[heather45879]

I like to go back to the basics. It irks me that folks don’t think HTML/CSS/JavaScript are good enough as-is—but nowadays the default browser capabilities are incredible compared to a decade ago. We basically have a full programming environment and add WASM to the mix! Back in the day the frameworks were first-and-foremost a platform compatibility solution.

People often have it ingrained in their psyche that reinventing the wheel is evil, but it’s not—we do it all the time when we write paragraphs.

It’s of course tempting to grab a library but there’s a learning curve and an often hidden long-term cost with using libraries.

[throwaway999528]

Throwaway for anonymity.

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.

[heather45879]

The underlying issue with web applications is that it’s like a square peg going in a round hole. Remember, HTTP is designed traditionally as a stateless protocol delivering static web pages, more or less.

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.

[llanowarelves]

It's like ORMs and game engines.

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.

[vbezhenar]

I agree. I like pure JS, but it just does not scale by default. You need to have awesome architecture skills and you need to constantly observe your codebase, you need to write half of framework if you want to avoid frameworks. Of course it's possible, but it's not possible for vast majority of developers, including myself.

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.

[wwweston]

> 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.

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.

[spookie]

As someone trying to create a frontend with plain HTML/CSS for quite a complex backend, I can attest to the fact that's impossible to maintain consistency between browsers.

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.

[lagt_t]

The problem was choosing an SPA

[phist_mcgee]

Everyone's a "pure html/css/js" gangster until they have to maintain state.

[throwaway0asd]

That sounds like a training problem more than anything else.

[0xblinq]

Well, the thing is… for any non trivial web app, you do need a framework (spa or Unpoly like). The question here is if you use an existing one or end up writing your own.

I don’t buy the “just use html, js and css”… giving the same developer skills, without a framework that becomes a mess much sooner than with one.

As your code grows you end up creating your own libraries, and your own conventions, and as soon as you (the one with a vision and that knew how to do it) leaves the company and other team members come and go, it ends up being a disaster because there is no documentation, no maintenance, and as you reinvented the wheel nobody used your framework before, so everyone has to start from scratch with it.

Popular libraries and frameworks are popular for a reason. Business wise, it makes sense to not reinvent the wheel and rely on existing battle proven, secure and documented tools.

Just don’t reinvent the wheel. Web applications are not “paragraphs”.

[akira2501]

> HTML/CSS/JavaScript are good enough as-is—but nowadays the default browser capabilities are incredible compared to a decade ago.

I'm not sure they remember a time when the choice wasn't "X Corporate Framework" vs "Y Corporate Framework" but "Native Desktop Application" vs. "Website Only Application."

I feel like I'm already accepting a huge set of "dependencies" by choosing to develop a web application, and I have a vast stack of technologies to draw upon in building my application already.

[alerighi]

In a modern web framework you still have HTML and you still have CSS files.

The problem is JavaScript and in particular the way that you interact with the DOM: browsers use an imperative API, that this day is obsolete, and makes writing web applications a mess rapidly, and produce spaghetti code difficult to modify and isolate.

While practically all modern frameworks use a functional approach: you have the component, that has an internal state, a function to render DOM elements from that state, and if you need to update the view you don't directly manipulate the DOM elements, but update the component state, that causes the framework to call again the render function that updates the DOM elements as required. That is so much simpler, because you don't have to ensure that the state of the application is aligned with the state of what the user sees on the screen!

[resonious]

I definitely see the elegance of the modern reactive approach, but in practice I'm not sure how much better it really is. I still see spaghetti code, and I still see stupid bugs in production. Doesn't seem to matter whether it's JQuery or Vue. Right now I'd bet that careful architecture and thorough testing are still #1 for making good software.

[arminiusreturns]

What irks me is the javascript part. You dont need to run random scripts on my system, just send me some fucking text! Make it a touch prettier with css! The javascripts are so bloated, spy on you, are often a malware vector, and offer little real user benefit.

[cies]

> It irks me that folks don’t think HTML/CSS/JavaScript are good enough as-is

I'm one of those folks. Allow me to explain.

I compare using HTML/ CSS/ JavaScript (or something that transpiles to JS/WASM) to making GUIs in Qt (C++) or with help of QML. I find the HTML/CSS/JS hopelessly complex compared to the Qt with-and-without QML.

Sting based binding of CSS to HTML classes/ids is super error prone. CSS is not really "connected" to the HTML as would be the case in style my QUI with Qt.

Also the widgets (dropdown, etc.) I get in HTML are often underpowered underfeatured, so I have to use widget libraries on top, or roll my own.

[LudwigNagasena]

There is a reason why modern UI frameworks like SwiftUI or Jetpack Compose look more like React rather than pure HTML/CSS/JavaScript. And it is not because iOS and Android can’t run WASM.

[blep_]

Because this entire industry runs on trends?