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A Rant about Front-end Development (blog.frankmtaylor.com)
submitted 2 years ago* by 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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[–] 16 points 2 years ago (1 child)

This is so cathartic to read.

I have worked with multiple static sites delivered with React, because somebody built an enterprise design system which is so tightly tied into React that it can't be applied any other way.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Lemmy, e.g. this here site, uses React too. Probably about as weirdly as they use Rust, even as the site appears to present an ok front end.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (3 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

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  • [–] [S] 16 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Remember when our industry cared about loading times?

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    facebook used to lie about react being faster than native on first load and navigation, in spite of that being impossible by both lived experience and as measured by benchmarks. supposedly templating is just too heavyweight for servers to handle at the mythical Amazon scale literally nobody reaches except Amazon but every shitty manager needs us to be ready for

    and now that react can do server-side rendering I guess we’re doing templating again, but in node and much less efficient and with extremely unclear semantics around when it switches to client rendering, and also weird bugs when things render differently under SSR

    also it’s still measurably much slower than old school server templating

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    the mythical Amazon scale

    Ah yes, Amazon, the company with literally the shittiest front-end of all in existence. AWS is downright unusable outside of the CLI, but hey, at least they scale??

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    you know, for as much poison’s been poured into my ear about how everything must be Amazon scale, there’s no way in fuck they use react for their storefront or AWS, is there? I think the only reason react is considered an Amazon-scale frontend (besides Facebook, which also has a shitty UI, though not as bad as Amazon, and notoriously uses PHP for everything) is how hard they push it as part of AWS Amplify, a toolchain they say will help you reach their scale (but from experience: it absolutely will not, it’s just a set of technologies that increase your AWS bill and perform like shit, which is why Amazon doesn’t use it for anything of value themselves)

    the only case I can immediately think of of a very major site going from server rendering to react is GitHub (which used to use Ruby on Rails and Erlang, apparently) and it’s been an unmitigated disaster — none of the new features that supposedly require react are good, the performance fucking sucks now, and the thing keeps breaking (I get weird renders with broken styling every few refreshes and apparently I’m not the only one). the fucking thing even hijacks the keyboard shortcuts I use and has become an accessibility nightmare, all in the name of pointlessly turning it into a react SPA and vscode wannabe.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    i keep finding so much that's done with JS that there's perfectly good CSS for

    it turns out browser rendering is fucking fast in 2024

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago

    fucking exactly! I’ve been doing a lot of CSS-only work for the sneer archive rewrite, and it’s shocking how fast everything renders without JS, and how much functionality you can retain with a good enough CSS framework and careful markup

    I’m also working on a JavaScript library and associated rant named fuckery because it turns out you can’t use Web Components without some utterly unnecessary JavaScript, because the W3C decided to do a fuckery

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  • [–] -4 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    The main reason companies use frontend frameworks is it's easier to continue development through employee turnover. If your app was written in react or angular you just have to hire someone who knows how those work and they can get up to speed pretty quickly. Modularity also allows for code reuse. It increases maintainability. Labor isbtye major cost of software development, so making things easier and faster to develop and maintain is better from a business perspective than ensuring your app can run on a 15 year old iphone.

    If you wanna go frameworkless, JS-less, or whatever on your personal projects then fine. If you insist on it in a professional team environment, you're making everyone's lives more difficult.

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  • [–] [S] 14 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    as a developer my favourite thing about react componentisation is how it makes me and my team more readily replaceable

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    fuck, this quip’s better than my seeing-red rant

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  • [–] [S] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I love when someone argues against something that is arguing against everything they use in their argument

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I checked and they do the “well maybe it’s ok in your personal projects” bit a lot, which is very funny because the code for my personal projects usually isn’t garbage

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago

    That's such a weird notion. My personal projects are the cutest, most groomed pieces of code I write, cause I do it out of my own volition. The code at work? Just any shite that passes the review so that I don't have to look at that codebase or think about it lest eldritch worms consume my sanity.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    thank fuck neither myself nor this instance have employees, turnover, or shitty little project managers that get heartburn when the stack’s HTML5, CSS, and a non-shitty templating language instead of HTML5, react/angular/svelte/whichever frontend framework the market decided is in demand this quarter, a CSS in JS library, an ORM, webpack, and whichever npm clone tweaks your nipples the most

    and you’d better hope you chose “right” on all of those pieces of the stack, cause you’re infantilizing your devs so much you think it’s impossible for them to learn a new frontend framework, or how to do modularity or maintainability in a basic fucking backend templating language. do they also have to ask your permission to take a piss?

    but why are you posting here? it’s almost Monday and you’ve got an hour-long, unproductive standup to preside over

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  • [–] [S] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    praise the circumstances that enable the scourge of b2b saas products imposed on employees at the collaboration factory

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    if we keep this up, the CEO might positively mention the name of our project briefly during an all-hands, then two weeks later vastly reduce our headcount because the good job we’ve done proves we don’t need to waste money on all these developers

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I've been forced to do react for years and I still don't like or understand it. Most times plain JavaScript is easier and quicker to write and quite maintainable if people can resist the urge to take the piss with nested anonymous functions.

    I honestly can't get my head around the idea that people can hit the ground running with react, but can't write unabstracted JavaScript. It's like a MotoGP rider not being able to ride a push bike.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I have, in a previous age, unfortunately been the first one to suggest react at work. it’s declarative! the mental model makes sense! it’s kind of like functional programming! why, Facebook is surprisingly good at CS, maybe we should look at graphql too since that seems like such a good fit for react

    this venerable house, opulent and imperial, is a festering abomination. as soon as you run into any performance issues or edge cases with react (or far more quickly with graphql, where the edge cases include shit like authentication and API versioning), you’re going to start burning out developers doing the most counterintuitive bullshit ever invented to torture a development team. and react is structured such that performance issues will accumulate in web apps; it’s just a matter of time (and not even that much time) before they do.

    that’s why the advice now is to dodge performance issues with server-side rendering, almost like your site should have been fucking static html in the first place, except SSR won’t fire up without a gigantic bundle of JavaScript affixed to it, and in general it’s another source of bugs and weird performance regressions that you now have to debug in two places

    and for what? react’s DX is better than HTML and CSS until you hit a wall, then it’s much worse. you can get a fairly react-like set of functionality out of plain HTML with Web Components… except Web Components requires fucking JavaScript for no reason but to not threaten existing frontend frameworks (see our sister community FreeAssembly soon for the gigantic rant and JavaScript library I’m writing about this shitty situation)

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    this venerable house, opulent and imperial, is a festering abomination.

    Magnificent.

    you’re going to start burning out developers doing the most counterintuitive bullshit ever invented to torture a development team.

    As depicted in the paintings of Heironymous Bodge.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    I’ve heard this exact same bullshit spun defending choosing golang too, and it’s just as bullshit there as it is here

    and that’s not even touching on the aspect of this being based on the extremely toxic “oh yeah just burn them up and find the next one” mentality that has become far more prevalent in the world under the umbrella of zirp-funded bayfuckery gaining international traction

    I beg you to go consider whether this is your actual position, or some shit you picked up from someone else. to consider what the effects of this stance are, not just today but in 5/10/15y+. it should be quite easy to see both how it helped us get into the collective pile of shit we now do have, as well as why it won’t ever be good

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  • [–] [S] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Modularity also allows for code reuse. It increases maintainability.

    another thing to think about is how this was not invented by frontend frameworks. We did it fine pre-SPAs and pre-preprocessors. It was part of the architecture and strategy. The hard work that allowed us to essentially reskin entire, very complex, projects every couple of years

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    i'll put myself out there - here's a receipt from 06~07 https://web.archive.org/web/20070512035940cs_/http://www.toyota.com.au/toyota/main/css/elements.css

    we were a team of 5 devs including me. We weren't tribed off into separate areas of concern, we all knew the whole project back to front, and (maybe not the most clever move) managed without version control by always being aware which part we were working on. Cos, ya know, communication is easy when you are 5 people sitting in a group.

    Don't give me shit about the complexity of the UI in modern apps either. We were dealing with a huge collection of brochure style pages that had plenty of variations. We kept all that css under 500kb. We could achieve the bland flatness of modern uis under 100kb easily. No fucking doubt.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    I built sites as large and larger than Toyota with a team of 4-5 devs. Even with some of them being very junior devs, we still managed to keep the CSS under 500kb.

    Lots of front-end devs don't understand the difference between complicated and complex.

    Complicated means it's difficult to do and hard to understand. Complex means it's got many parts.

    All it takes is a little bit of maturity and planning, and most any modern UI could be achieved in under 100kb of CSS. You put on your big kid pants and think about what you're going to write before you write it.

    CSS isn't some deep, level-10 arcane magic. You literally gotta roll an occasional persuasion check against a browser.

    Thanks for sharing the article, BTW

    • Frank.
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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 years ago

    Thanks, Frank!

    You put on your big kid pants and think about what you’re going to write before you write it.

    Killer line. THIS is what DESIGN is. The lost art of knowing what you want to do and deliberating over how to do it. The tech industry reversed it and now everyone is figma-ing about like children lost in the forest.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    I'm a backend developer and jesus fucking christ, 500KB? That's around the weight of code in an actual programming language for a mid-sized project, and front-end needs that much just for CSS? And CSS isn't even that verbose.

    The whole Rust compiler is like 10MB and that's a huge codebase, including all the documentation and shit.

    One more reason front-end work never clicked with me I guess

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago*

    Yeah. That's one of the many reasons I wrote a damned rant about how fed up I am with front-end. It's insane to think web sites telling you about cars or coffee need 1MB+ to do so.

    But it happens because front-end tooling makes it so fucking easy to write complicated, bloated code.

    Most of my time and energy these days is deleting shit. I delete more than I write. But my proudest achievement was like 7 years ago when I was asked to add a Japanese font.

    Took me 6 weeks. I deleted like 15% of the CSS in the process.

    Why did it take so long, and why did it require deleting 15% of the code?

    Because the dorks on the project used Sass for literally every line. So I had like 400+ instances of someone applying a font-family spread across 80 Sass files. Not a single.fucking.HTML.element received a style. Not. One.

    There was no font-family declared anywhere that it could be inherited down.

    So over three sprints I had to move the font-declarations into mixins, then onto raw elements, then actually delete the mixins on the classes. Eventually I got it down to like 18 instances of declaring the font family.

    and then I wrote another 18 instances where I could apply the Japanese font.

    Adding a Japanese font reduced the size of the CSS by 15%.

    front-end work doesn't click with most front-end devs, either.

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