wouldn’t want to have either 100 lodash dependencies or ship a ton of functions that aren’t used. Tree shaking is a pretty nice build step.

JackMorgan4• 3 years ago

Last month a client asked me to build them a crud form only using old school C# MVC with Razor templates. And by golly it was much harder for me than just doing it in React+Next.

I had some nostalgic notion that MVC was going to be a smooth ride. That all this JS cruft was slowing me down. Then I needed a search bar, then validation, then I kept running into weird surprises with Razor templates. After a month I ruefully concluded I'd have gotten it done a heck of a lot faster just using my usual stack.

I now regret all those times I complained about how much bloat there is in the JS ecosystem. Yes, is it possible to make crud apps with Razor, sure, people do it everyday. But for me, with a project with increasingly complex display logic and validation, I definitely should have tried a little harder to talk them into using Next and TS.

As an aside, I was surprised that getting HMR with C# is kind of a pain. I never figured out how to get it while debugging. So every time I wanted to debug some new issue with the template not sending data right to the controller (which felt like every few seconds of work) I'd have to restart the server and wait 10+ seconds for it to restart and then renavigate to where I was, reenter my form fields, and then try again. After I was done and wanted HMR, I'd have to restart the server again. That extra hassle really started to grind on my patience.

onli2• 3 years ago

The jump from JS to the microsoft world is always hard. Hell, jumping from anywhere into microsoft environments has to be hard. No surprise that it was a difficult transition if that wasn't in your background so far. The docs alone will cause a culture shock!

But for me, with a project with increasingly complex display logic and validation

It always sucks if the requirements are not clear in the beginning, if the dev can't anticipate how they will grow in advance?

But what has validation to do with it? That's completely backend, how would that have been easier with React+Next?

As an aside, I was surprised that getting HMR with C# is kind of a pain.

Proper systems dynamically interpret their templates on every request in dev mode because of this, like Ruby/Sinatra does.

tantalor• 3 years ago

What is HMR? Is it edit/refresh?

threatofrain• 3 years ago

IMO validation / boundary code ought be shared between frontend and backend.

Alano13• 3 years ago

Sorry, but what’s wrong with microsoft docs?

quest88• 3 years ago

Are you surprised that it took you longer with a tool you don't know compared to a tool you do know? IMO, that should be expected.

JackMorgan4• 3 years ago

More surprised at how much I'd forgotten and how it can be pretty fussy to use. I had in my mind a nostalgic feeling of it being so much easier and faster.

url00• 3 years ago

Having done a similar project this year I completely agree with you. Maybe that's more a statement against Razor than MVC itself - I suspect it's much cleaner/easier to do a trad MPA+MVC-style app in a language+framework combo that is made for it like Rails.

I think the reality is that Razor has been left rotting for a while. It still works, and there's nothing that bad about it but the DX is not good, especially compared to modern JS frameworks.

It's hard to explain to people who haven't worked with Razor how annoying things like validation are. There is a "happy path" where the different parts of the validation framework all talk to each other, but it's not obvious and the Razor documentation on MSDN is very _not good_. It doesn't help that there's like 5 completely different things all called "Razor/Blazor" and a lot of semantic overlap between them all. Very frustrating to need to sift through so much to find something that feels like it should be easy and well supported.

JackMorgan4• 3 years ago

This exactly summarizes how this last month has felt. Weird, frustrating issues that are weirdly hard to even find documentation on.

zb3• 3 years ago

Maybe 2024 will be the year where client-side Rust/WASM frontend frameworks start to get traction and if that’s the case, we’d better get used to having a build step!

That's nonsense, there isn't any progress here. You're just rebuilding things that could easily be built 20 years ago, but with 10X the complexity. And then to solve slow load times your solution is to add even more complexity..

mgaunard• 3 years ago

Reminds me of the fact that for a long time C++ compiler engineers didn't themselves write code in C++ or know best practices despite writing the implementation.

throwaway167• 3 years ago

2024 is the year of Rust and HTMX.

inopinatus3• 3 years ago

The tech sector is riddled with such divisions of perspective.

”In a high-level language like C...” - chip designer

”In a low-level language like C...” - application programmer

graypegg• 3 years ago

“Riddled” has a tinge of negativity to it. I would say it’s actually a useful thing, “level” is a count of abstraction layers relative to the abstraction you’re familiar with. It’s more just a way to communicate some personal responsibility/knowledge range. I’ve heard people call Python “a low level way of using a computer” or similar.

inopinatus3• 3 years ago

Riddles are also explanatory.

The best programmer I ever worked with writes drivers for a hobby.

rramadass5• 3 years ago

Anecdote: Coming from the application side i had always thought of C as a low-level language but in one company where i worked with chip designers who only did Verilog, i was gobsmacked when in my conversations with them they said they didn't know higher-level languages like C and cannot program in it.

flashback21993• 3 years ago

We're not gobsmacked when you don't know Verilog, so I'm not sure why you think you can be gobsmacked some chip designers don't know C...

bacro• 3 years ago

Recently I was reading the Learn CSS the pedantic way book and the definition for inline boxes did not match the way that anonymous block boxes were generated when an inline-level element had a block-level element as its child. So I went looking elsewhere for a more appropriate definition for that case and found this issue on standards: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1477 It was really interesting to know that I was not the only one confused. My question was: Does the inline-box generated by the inline-level element contains the box generated by the block-level child or there wasn't an inline-box that was a parent of them all but there were 2 siblings inline-level boxes of the block-level box that were wrapped in another anonymous block boxes? Reading that issue I got to know the concept of fragments, which I did not know browsers had. But the issue seems to suggest that the box tree for this case should have the inline-box as being a parent of the block-box. Which led me to another question, in that case, if I apply a border to the parent inline-level element, shouldn't it apply to the overall box that is generated (it does not)? The answer is that borders between block-boxes and inline-level boxes should not intersect but that is really difficult to derive from reading the standards alone. Anyway it was headache-inducing trying to learn the box-model pedantically :) I wish I could learn more about layout in browsers and I trying to read the code of LayoutNG in Chromium but I need more aspirin hehehe

imranhou• 3 years ago

If what the blog suggests are the optimal ways of doing it, it would have been a larger reality automatically by virtue of people continuing to try to optimize. Idealistic views aren’t necessarily practical, and may not get traction in the real world.

danielvaughn2• 3 years ago

When I worked on animations, I was surprised at how many people believed that some animations “run on the GPU” (the browser can offload some animations to a separate process or thread that updates animations using the GPU to composite or even paint each frame but it doesn’t offload them to the GPU wholesale)

Not to nitpick his nitpick, but...I've said this exact thing in the past, and his parenthesized explanation is what I meant. It's too much of a mouthful to try and be super accurate and specific all the time.

mostlylurks• 3 years ago

“Web development shouldn’t need a build step”

A build step is a huge barrier that makes authoring your own websites require significantly more expretise than it otherwise would. It thus makes web development less accessible, and puts anything even a little bit complicated out of reach of anyone who isn't already an experienced web developer or exceptionally dedicated. It also discourages the slow development of some pet website of a not-primarily-a-web-developer-by-trade into something more featureful, since expanding beyond the point where you can still reasonably avoid a build step suddenly requires acquiring a lot more exprertise and expending a lot of effort all in one go, instead of just being a smooth expansion into a more featureful project.

The simpler it is to make your own website without having extensive web development experience, the more people will be able to have their own website instead of being directed to the endless array of corporate silos like social media (which has largely replaced personal websites) and corporate middlemen (which have largely replaced in-house commercial websites for smaller actors) that take care of the burden of making your own website for you, with some rather obvious downsides.

Yaina2• 3 years ago

I mean, a build step is not required to build a website, but I'd say anyone who wants to have more than one HTML page and one stylesheet will probably want some sort of build step sooner rather than later.

Like, if you have two or more pages, you probably want them to share the same header or footer, and unless you want to A) repeat the same markup on each page or B) inject them with a client-side script, you will need some sort of build step. There are more accessible solutions out there, like Hugo.

How else are you going to achieve that? Sure you could use PHP, but I don't see how that is more accessible or maintainable than having a build step.

dakna• 3 years ago

How else are you going to achieve that?

People already thought about that problem when the World Wide Web was invented and they came up with Server Side Includes [0], a scripting standard that predates the Apache HTTP Server.

Looks like this inside the HTML document:

Not many people use this anymore, but it is easy to share common markup and very accessible for people with just basic HTML knowledge. Major web servers of today still support it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes.

lapcat• 3 years ago

The article title is actually "Weird things engineers believe about Web development".

mouzogu2• 3 years ago

nothing wrong with build steps until they go wrong.

then you will spend 5 hours replacing/updating deprecated/newly incompatible npm/system issues.

spcebar• 3 years ago

The horrifying guidance I've gotten a number of times when I step into a project is "downgrade your node version 5 years and never update anything."

mouzogu2• 3 years ago

a pragmatic solution. sometimes you don't have time and stakeholders don't understand or appreciate the side issues you need to deal with.

endisneigh6• 3 years ago

Technology is not a religion and it doesn’t need prophets. Why are people so hell bent on convincing others to join them in their use of whatever technology?

Pick what solves your problem. In the context of web development that overwhelming means using whatever is most popular given your preferred programming language.

butz• 3 years ago

It would be interesting to measure battery savings made by disabling JavaScript on mobile devices. While it might be cheaper to plop website on GitHub Pages or Netlify and others, somehow I feel that all costs are just handed down to the user in bandwidth and battery use.

rramadass5• 3 years ago

Well written informative article.

What does it say about this whole domain when, as the author says, Web Apps and Sites/Blogs (also add in Mobile apps) are so very different from each other using a myriad set of technologies each of which has a learning curve? Where is the uniformity and commonality in all this? Why are developers even perpetuating this?

That said, this might be a good place to ask for recommendations for study since i am not a "Web Developer";

1) Comprehensive books/other sources on full-stack Web App and Site development. Bonus points if they use a single language for frontend/backend/everything else.

2) The same as above but using C/C++ languages.

calderwoodra• 3 years ago

Businesses want uniformity and commonality since, in theory, it should lower development costs (see projects like flutter and fuschia, which have the goal to make every platform web based).

The problem is that users/customers have higher expectations for their user experiences than the web can offer on mobile/desktop/etc.

Robinhood, Duolingo, Slack are a few good examples of UX being huge differentiators.

rramadass5• 3 years ago

I understand what you are saying but am not clear as to why it should be so. Having programmed GUI apps in Microsoft Windows and X-Windows/Motif (which can be remote) on Unix systems i am not sure why we cannot have a similar uniform architecture for "Web Apps". After all the "Browser" is considered a platform in itself. Also given that HTTP has now been munged into practically being a Transport protocol for anything, previous limitations are no longer an excuse.

amadeuspagel2• 3 years ago

There are Twitter/X polls, for example, but they tend to only be answered by the Web developers on the bleeding edge and are easily skewed by who spreads the word about the poll.

Maybe MDN should have a comment section, like the PHP docs. That would be more representative.

omnimus• 3 years ago

The PHP docs comment section is pretty fascinating. I am not sure how these are allowed. But you will find 10year old comments with very distilled specific techniques or super well explained nuances. Not something i've seen in other languages.

cabalamat2• 3 years ago

Many didn’t know about new CSS features that had shipped 10 years ago. What’s more, even when we told them about them, they didn’t seem too excited. They were doing just fine with jQuery and WordPress, thank you.

...and if jQuery and WordPress do the job, they are sound technical decisions.

What is not a sound technical decision is forever chasing the latest fashion in technology. Also known as the "oh look a shiny thing development paradigm".

bbor• 3 years ago

Absolutely fantastic writing —- clear, kind, authoritative. Don’t agree with it all but I think the last section sums it all up nicely, and is something I’ve felt for a while.

With new SSR frameworks like Next.js, I think this whole MPA/SPA dichotomy starts to dissolve a little bit. I’m thrilled that browser standards are evolving to help it along!

eximius• 3 years ago

I don't mind a build step, per se, just that the JS ecosystem's build step is particularly more painful than others.

m3047• 3 years ago

I spend a lot of time with DNS (it just happened, man) and I see the same general thing where a lot of intention and expertise is imputed to others. True systems thinking around large systems is rare. Buffer Bloat (and the lack of progress in remediation, and the lawfare and near literal acts of congress due to misattribution and misunderstanding of the problem) as this thing slouches along and utters its phlegmatic growl could be emblematic.

g9yuayon• 3 years ago

I'd like to add another one: I don't need a separate NodeJS (or whatever engine) service to build my service dashboard. Before NodeJS got popular, backend engineers like me simply put web assets into a folder in my web app, so my service will have an admin page or a dashboard for per-node administrations. For some reason, such practice has become a taboo. My engineers have been insisting that they set up a separate NodeJS service just to build even a simple admin page. But I fail to see why. The reasons I got are usually these three: 1) a NodeJS service gives us optimized performance, though techniques like server-side rendering; 2) a separate service is easier to scale; 3) a separate service offers separation of concerns. However, 1) and 2) are premature optimization to me. All I need is standardized per-node admin page for my service. The QPS is probably one per day by a human. Why would I care about SSR or scalability at all? And 3) is quite hand-wavy. On the other hand, the overhead of managing a separate service as well as the dependencies brought by NodeJS' ecosystem seems high.

So, what's wrong with the old way of having embedded web assets in a service for building simple admin pages?

Things engineers believe about Web development

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