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Comment by Maxion | Hacker News Reader

Simple web pages can be made small with modern tooling, e.g. AstroJS.

The problem is that most web pages these days fundamentally are not simple.

Rather than trying to make web pages small, the real effort would be in designing web pages to be simple.

The large majority of software devs, PMs and the like don't really know how to do anything else than a Node + React webapp.

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I've come to the opinion that for the vast majority of apps I've built, it could all be built using HTML + CSS (all built server side). I can sprinkle in little bits of interactivity using something like HTMX. And I'll have a website that is very easy to optimise, has phenomenal backwards compatibility, and gets rid of a whole class of issues associated with SPAs.

I often regret in my career not pushing back more on "requirements" that ended up requiring a more complicated app, whereas the customer would have been happier with a simpler solution.

I guess you're right, but it's more of a curve, though. Once you get to any decent level of complexity, it actually helps to have a framework instead of just going all HTML+CSS. Also it helps having something standard as react (that every web developer should fundamentally understand) than doing your custom stuff if other people will be working on it in the future.

There's a lot to say about the side effects of frameworks but there's a reason why everything converges towards that.

I think it's the other way around, a framework will get you up and running quickly, but then it becomes technical dept, and if your app is complicated you will end up fighting the framework. If you write something from scratch it will take a while to reach to the abstraction level where you can work fast. But then you have a fully custom abstraction layer that is not a "one size fits all" but custom tailored for your needs.

Good luck with hiring, onboarding, and maintenance of your bespoke solution. Also with your resume when seeking your next gig. For any serious project, ignore community and ecosystem health at your peril. To be clear, we're talking about framework selection, not leftpad vs DIY.

I agree, most websites allow complex flows. But I suspect, that most loads don't ever touch those. There is probably an automated way to deliver just a flat page, and maybe even allow for the top 5 interactions without loading all the frameworks and libraries.

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