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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

As a web developer for the past 20 years, I do know how server-side state works. What baffles me is that, while there is certainly much to complain about the state of front-end JS dev today, the attitude of some that moving the web back 15 years is a good thing.

There is a reason single-page apps became a thing, so I'm not clear why you think a page refresh for every user interaction is somehow a good thing. The dismissive attitude that "Regarding form fields appearing and all your fancy front end logic: none of this would fly in user testing" flies in the face of how 90% of heavy consumer front ends out there work today.

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> There is a reason single-page apps became a thing, so I'm not clear why you think a page refresh for every user interaction is somehow a good thing.

So the reason I always hear is performance: Less HTTP-requests, less latency, therefore better user experience. While that might be the case for flaky mobile connections (although executing lots of Javascript on resource constraint devices might not be the best idea either), with fast wired connections I experience the opposite: The single page apps of today feel a lot slower to me, than the websites with the same functionality did 10 years ago, thanks to all the computation which has to be done on client side. Just take Youtube for example: What a bad experience nowadays, especially with Firefox. That was way better back in a time when they didn't try to avoid page refreshes. And it's not just Youtube, it's all over the web. A welcome change to all of that is HN, because it still feels as fast as websites did, before frontend development was even a thing.

You can disable the new polymer layout for YouTube on Firefox using a console command. It brings back the old layout which is much faster and more functional.

Performance of JS is much more controllable than round-trip latency.

> the attitude of some that moving the web back 15 years is a good thing.

Straw man. We don’t want to go 15 years back, only 10 :-)

Seriously, the web was at a local maximum around 2009. Google worked, GMail was OK, Ajax was expected for r new stuff but was still written with graceful degradation in mind.

> What baffles me is that, while there is certainly much to complain about the state of front-end JS dev today, the attitude of some that moving the web back 15 years is a good thing.

The problem is that many people, for various reason (accessibility, poor network connection, low-end hardware, etc.) are stuck "in the past" with regards to the web. This doesn't mean you have to make this the experience for everyone using your website: just make sure it degrades gracefully for those who can't use the new shiny stuff.

This is often much easier said than done. Graceful degradation isn't free, and for many types of applications, simply isn't worth the effort to support.

> Graceful degradation isn't free, and for many types of applications, simply isn't worth the effort to support.

I hate to say it, but you're essentially saying "we can't afford to support people who are disabled, cannot afford the newest hardware, or are simply driving through a place with poor reception".

Yes, unfortunately that's exactly what I'm saying. In a perfect world, every app would be fully accessible, colorblind-friendly, work offline, etc etc. But in reality, all of those things cost money, and sometimes the cost outweighs the benefits. To give an extreme example, if my app has 1 million users, but only one is blind, do you expect me to spend (potentially significant) development resources on that single user?

You have to do that cost-benefit analysis based on how important those things are to your business—for instance, screen reader support is an absolute necessity for the public sector and certain information-heavy apps, but probably not as important for visual tools.

It's absolutely ridiculous how some content based websites require several MB of js to function. And the devs say this is because it is 'easier' to write such apps. And if the thought of optimization even comes to their minds, its just adding another layer on top of this madness to manage the layers below, or saying its too hard. Of course it is hard if you start with an overcomplex solution in the first place and try to trim away stuff from it. How hard exactly is it to write some plain html and css, with js doing some optional improvements? Most problems of web development are self inflicted.

I was talking to someone once about how ridiculously bloated Imgur is and that I had to use Imgoat because of the slow internet I was experiencing then. Of course they were trying to make all kinds of excuses like imgur not having servers nearby etc. But of course the really simple fact couldn't get to their heads that Imgur downloads like what 2-3 MB maybe even more of crap minus the actual image whereas Imgoat is something like 500 KB. No amount of network optimizations and caches etc are going to get over this fact. And also, such optimizations are over and above the page download size improvements anyways. If Imgoat used such techniques it'd be even faster. Most importantly: both sites have the exact same and simple core function, yet one site is so many times more bloated than the other. I will let you derive your own conclusions as to what this means.

And imgur also has the typical horrendous js misuses such as scrollbar hijacking that makes absolutely no sense etc.

There is nothing limiting a disabled person’s browser from executing JavaScript, screen readers are generally not concerned with how an HTML element was created (server side or client side), but just read what’s on the page.

>just make sure it degrades gracefully

Okay, example: client pays me to make an somewhat interactive website. Client wants it to be done using React as that is easy to get other devs for in the future, if the need arises. Client doesn't want to pay double (random estimate) to make everything behave in e.g. Lynx. Do I do it out of pocket, or just say no to the client?

Yeah there are a lot of ivory tower developers here with little to no real world experience and have never done anything of any substance or complexity pushing their tiny limited experience and knowledge and you can spot them from miles away in these comment sections. Those of us who work in the real world know how silly some of these comments are.

Please don't post personal attacks here; they contribute nothing to the discussion.

I think you have a duty to your client to tell them why they should be paying you double to do the job right. If they don't, well, Hacker News is full of people like me to shame them for excluding people from using their website.

> If they don't, well, Hacker News is full of people like me to shame them for excluding people from using their website.

And the absolute number of HN people like you shaming folks for not supporting text-mode browsers like lynx is a rounding error for most websites.

Develop with React but use something like Next.js to do Server Side Rendering (SSR)?

Theres a huge spectrum between SPAs and pure js-less apps.

Single-page apps became a thing because of lack of development resources to build native apps or properly engineer server side solutions (as well as a business desire to centralize and lock down the product so people have to experience ads, pay subscriptions...). It has nothing to do with creating a user friendly experience. 100% of the time a user would benefit from a native app or properly engineered server-side rendered web page over a SPA.

> It has nothing to do with creating a user friendly experience.

This is absolutely not true. Think about any kind of dynamic dashboard or data management platform. Having full page reloads for any minor change to filters, etc, is simply an unacceptable UX. But it has to be web-based because you need to be able to access it from any device, anywhere, without installing an app.

Plus, on a personal level, there are many services for which I will never install a native app—because I don't use it often, or because the native app provides no added benefit, or for one of a hundred other reasons. Those services don't get my business if they don't have a web app.

That is a significant, but limited-use, case.

Theere's no reason a static contnt page must require JS Simply to render text, with a blank page as fallback.

Better ways of addressing the dashboaard example might be worth considering.

Too: bullshit dashboards with JS-based fakery;

https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/8/13571216/new-york-times-e...

Limited? That describes about half the applications I've built in my career!

In all seriousness, there is a big difference between static content pages and full-blown applications; the cost to make the latter work properly without JS enabled is almost never worth it. But the same is true even for some static pages; for instance, I would never expect that NY times election forecast page to work without JavaScript, and don't see any reason that it should. (The "JS-based fakery" is pretty irrelevant to the discussion, IMO.)

What fraction of all HTML pageloads?

And: Sampling bias. A simple static page shouldn't require development. Hence, anyone doing web dev will have experience skewed strongly to more complex designs.

How would you describe the basic underlying structure and mechanics of a typical app you've built?

> 100% of the time a user would benefit from a native app

I strongly prefer single-page web apps over native apps. Web apps are constrained by my browser. Native apps get a lot more trust.

That's a problem we should have fixed on the platform side long ago, but didn't. Now we're stuck with the garbage fire of the modern web. That doesn't make it better.

I have uBlock Origin on my browser. I can even change the font-size on a web page if I need to. A native app can be doing anything it wants without my knowledge, and I can't even change the font-size.

Native apps have a performance benefit at the expense of everything we take for granted on the web, like being able to open up a developer console and inspect it.

For example, I noticed that the top language translation app on the Mac App Store incurs a Google Analytics request for every keystroke. And since there's no easy network tab I can open on any app, I only found it out because I was curious how it worked and mitm'd it with a proxy. And I couldn't just toss uBlock Origin at it to de-trackify it like I can any web app.

Doesn't seem like a 100% epic win for users to me. In fact, the only upside I can even think of is that it probably uses less RAM than a Chrome tab opened to Google Translate. Let's slow down and acknowledge the trade-offs before we go all-in on HN memes like native app superiority.

> 100% of the time

Nothing in software engineering is absolute. And even if something were to be 100% the correct solution one day, the next it could change.

I agree, but there is one problem: most people would rather use an SPA than have to download an app and have to keep it up to date themselves.

I wonder if there's a market for an alternative "browser" that loads "native" code (or as close as practically possible) and runs it in a sandbox.

> I wonder if there's a market for an alternative "browser" that loads "native" code (or as close as practically possible) and runs it in a sandbox.

This is probably not what you had in mind, and I'm not sure how good it would be at sandboxing, but REBOL Reblets imho come close to this <http://www.rebol.com/reblets.html>

The question is what "browser" means. If viewing data connected by hyperlinks is the goal, that's pretty easy. Rebol's approach to X-Net (Executable Internet) apps is very different, with the goal of being a way to share both data and active content. You can do both, the web we know just wasn't designed for that.

> I wonder if there's a market for an alternative "browser" that loads "native" code (or as close as practically possible) and runs it in a sandbox.

Electron comes close, but many don’t like it at all. (I have somewhat mixed experiences, I love VS Code but I’m not too fond of Slack.)

Electron isn't native in any sense of the word. I meant something more like OS-specific binary executables that get loaded and executed in a sandbox.

Mike Acton once said something about having created a browser plugin his team used that loaded and ran binary exe tools on demand, but that it was also wildly insecure. At least I think he said something like that. My memory could be wrong about that.

We had this 20 years ago with Java (not native obviously) and ActiveX (Windows x86 only.)

> most people would rather use an SPA than have to download an app and have to keep it up to date themselves

Citation?

> Citation?

No.

Hah, you mean Java applets? Everything old is new again.

I meant something more like OS-specific binary executables that get loaded and executed in a sandbox.

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