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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

This is all over the place and doesn't really present a coherent argument.

The author complains about developers who "want to show off" and then derides the use of frameworks. But showing off would mean not using off-the-shelf solutions, and instead trying to hand-craft everything.

The author complains about how frameworks bloat the page, but react + react-dom, as of version 16 (the most recent measurement I could quickly Google), weighed in at 109 kb (34.8 kb gzipped). Sure, client-side rendering means you wait for the JS to bootstrap before you get to see content, but React also has good support for doing initial renders server-side.

It feels like the author just spilled out his or her assumptions and prejudices without examining or researching them at all.

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The author is right. It just sucks to read what's true. He's not entirely right but he's on the right track.

You'll find a lot of tiny companies with dev. blogs where they explain in-depth the scaling strategy of their unknown, sporadically-used product.

Yes, react and vue are a few hundred kb gzipped. But are we seriously going to pretend that projects built with react are in a few hundred kb range? You can't even predict how big a project will be. It's not react's or vue's fault, it's simply how it is - add assets, add css, add additional libraries for <insert reason here> and it's not unrealistic to get 2-3 MB that you need to download.

A lot of people are designing their products to show off to their peers or for google (SEO). Users get left out. And we (users) are starting to feel it. Heed the warning or turn the blind eye.

> But are we seriously going to pretend that projects built with react are in a few hundred kb range?

The author said frameworks == bloat. But the above suggests frameworks != bloat. So I don't know what point you're still trying to make.

> A lot of people are designing their products to show off to their peers

Again, I'm not sure how using new frameworks is "showing off for your peers".

> or for google (SEO)

Client-side rendering only makes SEO harder. Again, I'm not sure what argument you're trying to make.

Present clear reasoning and evidence instead of vague, preconceived assumptions.

In the good old days, there were plenty of terrible user experiences built with traditional technology. All of those apps failed to make a mark in people’s memories and have been forgotten.

I do remember stuff built in Frontpage breaking terribly if you resized your browser. I remember Joomla outputting reams of html that the browser would choke on the nodes. I remember doing chat apps via iframes and long polling. It was all there.

Better technology has only lead to better outcomes on both the low and the high end, and it’s a lot easier to debug and fix the low quality outcomes.

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