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Comment by toastercat | Hacker News Reader

I just want to say that open-source projects like these that have these fancy marketing pages and rely on a huge amount of marketing tricks & twitter reposts makes me less likely to use them. Unfortunately, this is all too common in the JS world these days.

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I highly agree. The main web frameworks I use are Svelte and Sveltekit. No comparison charts to other projects, easy to use, simple, created by a seemingly normal guy with sane opinions out of need for something like it for himself. It's not the end all be all, but works well for me. The JS world is pretty weird though. It's not only JS frameworks popping up in rapid succession but also browser features and proposals developing quickly. And what's really weird is how some new features rely on JavaScript, such as the newer <dialog> HTML element.

> No comparison charts to other projects

At least, none they publish first.

https://youtu.be/AdNJ3fydeao?t=1083

You seems misunderstand the role of web framework.

People want better abstraction than HTML, and JS is the only simple way.

Why i should use HTML input while i have better abstraction for it ?

TLDR is, HTML is the issue, not JS frameworks.

(Old man yells at cloud)

Well said.

> And what's really weird is how some new features rely on JavaScript, such as the newer <dialog> HTML element.

Compared to the older alert/confirm dialogue which was driven by a C++ browser window + JS boolean it kind of makes sense for <dialog> to use JS for such a thing and keep it within the HTML/stylable context. Like confirms the only place it will be used is within JS. So there's no separating the two really.

Unless you're just looking for a glorified HTML5 tag that you have to do yourself.

Yes, it's awful that HTML is now dependent on js... how did we let that happen?? I'm thinking mostly of HTML5 web components, which, unless I missed something, are completely useless without js. All I wanted was a way for HTML to import other HTML. This seems to be the central issue that we've been hacking around for decades with SSI, template languages, and js. It's so basic -- everybody wants a header and a footer and maybe a menu on each page. Should be an HTML feature.

iframes?

Yes, except without the frame. (Restrict cross-origin requests if you worry about security.)

Are iframes still fully supported across all browsers though?

You're basically suggesting implementing JS within HTML, which htmx exists on a technicality, but not sure that's something we should be pushing at all. We're just spreading JS problems to HTML which is a perfectly fine language.

Also, JSX is pretty much literally this.

But yes, HTML was clearly designed for producing output markup; but in reality the people who want to generate markup want to handle nested data, if/else, and loops, because that is better than copy pasting a bunch of markup everywhere and occasionally fat-fingering something.

I'm not sure I follow? I think the GP was just talking about the ability to import other HTML fragments without JS? Something like:

  <fragment href="site-menu.html"/>

Which would load my shared site wide menu html into the parent div.

I'm not sure why JS would be needed here? (i.e in the same way html <select> elements are interactive without needing "JS").

Going a little more out there, what about cross domain imports for easy web component consumption?

  <fragment href="https://weather-widget.org?location=london" />

I can't see how this would be less secure than current cross domain JS imports?

It used to be sorta possible with HTML Imports but that spec got dropped [1].

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/html-imports/

Is this not just an iframe?

Iframes are opaque for css, form fields and for js in some sense.

You can just make a function that generates HTML string like

    h("div", { class: "container" }, [
        h("p", {}, "oh hi!"),
        ...projects.map(renderProject),
    ])

the end result will have no JS if all you want is reuse HTML parts, much better than template languages imo (no additional syntax, has loops / functions / variables out of the box)

Declarative web components with Shadow DOM are now supported everywhere and require no JS.

That's not true. Declarative shadow DOM is supported in Safari, Chrome, and Edge, but that is not the same as declarative custom elements, which don't have a spec yet.

Fantastic. Thanks for telling me about this.

Web components are custom HTML elements, which typically combine state behavior and state-based rendering. How do you expect to do that without JS, at least without porting a non-trivial subset of a JS-like programming language into HTML?

Once upon a time we had HTML Imports which were lovely. But it made browser vendors nervous since folks could do stuff without Javascript. And what would then happen to all their tracking ? So, they unanimously purged the feature.

    <link rel="import" href="/partials/browser-vendors-hate-this.html" />

The problem with imports is they were render blocking

Don’t need JS to do tracking, and browsers can track without needs any marketing tags at all

Not a big deal. There are already render blocking resources today. Could be ameliorated with an async attribute if needed.

Obviously browsers that directly track users will lead a stinking public cloud and litigation. Vendors prefer their customers do the tracking for them. And make the ecosystem unable to function without tracking.

For what it’s worth, Astro is a static site generator that only relies on JavaScript at build time, and has optional integration with the usual js frameworks. In many ways that’s what it does solve (just importing html)

That's why I love Vue as well. It's developer & product-focused. No fancy marketing. Great docs. Approachable maintainers.

Fantastic docs, and primo documentation is not to be underestimated. Picking it up was a cinch.

Personally I love single file components. In specified having html, js and my scss in the same file, but split into <template>, <script setup>, and <style>. Nuxt 3 is fantastic DX.

Yes.

Open source is supposed to be merit-driven, not hype-driven and resorting to dirty tricks like these.

I wouldn't single out the JS community is the only one affected by it. To name just two examples outside JS, I blame pipenv authors for the same truth stretchi, and if you look at the current hype around open source AI libraries, there's a lot of it going on as well.

Idk I really liked how effectively Remix communicated their framework on their website:

https://remix.run/

I've never used it but I can see the value in good web design. Good Web design = good copywriting/colours/information design etc.

Maybe fancy marketing and good Web design are two different things though

Their use of colors and line height makes quite difficult to read their headers. I copy it the first one to be able to read it

> Focused on web standards and modern web app UX, you’re simply going to build better websites

I'd go with thinner fonts, less saturated colors (e.g.: the code on the right is easy to read) and larger line heights.

I've always seen Remix on mobile not desktop, so I may have to reserve my support for it. I don't mind bold fonts and saturation when it's used on marketing sites. Web standards and the like or most suited for utility sites and business tools like Google and Wikipedia. The documentation section of a framework site and the more serious stuff definitely should keep it simple and standard though.

My main complaint would be the scrolljacking on mobile.

It's a cool site for sure, but it's also hype-driven and buzzword heavy.

Remix is also run by/evangelized by people who: 1. hype their own work on Twitter with misleading comments, 2. released their framework as "pay-only" intially, 3. sell expensive coursework for their own tools instead of, yknow, having adequate documentation.

Remix also spun off into its own company before being acquired by Shopify. In fact, the whole "open-source library spins off into a company" is kind of creepy to me, although I'm sure not all are bad actors.

Well it's either that or you don't have a library and have wait for someone employed by a company to release something.

Someone has to get paid at some point. If this is their business why shoot it down? It's either that or subsidize this work by working somewhere that pays and leaves you with enough time for other projects.

Always wondering why devs are so cheap when they are supposed to earn that much more... Or perhaps it is just the vocal few on the internet.

Creating high quality video tutorials as a way to make $$ to support OSS actually sounds like a good idea to me.

Remix has sketchy/questionable marketing. Seemingly independent techfluenchers suddenly endorsing the product. Unfair comparisons with competitors to make the product look better. Most people talking about Remix aren't actually using it. Red flag to me.

Was this before or after they got acquired by Shopify?

Before, during, and current, though the Remix hyping train has fallen quite a bit as of late, I think in no small part due to Twitters recent changes.

I want to like Remix, but they have an odd culture around it, aren't really all that willing to talk openly about decision making or hearing valid criticism of the framework, and made some very bizarre design decisions with the framework itself, such as having zero ability to customize the build pipeline in any meaningful way

Projects like these scream "we are VC funded and will need to figure out a 10x exit one day". And that exit will only come by converting all the generated community goodwill into cash. Staying away from them is the correct decision.

Exactly, this is a form of marketing VCs found. Instead of using up say $500k on Google ads, you use up 6 months of development as marketing costs, open source whatever you come up with in that first bit, and from then onwards you only develop the paid parts.

I'm not that unhappy about this, end of the day there's more accessible code, but it's also good to see what's going on.

Yep. And what I'm always pleased to see is projects that have a section or page dedicated to explaining why it might not be the right tool for you, whereas commercial software tries to convince you it's fit for every purpose. And it's quite common to see FOSS projects linking to their "competitors". That sort of integrity is worth far more than any snazzy marketing website (plus some the best tools often have websites that look like they were designed in 2005 anyway)

Appearing immature has been a long-standing issue with some open-source projects. Desktop environments have never had the polish or cohesion of even Windows, and a large part of that is not attracting as many UX or design contributors. Seeing a marketing page could be a sign that they also put effort into a cohesive API and good docs.

That said, there's a certain project where I want to see the API front and center. I've seen companies make all sorts of vague marketing promises that I never understood until I saw their API.

Ideally frameworks will be simple enough that chart isn't necessary and people can tell with their logical engineer mind how fast it will be by understanding how it works (or better, can implement a POC yourself in an hour). If I can't do that for a framework I won't use it because I'll probably mess up (React is an exception because I will still mess up even if I know 100% how it works).

For what it's worth, the Astro guy apologized and replaced the graph.

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