Baldur Bjarnason @baldur@toot.cafe
“Adactio: Links—The web without the web - DEV Community 👩💻👨💻” Jeremy Keith’s comments on the last link. adactio.com/links/15583
The web without the web - DEV Community 👩💻👨💻
I love React. I love how server side rendering React apps is trivial because it all compiles down to vanilla HTML rather than web components, effectively turning it into a kickass template engine that can come alive. I love the way you can very effectively still do progressive enhancement by using completely semantic markup and then letting hydration do more to it.
I also hate React. I hate React because these behaviours are not defaults. React is not gonna warn you if you make a form using divs and unlabelled textboxes and send the whole thing to a server. I hate React because CSS-in-JS approaches by default encourage you to write completely self contained one off components rather than trying to build a website UI up as a whole. I hate the way server side rendering and progressive enhancement are not defaults, but rather things you have to go out of your way to do.
An absolutely brilliant post by Laura on how the priorites baked into JavaScript tools like React are really out of whack. They’ll make sure your behind-the-scenes code is super clean, but not give a rat’s ass for the quality of the output that users have to interact with.
And if you want to adjust the front-end code, you’ve got to set up all this tooling just to change a div to a button. That’s quite a barrier to entry.
In elevating frontend to the land of Serious Code we have not just made things incredibly over-engineered but we have also set fire to all the ladders that we used to get up here in the first place.
AMEN!
I love React because it lets me do my best work faster and more easily. I hate React because the culture around it more than the library itself actively prevents other people from doing their best work.
Responses
Jose Marmolejos
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Related links
No-stack web development – David Bushell – Web Dev (UK)
A stack is also technical debt, non-transferable knowledge, accelerated obsolescence, and vendor lock-in. That means fragility and overall unnecessary complication. Popular stacks inevitably turn into cargo cults that build in spite of the web, not for it.
The web platform does not require build toolchains. Always default to, and regress to, the fundamentals of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Those core standards are the web stack.
Why we teach our students progressive enhancement | Blog Cyd Stumpel
Progressive enhancement is about building something robust, that works everywhere, and then making it better where possible.
CSS-in-JS: The Great Betrayal of Frontend Sanity - The New Stack
This is a spot-on analysis of how CSS-in-JS failed to deliver on any of its promises:
CSS-in-JS was born out of good intentions — modularity, predictability and componentization. But what we got was complexity disguised as progress.
The only frontend stack we should talk about
Explore the platform. Challenge yourself to discover what the modern web can do natively. Pure HTML, CSS, and a bit of vanilla JS…
A (kind of) farewell to the web – Web Directions
We’ve arrived at an industrialised process, one that’s like an assembly line for applications. Frameworks like React have become the machinery of that assembly line. They enable us to build efficiently, to build at scale, to build predictably. But they also constrain what we build.
But what aren’t we building? What new kinds of experiences, what new kinds of applications, what new kinds of interaction could we create if we were deeply exploring and engaging with the capabilities of the platform? I don’t know, because we’re not building them. We’re building what the frameworks enable us to build, what the assembly line can produce efficiently.
Collectively, as an industry and as a profession, consciously or not, we’ve chosen this maxima that we’re stuck on. We can build what React or Vue or Next or name your framework/library enables us to do.
I share John’s despair at this situation, but I don’t share his belief that large language models will save us.
Related posts
Providers
Web browsers provide you with great features for free. Why would you choose to use tools that stop you taking advantage of that?
Reasoning
In which I find a tagline for Web Day Out and a tagline for React.
Mismatch
It’s almost as though humans prefer to use post-hoc justifications rather than being rational actors.
CSS Day 2024
A genuinely inspiring event.
Decision time
Balancing the ledger.
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# Shared by Stefan Tilkov on Thursday, August 1st, 2019 at 2:42pm