Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmx | Hacker News Reader

> In places where JS is truly useful, that is when the UI is more than a text document, SEO is not a concern or possibility.

I don't think you're thinking about this. e-commerce is more than just a document and SEO is massively important there but javascript makes the user experience miles better; Think product variation selectors, bulk pricing selectors, product filtering, realtime cart, etc, etc. It's insane to say we shouldn't use new tech so that the search engines can index us, do we just forever stick with what we had 15 years ago and never progress? Madness.

View on HN

I should have been clearer: I'm not against JS, I'm huge fan actually but I don't see the promised lands of better user experience with having these overly complex architectures where the UI is JS heavy and has to be pre-rendered on the server side so that the Search engines can make a sense of it. Larger and larger, heavier and heavier JS never delivered those perfected UI experiences that Web technologist promised.

The Web technology folks still circle around the same problems like 10 years ago when the actually popular and successful websites like HN and others deliver superb UX with the dinosaur tech.

Anything that is actually using the advanced Web technologies are not in the domain of SEO, stuff like true web apps like Figma, Google Docs let's say. At best, you can index list of content for those but that list could have been a JS-free HTML rendered by PHP.

even with php you need to use caching, the deal it s to provide bot quickly with content :)

Sure, my complaint wasn't targeting your project but the need for it in first place. In the state of the web, this is a nice tool to do some useful things.

A lot of people on HN are very against JavaScript and I often get the feeling they’re academics or don’t work in the part of IT with web software. The reality is huge swathes of the web benefit from it whether people like it or not, this project is just one example.

As I'm the subject here, no I'm not an academic but used to work with Web technologies. Quit working with web technologies at the time when a new JS framework was hitting the home page with a promise to make everything better. I quit because I lost my productivity because I got carried away with all this JS stuff and find myself in infinite complexity eating away my time and energy for less than marginal gains on the final product. It was extremely cool but utterly useless.

Now that I'm at the receiving end of the Web based products, i assure you the experience is horrific. I don't even use search engines as much since the AI went mainstream and can't be happier.

Good riddance.

Of course I do enjoy things made with the advanced Web technologies like Wasm, Figma for example. I'm every now and then impressed by some web app that does something I thought not possible before.

However I'm still disgusted by documents that are some images and text loading tons of stuff that don't do anything beyond degrading my experience by slowing down the response time or act weird when interacting.

As I'm the subject here

That's not the subject of Show HN's, though, which is a great reason not to post generic fighting comments in people's Show HN's.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com