Comment by andrewl-hn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewl-hn | Hacker News Reader

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Somehow I had an impression that web developers in general are aware of web APIs: stuff like fetch, DOM events, forms and URLs - all things this article lists.

Modern React development doesn’t deal with these things much not because devs don’t learn web APIs but because most projects use various component libraries that abstract web APIs from devs. You as an app developer do a lot more work to glue components together to achieve the desired behavior and you mostly deal with data management.

I don’t say Remix is bad, it’s an impressive piece of technology for building interactive UIs that tries to blend server side and browser side of web in a neat package, quite successfully I must say! It’s very pleasant to work with, not hard to get into, and I personally haven’t found any big drawbacks. I’d recommend it for all sorts of projects!

But this whole “we do plain web APIs” marketing angle is IMO strange and misleading. Remix is a set of APIs on top of React, you will be building React apps with it, with JSX, hooks and everything else. It’s NOT a vanilla web, far from it.

The impression I have is that many web developers who learned their trade in the past five years know how to build with React (or maybe another front-end framework) but don't know how to hook up a JavaScript-free form using GET or POST - or even know that it's possible and sometimes desirable to do that!

I suspect you’re right. I organize conferences, and about 5 years we ran into similar situations. A speaker would propose a talk and they would put an example that would assume the audience’ familiarity with jQuery. We’d have to explain to the speaker that half of our audience started doing web development 2-3 years before, and there was a very high chance they started with React and never wrote or read any jQuery-based code. Many talk proposals would almost completely broke down because of that.

Seems like an approach like that contributes to the problem. Instead of rejecting the talks, it seems fitting to make sure the talk includes a five-minute quickstart about how jQuery works if the audience is not familiar with it, rather than rejecting it outright.

After hiring several great developers with <5 years experience, I am inclined to agree.

> most projects use various component libraries that abstract web APIs from devs

You would be surprised

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