I work at a place that is mostly like this, I can tell you that using html/css/javascript raw, with a bit of bootstrap is a nightmare with a SPA.
Menus are constantly broken, back button is a game of roulette, caching is constantly a problem showing stale data, xss and other vulnerabilities are ubiquitous.
There are modern affordances in many of these frameworks others take for granted.
But here we are, with stacks-on-stacks-on-stacks of layers emulating what truly should be a native application. “Web Application” should not be a thing. HTML/CSS were supposed to be for content and presentation; JavaScript was for sprinkles of functionality.
So no matter how you spin it—each framework is a workaround making the browser do something it wasn’t designed for.
When I say that I don’t mean “abandon all APIs”—I’m just stating why things are so complicated in the web space.
Moral of the story—give us more static content please. “Dynamic” means ads and wasted CPU cycles.
If your requirement is to deliver an application to users on multiple platforms then a web application is a great target.
People complain about HTML, mean while new platforms (Swift, MAUI, Flutter) still design tree like documents. It's insanely fast, optimised, accessible and the tools are fantastic.
Frameworks don't change browser behaviour, they allow you to go up a layer of abstraction. Static content is great for static content. It would be a terrible fit for a rich text editor, a dynamic chart or anything that requires interactivity.
The ecosystem is great. Native applications can get you a more optimised experience at a cost. That cost is not worth it for many solutions.
Ads are on native compiled apps too, it has nothing to do with HTTP/HTML.
Also, should I really download a random exe to order a pizza? Plus, especially because the protocol is stateless a web app makes so much more sense (then replicating the state at the backend side).
You want to make photoshop or a CAD program? That is an app. You want to order a pizza? Just use html and forms, maybe javascript to reload the progress page once per minute. (You don't need websockets or SSE or anything to check pizza progress)
It has huge value as a delivery platform.
Sorry.
Not even that, as there is meta refresh :)
That's where mobile seems to be heading, McDonalds would like you to download their app to order a burger
I liked that react/jsx was born out of the web, and then influenced swiftui, jetpack compose, and flutter for a new way of writing application markup. I wonder: if not for the web and its pain points, would we have landed on similar patterns? Maybe.
I believe there is a phrase "path dependence" to describe such situations.
Many times when people try to forgo them, they end up making their own poorly specified and half-baked version of it that only some people (who may leave the company) understand.
Web frameworks are more like… clever hacks to HTML to wedge in a “new way to do it” more clever than the last attempt.
Game engines are also somewhat different because the level of abstracted complexity there is vast and heavily domain-specific. It targets multiple platforms like ORMS and multiple GPU backends as well. It provides physics APIs and other heavy maths capabilities too.
But the browser standards-bodies provide that for us now. HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript will run well across all modern browsers.
May be we need some education: how to write 100 kLoC pureJS WebApp and keep sanity. I didn't see that kind of articles. I know that my pureJS web apps can survive few hundreds LoC. Then it becomes a mess. With React it's much easier to structure an app so it's maintainable, different parts are separated, etc.
I suppose the question is: how much time does it take to master stock HTML5/CSS/JavaScript versus mastering a framework, through-and-through.
Frameworks are constantly in flux but the foundation they are built upon is a more lasting skill set. But the more we spend learning framework X we are spending time away from foundations.
So… what’s the difference between this and SPAs using frameworks again? Because it sure seems to me I see many of these in sites that are apparently using frameworks. Hell, Facebook — presumably the poster child for the react ecosystem and certainly with the resources to do everything right — is still introducing nav-state related bugs.
Frameworks might focus people’s attention on what needs to be done, but the fundamental capabilities aren’t in the framework, they’re in the browser and the heads of the devs.
And of course, the other possible point the parent is making is not that people should be doing SPAs from scratch (which probably wouldn’t be wise in many cases) but that it’s not wise to start from the assumption that you should be making an SPA.
> Hell, Facebook — presumably the poster child for the react ecosystem and certainly with the resources to do everything right — is still introducing nav-state related bugs.
This doesn't necessarily disprove the framework's value proposition. Bugs like this are hard to squash and at great scale (like Facebook) they're a huge challenge. Frameworks propose trade-offs to manage them, but can't eliminate all classes of bugs. We don't know how much worse it'd be without the framework approach.
It's not even about how each block's styling behaves, but how different combinations of tags, blocks and widgets are able to exhibit very specific issues in each one of the 3 main rendering engines around. In very different ways, that require incompatible solutions.
It's quite egregious.
I realize JQuery is terribly unfashionable these days and maybe people would rather use some smaller niche polyfill library, but with how quickly the javascript world churns and deprecates, that is kind of a virtue tbh. JQuery is 16 years old and that's ancient in the javascript world, the Lindy effect says it will likely continue to be a pillar going forward as well. You're probably just better off using the standard even if you're not using all its capabilities.
He started off with something like: "Why don't you try your 'simple' techniques in a tangled web of hundreds of microservices written in different languages and running on different platforms?"
It's like some people can't see the forest for the trees.
In the last few years, I've come across about half a dozen existing web sites with hideous performance problems, all of which should have been vanilla HTML but were written as Angular monstrosities. The same teams -- against repeated advice -- have started new Angular projects for sites showing static data, anonymously, to the general public.
They start off conversations with "We'll need a web app, an API app, a mid-tier, a service bus, and then this, and then that..."
It's madness.
So many people don't get that their design decisions have consequences and using a SPA is absolutely a design decision.
Basically every part of the website written before their time functions correctly.