Don't Roll Your Own

https://susam.net/do-not-roll-your-own.html

by adunk • 2 months ago

161 126 2 months ago

At the same time, ask yourself "do I really need something special for this?" because the browser adds native support for things all the time.

singiamtel• 2 months ago

I find that most datepickers are better than the browser's default. It's a shame that they can't be styled more

paularmstrong• 2 months ago

I agree with a caveat: Default date pickers on mobile devices are very good. But on desktop browsers they are terrible. They break design continuity in a very ugly way and have quirks between browsers and systems. And personally, the popup calendar they provide just too small. If the system took over the date picker on desktop like it does on mobile devices instead of forcing the browser to handle it, I feel like we could get somewhere better.

king_geedorah2• 2 months ago

I just went and confirmed this because it’s not something I’ve really looked at and I agree. The date picker you get from a straight up <input type=“date”> on iOS webkit is pretty nice.

The one in webkit on macOS isn’t quite as good, but is better than the one in firefox if only because firefox closes the picker when you type a year in to move far through time. Good thing firefox is open source.

pwdisswordfishs• 2 months ago

I find that most datepickers are better than the browser's

You mean your browser's. There is no "the browser".

Shellban3• 2 months ago

The Google Chrome team would like a word with you.

julianozen• 2 months ago

Yes, but having worked on the date picker at Airbnb I can assure you almost every custom implementation (probably ours too!) messes up date picking in some region in an important way

neals• 2 months ago

Except...?

joenot4432• 2 months ago

I agree.

The date range selector used in Google Flights is a near flawless control. The implementation can be done, it’s just hard.

poisonborz2• 2 months ago

From your perspective. Ask people using non-gregorian calendars.

chihuahua• 2 months ago

Totally agree. What do engineers or designers think they're trying to accomplish when they mess with the scroll bar? Or the password field? "We are so sophisticated, the built in behavior is simply not good enough for us!"

Congratulations, now your website is a shitty experience for your users. Well done.

amarant• 2 months ago

In my experience, it's never the engineers nor the designers who makes those decisions. Stuff like that always comes from higher up the ladder, some middle management figure who thinks he is smarter than he is, mandates such abominations and refuses to hear reason from the engineers and the designers.

The engineers and designers then proceed to do as they're told because they like that nice fat paycheck at the end of the month more than they like the service they're building. Which is fair enough.

IcyWindows• 2 months ago

I don't know. Someone above mentioned that don't like their browser's date picker. Maybe they are a "middle management figure", but probably not.

m0llusk• 2 months ago

Or nowadays managers can use an LLM to take control, sieze the moment, and make the buy button bigger.

LtWorf2• 2 months ago

In my experience it's always the designers.

cousin_it• 2 months ago

Portfolio websites of designers, where nobody's the higher authority but themselves, are full of scrolljacking and other fuckery.

lysace2• 2 months ago

Don't roll your own page scrolling, link navigation, text selection, context menu, copy and paste, password field, or date picker.

Javascript in the browser was a mistake. And if we had to have it, the suitable scope of it was what we had around 2004.

Google invested tens of billions in it realizing they had a way of owning the browser space simply by making it insanely complex. Just hire all of the web standards people, tell them to go crazy and then also hire thousands of C++ browser developers for decades to implement everything. Boom, a moat!

iainmerrick5• 2 months ago

I understand the frustration but don’t take it too far. People often post great games here, cool visualisations, useful utilities. Hardly any of those would work at all without JavaScript.

You can do terrible things with JS but you can do great things too.

lysace2• 2 months ago

The cost of complexity is generally underestimated. (But hey, we can try out cool demos!)

TacticalCoder• 2 months ago

Javascript in the browser was a mistake.

There are too many words in that sentence. Here are the words that can be removed: "browser", "in" and "the".

ChrisMarshallNY2• 2 months ago

I'm always an "It Depends" kind of guy.

I have a personal issue with having a 500KB page load, so a button press can be animated.

not_a_bot_4sho• 2 months ago

Ugh you triggered me.

I hate how most "modern" websites have MEGABYTES of JavaScript. CSS? Pack it in a js bundle with JSX and object literals. Images? Throw them in too, just make it load on demand.

Hell, just put a <div id=root/> there and let js do the rest. It's not like we have browsers and networks and edge nodes optimized to render websites in other ways.

Gud• 2 months ago

Honestly, your suggestions found just as awful.

Bloated sites need to go. Putting makeup on the pig and it’s still a pig.

wxw• 2 months ago

UX standardizes as majorities begin to agree on patterns/interactions/concepts.

Unfortunately, it’s 1) difficult to reach consensus 2) difficult to broadcast and 3) difficult to enforce. For example, even when major browsers achieve 1) and (e.g. implement a standard component) 2) and 3) are still huge gaps.

yardstick• 2 months ago

Among software developers, and especially among those who work on security-sensitive systems, there is a well-known maxim: Don't roll your own crypto. This does not mean that nobody is allowed to write cryptographic code. Someone has to. It means that, for ordinary production software that protects sensitive data of users, we should not rely on a private, unreviewed implementation that has not been vetted by the wider software development community. We should use established, vetted software packages or tools wherever possible.

The great things about all these crypto libraries are:

- Minimal to no dependencies

- Coded by security conscious people

- Often externally audited

I wish more libs/deps are crafted like them. Until then the risk of rolling your own vs using a dep isn’t as different as it could be.

leonidasrup• 2 months ago

Don't roll your own crypto, use what?

OpenSSL ?

LibreSSL, created as a response to the OpenSSL Heartbleed security vulnerability?

Any alternative SSL/TLS library?

Non-SSL/TLS cryptography? NaCL, Libsodium? Post-quantum crypto?

There are many libraries, with different applications, protocol, crypto algorithms. Some implement everything, some implement secure minimum.

Then the question is PKI, who do you trust your keys? Which SSL certificates do you trust?

zephen• 2 months ago

"Don't roll your own" is perfectly sane advice...

For those not trying to implement the dark patterns that enshittify the web.

If you don't roll your own back button behavior, you've missed the opportunity to show a few more ads.

If you don't make your window full screen on my shitty old tablet browser (yes, I'm looking at you, BBC), then it's far too easy for me to close your window. (Joke's on you, though -- my old Samsung tablet has a physical back button.)

shermantanktop• 2 months ago

If you don’t “roll your own,” you must choose from what other people have created. And in this space, there are a bewildering array of options, each of which carries some new pile of abstractions that make some things easy and other things hard.

Many eyes are supposed to make bugs shallow. In the webdev space, many eyes on something like React lead to numerous opinionated alternatives, each successful enough to warrant consideration. This doesn’t seem to be slowing down, either.

Meanwhile, vanilla HTML and DOM capabilities have never been stronger.

iririririr• 2 months ago

so much this. tried to implement oauth recently.

all providers only document their bloat-spyware-buggy javascript that creates a button and handles all in the client.

then using libraries you are open to attacks in one hundred ways because those implement all the unrealistic things in the spec (including overriding issuer and setting crypto to nothing, via attacker controlled fields). after two days of evaluating i just gave up and wrote my own, server side and handling the singular case everyone uses. 20 lines, which was less then adopting the libraries.

analogpixel• 2 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48141474

agreed, that page decided they needed to write their own scrolling logic and it made the page horrible.

alcazar• 2 months ago

Of all the things I mentioned above, the one that bothers me the most is custom scroll behaviour on websites.

While I don't necessarily agree with the entire premise of the article - in particular, a well-designed range date picker is superior to two separate browser-native date pickers - I completely agree that custom scroll behavior needs to disappear.

NooneAtAll34• 2 months ago

Don't roll your own page scrolling.

browser should not even let the page see this action

Don't roll your own link navigation.

browser should not even let the page see this action

Don't roll your own text selection.

browser should not even let the page see this action

Don't roll your own copy and paste.

browser should not even let the page see this action

I'm serious. WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user? We already loaded the page and rendered it - we users must already be free to do with the content as we please

vitally3643• 2 months ago

It should be illegal for a website to hijack text copying, right clicking, or keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl*f.

VladVladikoff• 2 months ago

No. There are already too many batshit insane laws trying to regulate the internet. We need less, not more.

js2• 2 months ago

All of these annoyances and more can be blocked by StopTheMadness (available for iOS and macOS):

https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/

orhmeh09• 2 months ago

This is one of the most useful programs I use every day. Works in Firefox too

NooneAtAll34• 2 months ago

Sold separately

aaaand you lost my interest the moment money got involved

all these things are already fixable by browser extensions - what is lacking is exposing that in browser options and even making it the default

bigstrat20032• 2 months ago

Also: Javascript should not be able to touch the browser history. I know it's useful for some apps. But it's too prone to abuse and that API should be revoked.

NooneAtAll34• 2 months ago

my main argument against this has been reading books

I don't enjoy needing to "go back" 100 times, once for each page of the book just to return to f.e. search results I opened the book from

incr_me• 2 months ago

Because the web browser was burdened with the role of application host, and not just presentation of static content. There's no going backwards.

trueno• 2 months ago

this is why the web stack feels like a car held together with duct tape these days. we collectively took the wrong fork in the road and doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down. computing in general is glorious when i feel like im working near computing and then i get to web app stuff and im like.. i dunno. sad. i get why we ended up where we did with web stacks but seriously what a nightmare

jay_kyburz• 2 months ago

rss

msla• 2 months ago

WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user?

Because the alternative is UI/UX Designers and Visionary Managers insisting on keeping Flash and Java Applets and Microsoft Visual Silverlight .Net++ around forever, because you can't do some things in the browser and We Need To Do Them.

Some things have minimal complexity that either lives in the language itself or in libraries. The Web has minimal bells and whistles that are either implemented in the browsers itself or in plugins.

king_geedorah2• 2 months ago

Nobody “needed” the web to do these things. We decided that the effort and cost of making native applications was too great. I’d argue we went the wrong way given that even the same browser will exhibit slightly different behavior depending upon the underlying platform upon which it runs.

andai3• 2 months ago

I found that most internet pages are greatly enhanced by disabling JavaScript in my web browser.

Shellban3• 2 months ago

It depends. A lot of websites refuse to display some stuff without JavaScript, and of course online payments insist on JavaScript (to the point that trying to push through without it can result in strange errors and potential double-charges as you troubleshoot).

NooneAtAll34• 2 months ago

total disabling of JS is overkill

I mean, I'm all for for switching to Lua or smth (which is a slightly different anti-JS camp than yours), but the problem isn't in interactive (or even non-frozen) pages in general - it's in pages reading user actions that user doesn't expect/want to

GolfPopper• 2 months ago

WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user? We already loaded the page and rendered it - we users must already be free to do with the content as we please

Because on the modern web, the user is the content, sold to the highest bidder.

manoDev• 2 months ago

Javascript was a mistake.

crq-yml• 2 months ago

The Web is an ads platform with useful functionality as bait.

That's all there really is to it: Mosaic added image support. Investors got excited and asked if the images could animate, if they could record click data and credit card data, if they could add video and additional presentational elements. Holistic user experiences were secondary.

To move forward we have to accept that most of this wasn't an accident and it needs some breaking changes.

jakevoytko2• 2 months ago

Applications like Google Docs would be impossible without each of the four things you listed being available. We had Google Docs that didn’t roll-your-own for each of the items in that list and it was called Writely and it was absolute dogshit (but super cool for its time) because those limitations were too extreme. And by extension it wouldn’t make sense to have Chromebooks as a category of hardware, because web software could never compete at a feature parity level with native software.

BrenBarn2• 2 months ago

I would rather not have Google Docs than have all the other crap that comes along with allowing every website to do stuff that Google Docs "needs".

at_compile_time• 2 months ago

Seems like exactly the kind of thing permissions are for.

tiltowait2• 2 months ago

Applications like Google Docs would be impossible without each of the four things you listed being available.

I was already in favor of banning it. You don't have to keep trying to convince me.

Okay, snark off. But as someone who dislikes the proliferation of "web apps", I'd be perfectly happy to see Google Docs and others die off if it meant we moved back to real, locally run applications.

tecoholic• 2 months ago

WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user? We already loaded the page and rendered it

Nope we haven’t. At least not in a web application. At least not since the days Infinite Scrolling was invented. IIRC Twitter, for eg, only renders a partial list depending on the scroll position.

I once wrote a NER tagger, where implementing custom text selection allowed users to not stress about selecting the exact word boundaries when manually tagging 1000s of words per day.

I can probably find legitimate use cases for almost of these things in the list. While I agree with the broader theme of the article, this idea that the user agent should be a dumb display is not valid.

wasmperson• 2 months ago

WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user?

scrolling: used by games, maps, image viewers

link navigation: used for client-side routing (youtube/twitch, any website with a chat window)

text selection and copy/paste: word processors, spreadsheet editors, forum software, etc.

I'm not sure if your question was sincere or if you were trying to say that the web should not support these use cases.

gyomu• 2 months ago

Yes, you get to the heart of the problem - we turned what started of as a document viewer into a general purpose application platform.

Features paramount in a document viewer (broadly, "respect the user's local document viewing preferences") aren't desirable in a general purpose application platform.

A large number of companies/web developers don't think of themselves as offering the user a document to view on their own terms, but rather an "experience" that they want full control over (which means, most of the time: show ads and record user behavior).

If you're offering me a game, fair enough. But if you're showing me my hotel reservation or electric bill, I want a document, not an ""experience"".

jason_oster5• 2 months ago

On the extreme end, a web app can do all of its own rendering in a canvas with WebGL/WebGPU. Some apps do exactly this: Figma, Google Maps, Google Docs. Just to name a few. (edit: Earlier I claimed PDFjs uses canvas, but it does not. I was confusing it with Google Docs [1].)

It's a thing you can do. But it is very bad for extensions and extension developers for the same reasons that Java applets, Flash, and Shockwave were bad for the web. These apps are difficult for end users to customize. It's a real bane to tinkerers. And it's a shame that "view source" has slowly grown completely useless over the decades.

[1] https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-...

tiltowait2• 2 months ago

scrolling: used by games, maps, image viewers

Out of curiosity, does anyone like the way Google Maps hijacks scrolling? I use a trackpad. When I scroll, I'd want it to pan around on the map, not zoom in and out (which always feels awful as a scroll action and never stops where I want it to).

Click-drag to pan doesn't feel nice.

It doesn't really matter anymore, since 99% of maps use is on mobile now, but this was always a small pain point to me in the past.

janez2• 2 months ago

in my ideal world, the browser would ask to confirm "allow example.com to modify scroll behavior?" for all the potentially bad uses of javascript, like how current browsers ask you to allow microphone/multiple downloads/etc

does such a browser exist?

kazinator2• 2 months ago

Desktop envy: so you could create certain desktop-like interactions.

awongh• 2 months ago

In the age of AI and npm supply chain attacks I feel like there are more reasons than ever to roll your own.

One other possible title of this article could just be, don’t break UI conventions. Which is not the same thing.

Instead of trying to download and configure a date time thing (for something app specific like domain specific date ranges) rather than having to rely on the configuration of a larger library, then having to manage all future major version upgrades (and some of these npm libraries have major versions every year!) why not just create your own smaller surface area component? It’ll be literally zero maintenance compared to managing an npm dependency in your app.

Shellban3• 2 months ago

Counterpoint: all of these things are built right into the user's browser, and browser vendors independently work to avoid attacks across the userbase without any intervention from web designers. In fact, if the browser itself is compromised, we probably have bigger problems anyway. By just letting the browser handle these tools, we do not need to spend any resources at all.

bigstrat20032• 2 months ago

I'm going to go out on a limb and say there is never a valid reason to mess with page scrolling. It's just bad design and a terrible experience for the user.

ethin• 2 months ago

I'd like to add:

* Don't roll your own standard controls

Seriously. Don't. You want a single-select box? Use a combo box or radio button group. Want an edit box? Use an edit box. Want a list that finds things as you type? That's in the standard too. Don't roll your own.

This "roll our own controls for everything" bothers me to no end as a screen reader user, because practically nobody properly follows ARIA best practices, and that leads to a less accessible internet.

LtWorf2• 2 months ago

Don't worry, they bother everyone else as well since they are usually broken one way or the other.

CrimsonRain2• 2 months ago

Things wouldn't have gone this way if browser vendors and the working groups were not so lagging on adopting better UX for controls and had more built-in ways of customizing the looks.

Take a look how long it took to be able to customize <select>.

A hamburger menu or an accordion with proper viewport scrolling should be a couple of lines of html css...

appplication• 2 months ago

Yeah I could not agree more. I find myself wasting a lot of time building controls that really feel like they have probably been built ten thousand times before.

Bender• 2 months ago

If one really wanted to ruffle feathers they could make a script that checks out the latest source code for OpenSSL, OpenSSH maybe a few other communication daemons, makes just a few very subtle changes to a few ciphers, shim in some random nonsensical padding, static compile or containerize and distribute to a private network of systems in minecraft.

Whatever you do don't teach AI how to do this or there could be a flood of VPN's speaking new but not really new ciphers that code breaking farms won't know what to do with and ciphers that are not known to exist and yet nobody ever really rolled their own.

This concept was conceived whilst interacting with Rubix cube players.

andai3• 2 months ago

Don't fuck with the scroll bar should have its own article.

nosioptar• 2 months ago

It should be legal to cut off a dev's fingers if they fuck with the scrollbar.

casey2• 2 months ago

What an odd idea. You should always write your own code whenever possible, that's how we get better things. It's not my job to make the standard better or to force a bad standard, it's your job to make the standard the obviously correct choice.

wtallis• 2 months ago

You should always write your own code whenever possible, that's how we get better things.

No, that's how you end up with a mountain of bad half-assed implementations. You should only roll your own when truly necessary, and only after thoroughly understanding the problem and the existing mature solutions and honestly comparing that against your own ideas to see if you're missing important aspects of the problem.

And even after doing all that, when it comes to implementing custom UI for something that already has a standard approach, you should still usually throw away your custom version because it won't be better by a wide enough margin to justify the effort users will need to invest in re-learning and breaking their existing habits.

Save your UI experimentation for your personal tools, and don't inflict it on innocent users.

bschwindHN• 2 months ago

I'd like to add "don't roll your own image viewer"

twitter and google and google maps and so many have rolled their own and they completely suck compared to just letting the browser render an img tag. They inevitably fail on some bad multitouch interaction that affects the web page, and the image viewer container. Or they add some slow-as-molasses zooming effect.

pvillano• 2 months ago

Nobody cares that a browser's navigation buttons, address bar, tabs, or window controls don't match the current website. Probably because these things are obviously outside the extents of the web page.

However, scrollbars, context menus, modal windows, and date pickers are rendered within the extents of the web page, and get replaced all the time.

It is my opinion that these controls don't need to be styled to match the website, because they're not part of the website. They're part of the browser. Non-diegetic. Outside the fourth wall.

pancsta• 2 months ago

He’s totally right. It’s obvious.

BrenBarn2• 2 months ago

I'd go even more basic than this: only use native everything. It's a travesty that web pages are to use use custom controls or have any kind of look and feel different from the native OS ones. The look and feel of everything (every app, every webpage) should be determined by the end user, via their OS settings, not by the author of the app or document. What we have is designers being able to get to "my app/webpage looks the same for everyone"; what we ought to have is users being able to get to "every app/webpage looks the same for me".

rozumem• 2 months ago

For most users, link navigation for single page apps is far better than making round trips to servers which the 'traditional' browser would do.

jason_oster5• 2 months ago

That depends entirely on how much needs to be downloaded for each round trip.

A lean website can work just fine on complete trash connections like GPRS or Comcast without incremental loading. Web developers are not incentivized to make lean websites.

SPAs add unnecessary complexity -> increasing page weight -> making finer grained incremental loading more important -> requiring even more code. It's a self-induced problem.

As a corollary, McMaster Carr is often used as an example of a website that didn't fall into the SPA trap, and customers greatly benefit from that [1]. The front page weighs about 14 MB with all of the images, but the loading experience is great even with network throttling simulating a poor connection. There is a good reason the site has this reputation.

Overengineering is the true root of all evil. Web developers cannot learn that fast enough.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=mcmaster+carr

kazinator2• 2 months ago

The problem with Don't Roll Your Own is that Other People's Code gets more and more grotesque with each passing year. More bloat, more random dependencies, more churn. Other People are a headache in any industry; with Other People's code you have Other People problems by proxy.

TZubiri• 2 months ago

"there is a well-known maxim: Don't roll your own crypto."

Fun fact, this was written shortly after one of the biggest linux vulnerabilities which was caused by a kernel crypto library, presumably to avoid userspaces rewriting their own crypto.

okandship• 2 months ago

the split between documents and apps explains a lot of the pain here. if a page mostly presents content, hijacking selection, scroll, or copy should be treated as a regression

rglover• 2 months ago

Sometimes it makes sense to roll your own, sometimes it's a distraction. As always, judgment and taste matter to avoid mistakes and/or catastrophe.

ryanschaefer• 2 months ago

A strange issue I’ve found is careless use of AI at my job has lead to many people rolling their own incomplete mini parsers. Think YAML parsers of a frontmatter that expects either `key: value` exactly or treats `item1, item2, …` as a list.

It’s a litmus test I use to see if someone actually glanced over what the AI generated.

Minor49er• 2 months ago

This feels like a modern version of people writing regex to validate email addresses: employing a complicated, yet incomplete roll-your-own approach as the wrong solution to a problem

xtiansimon• 2 months ago

Tempest in a teacup. Don’t roll your own UI? You’d be apoplectic in the age of Macromedia Flash. Failure is.

Let’s talk about the economics which permit bad webapps to continue in use. Illogical UI behaviors to be defended as “working as intended”. Or my favorite, UI redesign trend away from compact data dense UI towards open layouts with gobs of empty space (I guess it’s a touch UI compromise, because of “dashboards”). Or the financial incentives to remake the IP of excellent phone apps which end up looking and behaving worse. I suspect some must be tech debt, some reflect development job pool. But the rest? I blame MBAs

No. I don’t mind roll your own. I mind rolling your own crap and defending the indefensible.

Don't Roll Your Own

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