I am a front-end developer who is FED up about front-end development. If you write front-end, this isn't about you personally. It's about how your choices make me angry. Also this is about how my choices have made me angry. Also this is mostly just about choices, the technologies are incidental. Note: The views expressedRead More

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.

  • Frokke@lemmings.worldEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    I’m not versed in the web dev scene, front end or back end. But if you mean the people that design sites where shit isn’t loaded in proper sequence and keeps shifting/moving buttons as it keeps loading more shit, then yes, fuck those people.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      so, this isn’t so much a design as it is a consequence of how a lot of the technologies involved operate (as in, it’s (largely) not a conscious choice for those things to do that shifting (except in the cases of deceptive designs)), but you’re fairly correct in that it fucking sucks to have that interaction with sites/systems (because of violates principle of least surprise, etc)

      (and probably also sometimes/often falls into that bucket of things where “it works perfectly fine on the dev’s 27” laptop with 16 cores and 32gb of RAM and the DC is next door" development applies)

  • deborah@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    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.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      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.

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        4 months ago

        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

        • Steve@awful.systemsOPEnglish
          0·
          4 months ago

          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