Thinking back to my community college days in 2020 (right before the pandemic!), I used to rock a crappy old dual core laptop with 4GB of RAM running Fedora. Browsing the web was less than ideal and YouTube barely worked. For certain classes (the big hassle was a DB class after I transferred) running the course software was very taxing and I had a harder time with that compared to other students as a result. I remember Zoom barely working on it, but only if I didn't use the camera. I look back at this experience a bit fondly as it made me rely more on the terminal and I shifted away from slow laggy GUIs to TUIs/NeoVim. That said, for most other individuals in that position it really is a big limiting factor for their education.
Recently I was tutoring (for college essays and math) at a local high/middle school and most students browsed the web on their smart phones, but those that didn't were limited to school issued Chromebooks which were ungodly slow. Some of these students served as translators for their parents and I was under the impression that they used these devices to pay bills and for other household tasks as well. This experience is why to this day I try to keep the websites I make light on dependancies (I don't like react) and fast to load (sub 300kb ideally).
You can also get really small file sizes by ignoring frameworks and porting unsupported codecs to wasm.
I ported jbig2 (17kb uncompressed) and codec2 (60kb uncompressed) to wasm which enables me to use really small image and audio files in my web app. I also made a custom read only database and search engine with built-in zstd decompressor (39kb uncompressed). It probably wouldn't run on a psp though.
I like optimizing and making things small. I want to use neural audio codecs for even better compression but the model sizes and compute complexity are major hurdles and muddy the vision.
I build my apps the same way: mostly server-rendered HTML with a little JavaScript on top (Hotwire on Rails). They're mostly forms and CRUD, and it's worked for years with almost no client-side state to debug. I avoid React when I can. The frustrating part is there isn't much Hotwire or Rails work around these days. Most of the jobs want React.
I personally think CSS animations are wonderful. I’ve recently returned to dabble in frontend stuff and was delighted with what you could achieve with purely declarative HTML and CSS. I’m finding that you can often match the feel of an SPA with just HTMX and some CSS and I’ve found that simultaneously very satisfying and productive.
I would say that what ruins the experience is things not working. If it was an animation or some add on that threw an exception to console and did nothing, it would be fine, but designers and their tool makers want everything to be a giant conversation between microservices, which breaks for odd, undefinable, nonlinear reasons, and requires expensive help.
It feels like every week someone discovers that code closer to the metal is faster, and ignores the fact that it’s easier to write higher-level code, and that this is the specific tradeoff everyone is making. Why do these articles keep getting posted? Who is this a revelation to?
I don't think of HTML as low level, and I don't think that writing "high-level" web (whatever that is? React?) would be any faster to develop or produce better results for his example.
If you looked at the gov.uk page [1] that he linked, it is clean and readable. It doesn't look hard to me to make, and I don't think it is lacking functionality.
I'll grant that writing web-apps without a framework is going to be harder for many people (especially with all the fancy features that are expected now days), but that is not the point of this writing. This is an argument that the web (especially government services) should be usable on limited devices too.
Thinking back to my community college days in 2020 (right before the pandemic!), I used to rock a crappy old dual core laptop with 4GB of RAM running Fedora. Browsing the web was less than ideal and YouTube barely worked. For certain classes (the big hassle was a DB class after I transferred) running the course software was very taxing and I had a harder time with that compared to other students as a result. I remember Zoom barely working on it, but only if I didn't use the camera. I look back at this experience a bit fondly as it made me rely more on the terminal and I shifted away from slow laggy GUIs to TUIs/NeoVim. That said, for most other individuals in that position it really is a big limiting factor for their education.
Recently I was tutoring (for college essays and math) at a local high/middle school and most students browsed the web on their smart phones, but those that didn't were limited to school issued Chromebooks which were ungodly slow. Some of these students served as translators for their parents and I was under the impression that they used these devices to pay bills and for other household tasks as well. This experience is why to this day I try to keep the websites I make light on dependancies (I don't like react) and fast to load (sub 300kb ideally).
You can also get really small file sizes by ignoring frameworks and porting unsupported codecs to wasm.
I ported jbig2 (17kb uncompressed) and codec2 (60kb uncompressed) to wasm which enables me to use really small image and audio files in my web app. I also made a custom read only database and search engine with built-in zstd decompressor (39kb uncompressed). It probably wouldn't run on a psp though.
I like optimizing and making things small. I want to use neural audio codecs for even better compression but the model sizes and compute complexity are major hurdles and muddy the vision.
http://Bellard.org is peak web design. Change my mind.
I build my apps the same way: mostly server-rendered HTML with a little JavaScript on top (Hotwire on Rails). They're mostly forms and CRUD, and it's worked for years with almost no client-side state to debug. I avoid React when I can. The frustrating part is there isn't much Hotwire or Rails work around these days. Most of the jobs want React.
Which was quoted in a recent post on the HN front page: https://mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/ , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48475483
You've a point. HTML is plain and simple, works and gets the job done. Presenting on the web (may be a little bit of light css).
Heavy CSS animations, Javascript bloat is what slows down the websites and literally ruins the web experience.
I personally think CSS animations are wonderful. I’ve recently returned to dabble in frontend stuff and was delighted with what you could achieve with purely declarative HTML and CSS. I’m finding that you can often match the feel of an SPA with just HTMX and some CSS and I’ve found that simultaneously very satisfying and productive.
I would say that what ruins the experience is things not working. If it was an animation or some add on that threw an exception to console and did nothing, it would be fine, but designers and their tool makers want everything to be a giant conversation between microservices, which breaks for odd, undefinable, nonlinear reasons, and requires expensive help.
It feels like every week someone discovers that code closer to the metal is faster, and ignores the fact that it’s easier to write higher-level code, and that this is the specific tradeoff everyone is making. Why do these articles keep getting posted? Who is this a revelation to?
I don't think of HTML as low level, and I don't think that writing "high-level" web (whatever that is? React?) would be any faster to develop or produce better results for his example.
If you looked at the gov.uk page [1] that he linked, it is clean and readable. It doesn't look hard to me to make, and I don't think it is lacking functionality.
I'll grant that writing web-apps without a framework is going to be harder for many people (especially with all the fancy features that are expected now days), but that is not the point of this writing. This is an argument that the web (especially government services) should be usable on limited devices too.
1 https://www.gov.uk/housing-benefit
(2021)
(2021)
Now do the unreasonable effectiveness of an overly ambitious junior dev convincing management to rewrite the who site in client side react.