Comment by gwn7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwn7 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Let's start some controversy.

I think JSX is popular because of historical reasons. Not the history of JSX, but the Web in general, specifically about HTML being the primary API to build web interfaces since the early days. Everyone feels at home with HTML because of this. We all started with it and it is unquestionable for many.

DOM is the second way to build a web interface. But nobody in their right mind would prefer DOM over HTML as long as HTML is sufficient for the task at hand.

The advent of stuff like Hyperscript and virtual DOMs of today introduced a new alternative to HTML and DOM: Now we can build our interfaces using simple data structures (POJOs). This was already possible from the beginning, but the interactivity requirements of the modern application forced us to invent the "UI as a function of the state" paradigm and this approach became mainstream after that (AFAIK).

But wait... Isn't HTML a data structure as well? Not sure. It clearly started as some kind of DSL for building web interfaces. Then XML is invented and HTML was declared as being an extension of XML; thus some kind of data structure (roughly). Then it got complicated. Today I have no idea about what HTML is.

This is the first part of the story.

The second part is about RPC. This one is short. XML used to be everywhere until the advent of JSON. Suddenly everybody started to embrace JSON and hate XML; for several reasons most of which are reasonable.

The question is....

Why isn't the same thing happening with user interfaces? HTML is a subset of XML (or something like that), and the syntax proposed in this article is clearly JSON. Why is everybody embracing JSX like crazy. Do they not find it extremely ugly, as XML is, compared to a POJO?

Is HTML really a better way to represent user interfaces than a solution such as the one presented in this article?

It may be hard to answer as we are all biased in favor of HTML.

I'm not experienced enough to make big claims, I'm just thinking out loud, I find this topic interesting. Corrections and feedbacks are welcome. Not trying to start a flame war.

My two cents: It's a generation of programmers raised on the Web who think web technology is good because that's what they know. They believe in "open standards" and "design by committee" and nonsense like "semantic HTML" being "best practice".

To everyone outside of that bubble, the following is obvious: Web technology sucks. HTML sucks. CSS sucks. Javascript sucks. They're inadequate solutions, which is why people keep reinventing the way to do web frontend every two years.

> It may be hard to answer as we are all biased in favor of HTML.

Not me.

Yeah I kinda agree with this. I'm not old enough to remember the pre-Web era but I did my share of research and know that hackers of the previous generation does not hold much love for the Web, and I'm convinced that it's for good reasons. Nowadays I feel the same way.

But this problem is not specific to our generation as far as I understand. Maybe the thing that sucks the most that became big in our generation is the Web, but weren't there similar scenarios before us as well?

Doesn't Linux suck? Systemd? Java?

Doesn't every freaking mainstream technology suck? I regularly come across rants from significant developers regarding this issue. There probably is no way to prevent this from happening. Because worse is unfortunately better.

I regularly and seriously consider to leave software development because of this (as I'm really suffering) but then I remember how much power it gives me despite the horrible faults it has.

I think it's very important to understand that the tools we work with mostly suck. In my opinion this is something that is missing from software education curriculums. People need to know and understand how and why everything is messed up and how can we work around this issue while preserving our mental health and the intellectual satisfaction we are supposed to get from the craft.

> Doesn't every freaking mainstream technology suck? I regularly come across rants from significant developers regarding this issue. There probably is no way to prevent this from happening. Because worse is unfortunately better.

Web technology is fundamentally different in that you have a big standards body regulating everything from layout down to color blending, then leave it up to multiple vendors to implement all that stuff at great expense and with long delay. Worse, it's all shoehorned on top of some "document model" than was never designed with applications in mind. It's a waste.

To see what a better platform could look like, consider this:

https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/publications/atlantis-robus...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uflg7LDmzI

The key here is reducing surface area. It's entirely possible that WASM will bring us closer to that, but the web developers of today probably won't like that.

> I regularly and seriously consider to leave software development because of this (as I'm really suffering) but then I remember how much power it gives me despite the horrible faults it has.

I don't know what you do, but I find web development to be significantly more frustrating than other areas. That doesn't mean there isn't frustration elsewhere though and it's definitely part of the job.

Will respond more about that later, but just wanted to point you to Phil Wadler's 1999 paper about both XML and the S-expression approach (HTML/XML are essentially S-expressions too):

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/next700/next700....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com