Comment by iamleppert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamleppert | Hacker News Reader

I just took a look at the Instant 2FA app.

What exactly about this thing warrants the use of a behemoth of a framework like Ember?

The entire app looks like an optimization of a poor experience in another web service. I'll conserve my cynicism for their actual app, which could have been implemented without even the need of a framework.

What is exactly complicated about a few different screens? I fail to see the need for even a web app here.

Also, I'm not sure I understand any of their arguments. Does it really take days to setup a test harness in anything?

Also, the bit about progressive enhancement -- are we really talking about this still? When using a single page application framework? For an app that does two factor auth. I'd also be concerned about the security surface area for an app like this that pulls in a dependency like Ember, on a third party site during the login/auth experience. It's bad enough that we have third parties pulling in react to display some simple forms and buttons.

I also find it annoying that it seems people have transitioned from progressive enhancement meaning 'detect if we can use JS' to 'detect which features of JS to use' to 'detect how much processing power we can abuse without the user noticing'.

As someone who really enjoys his <0.3s page loads (that is fully fetched & rendered, less when from cache) even on mobile it feels annoying to not have a 'middleground'.

For example my current project, which is basically a small website where people can upload artwork, does not need to be a SPA. However, I'd like to integrate some interactivity to make browsing easier. Like a 'browser' view when you click a picture, or in place reloads (so the CSS doesn't need to be reloaded, nor perhaps the JS. However there doesn't seem to be a library for that to my knowledge. All I know are either on the jQuery level where you have small seperated pieces, or the React/Ember/Angular level where you have to write all or nothing in that language.

I wonder if it is even possible to have an 'augmenter' library that just makes existing HTML better (Perhaps with some hints in the 'data-' attributes), or maybe my google-fu is just bad.

As a followup I don't seem to be the only one thinking like this [1]. [2] comes close to what I'd like, but the last update is from 2012 and the author doesn't seem to have done a lot lately.

[1]: https://allinthehead.com/retro/367/why-is-progressive-enhanc... [2]: https://github.com/jamesallardice/Progressive.js

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