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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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?

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.

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.

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

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