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A Rant about Front-end Development (blog.frankmtaylor.com)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by fasterandworse@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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A masterful rant about the shit state of the web from a front-end dev perspective

There’s a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn’t possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSR only in the context of Node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air2.

Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shitty div soup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere.

Server-side rendering means it’s rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.

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[–] self@awful.systems 10 points 3 months ago (31 children)

it’d be very nice to have a progressively enhanced static frontend instead since there’s really nothing about any of this that should require JavaScript (and something like unpoly would give us react SPA style functionality strictly as an enhancement on top of plain HTML)

this might be a cool project for someone to pick up once work on Philthy gets going; most of the alternative Lemmy frontends still have an unnecessary JS framework dependency, or are lacking features for essentially no reason

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 16 points 3 months ago (6 children)

we used to strive for minimum possible front-end payload, and it was an embarrassment to do anything with JS that wasn't backed up by a non-js default. Will never forget how suddenly React removed all those things from front-end team meetings.

They were solid industry-wide concerns that just... disappeared

[–] gnomicutterance@awful.systems 14 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Remember when our industry cared about loading times?

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 12 points 3 months ago

I remember seeing an argument on reddit between a css dev that understood the depth of the responsive design philosophy and a dismissive Reacter that shut them down by calling them an old "list-aparter"

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