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Comment by omarhaneef | Hacker News Reader

Almost all the comments are from those who have tried it. (And most people apparently love it).

Why?

Because it never tells you what it does. It’s “front end tooling” which could be anything from a new JS target language to a framework to something else.

The features don’t help: it’s fast. That could apply to anything.

It’s only when they talk about the alternatives like ESBuild and webpack that I get a sense of what it does. That’s several clicks in to figure it out.

Please put what the thing does front and center.

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The "Why Vite?" button on the homepage is fairly "front and center" to me and is only a single click away: https://main.vitejs.dev/guide/why

The front page is right there and could've included the copy "Next generation replacement for Webpack" and I would've known exactly what it's for.

Literally one sentence.

It's not really a correct sentence though

Isn't it? I use it and it's not clear to me what's incorrect about it.

It's too imprecise:

- People might interpret that as "drop-in replacement for webpack", which is definitely not true

- Even as just "a replacement for webpack"; Webpack and Vite have a lot of overlap, and it makes sense to compare them, but I think there are too many asterisks and nuances to say they're equivalent, in official materials, unqualified

Rather imprecise then have people confused of what it does - especially when the confusion could be fixed by a sentence.

Just have a hyper link that directions to a comparison page explaining the nuance. Even without the hyperlink I wouldn’t assume people would think it’s a 1:1 clone drop in replacement. People don’t just drop in a new tool without research and comparing it against their new tool.

An 80% true statement that sets the tone followed by a deeper explanation is fine. What is currently there tells us 0% about what Vite does.

It's still not concise enough. It's a long article you have to read to figure out what you are reading about.

"WTF IS IT?" is an endemic problem with marketing and startups.

Marketing is a skill, that many people in marketing so often don't have, and lot of leaders fail to grasp. It's so sad.

Imagine losing 1/2 of your potential uptake because of poor choice of words.

I think is more of an indictment on the javascript ecosystem generally, because there's so much more to building an app that runs JS than just your standard MVC/MVVM/pick-your-pattern web frameworks.

You have to deal with various layers of transpilation on your JS, styles and assets and that all needs to be flexible enough to fit a wide set of use cases for the community. It's gotten to the point you need to be an expert in all of the different ways you can bundle and deploy a JS app in order for the jargon associated with these tools to make any sense.

You're right that JS is a mess, but this is not a JS problem, it's a tech problem.

I see it over, over and over again.

I see young people pitching their tech and I have no f*ing clue what they are talking about.

I would say >50% of web sites don't do a very good job of explaining anything.

Vercel is one of the worst offenders.

I see the same issue with libraries and frameworks in any language. For example, I came across Dark Lang [1] yesterday, and the front page is similarly cryptic if you aren't familiar with back end work.

[1]: https://darklang.com/

Hilariously I came across that one as well as a good 'WTF' example.

That said - I feel for some of these dudes just wanting to make a framework, struggling a bit with the 'communication' part.

It's in the first section when you click the one colored button ("Getting Started") on the front page:

Vite (French word for "quick", pronounced /vit/, like "veet") is a build tool that aims to provide a faster and leaner development experience for modern web projects. It consists of two major parts:

* A dev server that provides rich feature enhancements over native ES modules, for example extremely fast Hot Module Replacement (HMR).

* A build command that bundles your code with Rollup, pre-configured to output highly optimized static assets for production.

You are repeating the feedback "...when you click...". Get rid of the click. Landing page should say what it does. If the author doesn't know or accept feedback on this website 101 topic, I doubt they revolutionized much elsewhere.

Yeah. I couldn't think of a more generic name than "Front End Tooling"

And next week there will be yet another "revolutionary" front-end thingamajig.

Edit: the "why" page mentioned by the sibling comment actually explains it

I think you are being a bit disingenuous to suggest it could be a framework. Is there a framework or JS target language project you are aware of that references itself as "front end tooling"?

I wanna say it's been a decade of front end build tools that have come and gone (or stayed.. we still use a grunt file from 2013) and they all do more or less the same things a front end dev needs.

They actually do right in the hero section of the landing page. For me:

- fast (very important) - Fully Typed APIs (very important)

Just those two points would convince me to try it and I can see it right away on the landing page.

At my company, I looked at Vite 6+ months ago and decided it doesn't make sense for us, yet, because of some specific tooling gaps, but it's a tool that I consider "cutting edge" in the frontend tooling world. I think they're doing just fine and their page doesn't have any major issues with their copy. Do you actually do frontend dev?

What is cutting edge about it? What gaps is it lacking, and why not put thodr in more established tools? Basically, what problem is this solving and way throw out years of experience in the other tools?

Why Vite explains this all https://vitejs.dev/guide/why.html

Why would anyone read a long-winded technical article before they even know what they are about read about?

"We have some amazing fast tech, that will make your life better -> read our white paper! We have good APIs"

Tell people what it is first, roughly what it's for, then the benefits. Then the article.

Vite does not throw out any experience. It builds upon Rollup, esbuild, and other existing tools.

There's a great page on how it's cutting edge here: https://main.vitejs.dev/guide/why.html. I suggest you try using it to see for yourself.

?? 'fast' and 'fully typed APIs' do not explain anything at all.

Those are completely generic descriptors.

Those are arguably 'differentiators' to the problem they are solving, but they don't first explain the problem they are solving.

> they don't first explain the problem they are solving

I think you're right about this and the "hero text" on their landing page should explain that in one crisp sentence. I imagine the authors of the project just aren't good at this stuff so hope they read this thread and refine the messaging.

It doesn't need to be in the 'hero text' it just needs to be somewhere.

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