As a non-web dev, I have a question about this part:
> There was a sad coda; as is the way of contract work, I moved on. I explained what I had built to my replacement, that it always worked even without javascript. He was appalled and said, “but that’s a lot more work for us.”
Why is it more work? The approach described in the article seems honestly reasonably simple: just write the standard <input> components for the form, have a submit button at the bottom. When I was making my own websites many years ago now, that's how it worked, and it wasn't that hard. Maybe it's reflecting my ignorance in this field, but doing fancy front-ends seems much harder to me.
Starting a few years ago, I realized some junior and medior engineers never once considered the possibility of building a website (app, experience, etc.) in anything other than a heavy SPA framework. But they're not stupid people! If you directly asked "Can you build a website without React?" they know the answer is obviously "Yes." However, if you asked them to build a new website, they would unthinkingly start a new React project, mostly out of familiarity and a desire to get the job done.
A few of them would outright not know how to do anything else. No knowledge of how to stand up a boring HTTP server to send pure HTML. No experience building a form that validates or submits without JavaScript. These are not the people who post here on HN. They are not engaged in online discussions of new tools and skills (or old tools and skills!). These are people who learned just enough from a bootcamp, or their uni's single "web apps" course, to get a job. Since then, they have just-in-time learned whatever their employer required, or whatever particular tools someone else on their team chose for a project.
As an old, it took me a while to recognize/realize it, but I understand them now. Depending on their career path, someone will encounter the simplest aspects of HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript after they learn the complex, framework-specific aspects of each. It feels (to them) like more esoteric, advanced, or tertiary knowledge.
Tying it back to to the quote "that’s a lot more work for us", that's not necessarily an intentionally false claim. It probably does feel like a lot more work to perform a task using unfamiliar tools, even if they are less-complex tools.
You are far too empathetic to them. They should not hold the jobs they have.
These are the people writing React monstrosities for government benefit websites, and testing them on fast iPhones and fast 4G, without realizing that every page load for actual users will take 30 seconds on their old $200 Android on 3G, and users won’t complete the form.
It’s a culture of not giving a shit, that’s the deeper issue.
Junior and midlevel devs aren't decision makers for government benefit websites. The culture of not giving a shit is real, but the responsibility goes far beyond these roles.
Preach! Amen! Hallelujah!
I am always baffled by people who blame developers. Like some mid dev or junior would calling shots what stack should be used for project.
You'd be surprised, then. Some managers don't know squat. I rolled onto a project once and found that an entire application was being delivered as a 300MB ActiveX control, to run in a browser because that was cool and "cutting-edge" at the time.
Looking at the code, I found it was using UI elements for data storage and other such nonsense. A colleague and I had to tell the manager that the entire thing had to be rewritten. I'm not sure he actually went pale, but that's how I remember it.
I had a contract once to save a government website that had serious performance issues, it was so unusable that people preferred to go in-person and wait 4h in a queue rather than try to fill the forms online.
The frontend was in React because the company that got the contract initially used React for everything. The frontend was a 5MB SPA, but it could've been (mostly static) HTML files with some interactivity for forms like TFA. Everyone working on the project agreed React didn't make sense, but we couldn't do anything about it because someone from the government IT department would have to admit they made a mistake. There was no budget for rewrites in the contract. The few times a developer attempted to remove any "React monstrosity" they got in trouble.
Sometimes developers care, but the people in charge don't, and in government environments every change must go through them first.
In Canada you can't call yourself an engineer unless you have some kind of association behind it; the title holds meaning including partially accountability. Something that is lacking in the tech world. I'm not saying I want to live in that world but also I worked hard for the knowledge I have starting in the IE days of web dev; it was hard earned experience making things work across the web without loosing performance. The idea that we have developers out there now getting paid higher than me that are clueless on how auth works, how the browser works, why css and browsers maintain backwards comparability for a reason.. well it's sad; but good for them I guess?
The behaviours of developers as well being beholden to their managers rather than the craft; meaning not saying No we will not move forward without proper unit tests, or pushing back when business demands quick corner cutting solutions.
Anyway, decades of bitterness. I wish we had associations to uphold some level of accountability on developers as much as protect developers. I think things would be a lot more expensive and slow if we did that though.
Fundamentally I agree with your take, not just on dev side but just the web/dev/produce' a culture of not giving a shit.
New cheap android phones are just as slow as old cheap android phones. The bottom of the market has been stuck in performance limbo for years, and modern web dev frameworks are ill designed to meet them where they are at.
I've found what works really well on 3G an MPA with streaming HTML with brotli compression rendering the whole page on every change.
I use to have an old pentium 2 computer for testing websites. Sometimes you cant make things fast enough for the old box. A fun trick is/was to have <script>elm.textContent="loading images"</script> between each "heavy" section, all targeting the same elm. If the computer, network or server is truly extremely slow you will get a nice message at the top describing what they are waiting for. On a normal slow computer you won't see the messages unless something went wrong.
It's more of a culture of "but everybody else does it".
I like how HTMX does SPAs. It straddles the divide nicely between simple and capable.
I see no reason not to be empathetic. The frustration is fair, but it's aimed at the wrong layer. These people were guided into this spot by bootcamps and curricula that start at React and never go down the stack.
My experience was the reverse. I learned HTML and CSS first, then Rails in college to serve templated pages. I understood the client/server boundary fine as a concept, what I couldn't see was where it actually sat in a web context. I sort of knew JavaScript ran in the browser, but then I'd see ERB templates stamping values directly into script tags, so the server was writing the JavaScript that ran on the client, and my mental model fell apart. Where does my code actually execute? Why does this variable exist here but not there? Why does the page have data the network tab never fetched? Nobody ever sat me down and explained the request/response lifecycle as its own thing. I had to assemble it from fragments over years. This was around 2017 for context.
How you learn something shapes how you keep learning. If your mental model is misaligned, everything downstream is friction. The thing that finally made it click for me was reading the actual HTTP RFCs, which is apparently a weird thing to do, because HTTP itself is absent from nearly every guide and curriculum. Tutorials teach you the framework, maybe the language, and just assume the protocol underneath. These days I make newbies read the MDN docs like a book and skim the HTTP wiki page, learn the history of the protocol. It's short! It's not even a book! That gives you a firm foundation. But if your foundation starts at React, drilling down is like digging past bedrock. People don't know where to start, and Googling only shows them wrong answers because they don't yet know how to ask the question.
Are you sympathetic to a doctor who specialized in surgery and now always recommends surgery, even for a common cold? Or would you say they are in the wrong job, if they are anywhere but surgery?
Well that's horribly reductive. I certainly do not expect everyone in a given field to know absolutely everything there is to know in that field.
Crazy enough, I also hold doctors and surgeons to higher standards than web developers.
Ridiculous example that does nothing to argue the original, fair point. Obviously health interventions demand more finely tuned solutions than information technology
FWIW, maintaining at least a moderate degree of empathy even in systemically frustrating situations is good for the empathizer and thus in one’s interest
Kinda sorta analogous to the cloud engineers who can standup complex monstrosities in AWS-land, but don’t know the first thing about how to troubleshoot say a connectivity or simple problem where they have to ssh to an ec2 box and do the needful
or the materials engineers who are great at making mems tools, but couldnt for the life of them design an aircraft prop
I’ve long thought frontend web developers are the ones most threatened by LLM-assisted programming for a bunch of reasons and now I can add “many don’t understand web fundamentals” to the list.
Absolutely
I'm not a web developer. I built a few websites in high school, but these days I write safety-critical real-time code for robots.
A few years ago I was back in grad school and I took a class with undergrad senior CS students. We had to write a fairly simple web service, and I was blown away by how complicated they were making it. Based on the requirements we easily could have written 90% of it in plain HTML, but everyone else insisted it should be 100% react. Part of that is honors students wanting to do everything the most complex way possible to impress teacher, and part of it is them simply not knowing that other options exist.
Don't you think they have a legit skill issue here and should they be better off upskilling themselves?
This is a direct effect of being a low barrier industry to enter. Most of the ppl among us are mostly here because of a good paycheck. And it SUCKS!
>Don't you think they have a legit skill issue here and should they be better off upskilling themselves?
Absolutely agree! Just because I understand how they got there doesn't mean I think it's a good state of affairs ;)
My post was already quite long, and I didn't want to append a treatise on what one should do when encountering those engineers. It depends on many details. Avoid hiring them, if that's a power you have. If you are stuck working with them, depending on your authority, encourage them to learn or force them to learn. If you're coming in to clean up after them... well, hopefully your comp is worth the annoyance.
We are all simultaneously in the position of encountering "the world as it is", understanding it, and doing what we can to improve it.
Yep. It’s also an attitude problem. A lot of devs are able to up-skill just fine, but some are downright demeaning towards anything they don’t understand, or towards anything that doesn’t come from a FAANG.
“HTML only? Nobody is doing it!”
In the olden days, people wouldn't take office jobs or factory job necessarily because they thought: "Yes! That's my passion! That's exactly what I've always wanted to do." Passion isn't your first and foremost thought when you have a family to feed.
A few decades ago, IT jobs were for the most part done only by people who were in it for the kick they got out of working with computers. They already hacked at their dad's computer in their early teens (or sometimes even younger), and just could just never let go. It was for people who loved it because it was a niche.
But today, IT is no longer that. It's the backbone of much of our society. And so the field no longer attracts just the die hard fans, the nerds. It attracts ordinary "career people", who just need to have a job to feed the family. Who turn the machine off after 8 hours. Who don't go on coding all through the evening on their hobby project. Who don't try out new tech just for the heck of it.
I think it's hard to understand if you belong to the first group, the nerds, that anyone working in the field isn't like you. Because they all used to be! But those days are gone. We live in the times of enshitification for a reason. If you have the hacker spirit, you don't enshitify because you simply can't. You know what is the right way to do it. Sometimes that's a React app but sometimes it's just an HTML page.
You're not just in it for the money. You care. Not necessarily for the end user, although that would be nice. You care for the tech. And when - like in this article - both come together, sweet things can happen.
A few of them would outright not know how to do anything else.
It's like how a lot of people these days reach for an electric drill/driver for even the most simple projects like tightening a screw. It never occurs to them to use a screwdriver, or even a butter knife.
Try to get a Java developer to do something without Spring.
There is a reason we use React today - if you want dynamic and complex site, HTML is PITA to work with. Either you reload everything on any change (not good), or end up with a maze of partial reloads in event handlers (not good either). It was done, it was bad, React (and similar frameworks) was the solution. If you don't need complexity of React, fine, use HTML. But if you do, who can guarantee that 5 min later someone will not start requesting site not to reload here and there, but update this bit here. So I don't blame people for just using React. And in this case the issue wasn't that react was used, but that it was used poorly.
Two years ago, I started a new company, and decided at the outset to avoid using any heavy JavaScript SPA framework. We stuck to simple server-rendered html and only use progressive-enhancement style JavaScript.
Our app was fast, and simple, but it also came at a cost: we were limited in our ability to take rich UI elements off the shelf with an npm package. We had to do a lot more work to provide a rich user experience. Everything took longer, and the user experience was worse as a result. We cared, but sometimes you don't have time to carry through.
The company failed, and I don't think react would have saved it. But I can tell you first hand that righteous adherence to "simplicity" didn't help either. It's always a trade-off.
A lot of developers have made or just perceive very strong silos between frontend and backend today. Any coordination that needs to happen between frontend and backend is potentially a communication challenge.
It seems like a lot more work because you have to keep the backend and frontend in closer sync. The backend has to be aware of and able to store every sub-form in the full process (which sounds like a "wizard form" with a multiple sub-forms to get through the full "form" process), not just accept a "finished" or "complete" submission. If a sub-form needs a change the backend, the backend's storage, and the frontend all need to change. The backend and frontend have to agree on validation logic for each small piece of the form. The backend and the frontend need to both validate every small piece of the form, and maybe can't share that validation logic (depending on what language the backend is written in), especially if one of the goals is to do as much of the frontend validation as possible with Browser native validation tools (`<input required` and `<input type="email"` and so forth) so that you get the most benefits of progressive enhancement.
The original ways of making websites were "full stack" and from a full stack perspective it shouldn't seem that hard to have a coordinated frontend and backend, especially when a progressive enhancement approach likely means a smaller more agile frontend, but current siloed world where frontend and backend are different teams with different goals and alignment makes that seem like way too much work.
> Why is it more work?
As someone that reads a lot of code written by others, I'm confident that "learning a new way to do something" is perceived by many as the hardest thing in the world.
I think the problem is hearing just one side.
Someone is saying that they delivered a very reasonable solution that's simpler than most would come up. Person taking over was not happy.
Do we know if the code being handed over was high quality? Were they reacting to the fact that it was "not React"? Maybe they have a template they enforce in the company about how apps are built?
We don't know.
It probably has to do with what technology people are used to. There has been a couple of generations of web developers who have only known javascript and its ecosystem for building webapps, and so anything other than pure javascript solution looks foreign.
Computers are very good at repeating a known "recipe". They can add numbers billions of time per second. Yes, billions with a bee.
The hard part is coming up with a recipe that solves your problem and that the machine can run without breaking things when it runs around with a few billion steps per second. You have to think ahead for it and handle edge cases in the recipe.
That is the really hard part.
I used to do web dev. (Got out of it due to js frameworks and their bloat.)
I'd pee myself in happiness to take over a project like this.
I was confused by that too, but then I thought maybe the new replacement was commenting that using javascript in the app would provide more work for contractors, which he perceives as a good thing. So not using javascript provides less work. I could be wrong though.
This was the jQuery way. It was called Graceful Degradation.
The entire approach went out of style with the advent of single page apps, React, Angular, VueJS, etc.
That's generous. I always heard people espouse that ideal, but I rarely saw them actually do it. And I never saw it at work.
There were always certain UX requirements that required JS, and that meant the company wasn't interested in testing to make sure it worked without JS. None of their customers were going to use it that way.
Angular, React, etc helped force it further, but they didn't cause it.
I know I always did. CakePHP and Rails made it really easy to determine if a request came from AJAX or direct and you could slightly tweak the response to match the medium.
Agree that most people didn't, but I was always an advocate.
the shockwave and flash way was simpler.
download the whole app and run it in browser. you can even run it off line!
jQuery and graceful degradation are different things. The vast majority of sites in the jQuery era that used jQuery did not gracefully degrade.
As an application becomes more stateful it gets harder to keep that state aligned across the frontend and backend, especially if they're in different languages.
They don’t know how to compose and style elements without someone providing them with a prebuilt library of $framework components.
I'm risking being wrong here, but I think the difficulty is getting conforming behavior across all device and browser combos.
By this point people don't appear to have any real clue how to write HTML anymore. Writing semantic HTML isn't significantly harder than say writing Markdown. You copy some HTMl skeleton and you literally just stack your elements into the body. I managed to do that as a 13 year old on MySpace without any deep instruction. Sure you have to close elements as well so the syntax is slightly harder than markdown, but that allows you to differenciate between for example <article>, <section> and <aside>.
I am convinced the one single thing that made HTML unusable over the time was that people wanted or needed a way to re-use parts of the page across multiple pages, like headers, navigational elements and footers.
This meant people used frames, PHP, templating engines or any other new technology mainly for the purpose of creating shared elements, simply because HTML failed (and to this day: fails) to offer a way to include one HTML file in another without having it suck (like frames definitely did, since the browser treated each subpart of the page like its own entity including caching).
<div><div><div><div><div><div><span></div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div>></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
writing straight html and css sucked. building reddit css themes sucked
But I believe the point is: if you were writing HTML by hand, you would never have written the above.
> (and to this day: fails)
The `<template>` tag has gotten very close. Right now you still need JS (optionally wrapped as a Web Component) to load a `<template>` from an outside HTML file (at which case, yeah, it's so easy to just use a JS-based HTML renderer instead of a template today), but discussions are ongoing about closing that loop for simpler "JS-free Web Components".
I don't know when that will be accepted into the web platform, but it still feels more like a matter of time that it may happen eventually.
I've found at least some of my static page generation has moved to just dumbly appending `<template>` tags to the bottom of a page rather than use some other template language, so it feels like we are closer every day to finally having "HTML-native" simple part reuse.
Large websites resorted to PHP and server side includes to get headers and footers. Smaller websites resorted to frames and copy/paste. It wasn't perfect, but it also wasn't horrible or unusable either.
I think it was... SHTML? that allowed for server includes. My recollection from... 25ish years ago was that it was generally quite well supported and worked quite well (and was dead simple to implement). Not sure why, if that was the issue, the fix didn't quite catch on (but it's totally possible I'm mis-remembering the state of browser support).
Server-side includes worked fine but weren't enabled by default in any of the mainstream web servers. I think the lack of default-enabled status hampered their adoption. Joe User couldn't just FTP a bunch of ".shtml" files up to their shared web space and expect it to work right.
I certainly used the heck out of them in the late 90s, though.
It would have been very cool if HTML had been created with the ability to do client-side includes without having to resort to using a Turing-complete VM in the client to do it.
[delayed]
yeah editing all the footers and navigation parts in html is too annoying to me so i've resorted for my websites to just a back button to a page that has links to everything else lmao
I suspect they are both more familiar with client-side rendering, and also thinking of things being able to share components, reuse existing libraries, and so on. So re-implementing everything with vanilla HTML and forms feels like reinventing the wheel to a team used to an SPA component library, it's not that it's intrinsically harder, it's that they don't have the existing building blocks they'd normally reach for.
Modern frameworks such as Astro allow for a similar development experience (and can optionally use JS, React and other client-side libraries) while still being able to generate a static site if desired.
I think server-side rendering and static site generation are less familiar to many web devs who came up in the React/Vue/Svelte era. The patterns and mental model are just different. In an ideal world we combine both: fast static HTML that works everywhere, with progressive enhancement for interactivity. Astro does this well; Next.js supports it too, though the SSR parts have a learning curve.
Because before there was AI Slop, there was React.
I think Facebook with their money and Vercel with their VC funding tried hard to push the React and then the Next.js everywhere. So it arrived in time for AIs to all train on it. And now it’s the one true way :)
But do we really need all that stuff? Build steps, bundling, tree shaking, all for what? And is it really simpler… hmm
There are some advantages, but the main one is probably that it stops everyone from using NoScript and breaking tracking.
Simpler doesn't mean easier. Consider a chef who at their previous job started using a wood-burning stove. This is an objectively simpler tool than a gas or electric stove, yet it would be very difficult (even impossible, depending on local architecture and regulations) for a new kitchen to add one.
I'm interested to hear what architecture and regulations prevent the use of something that is foundational to web develpment and backwards compatible by design? Which also, by the way, comes with the advantage of not incinerating other parts of the restaurant (accessibility, user experience...), forcing expensive countermeasures or total rebuilds of the things destroyed every time you turn it on.
90% of the SPAs I use could be Django/Rails/Flask apps with no noticeable difference, other than that they'd be many times more responsive on slower devices.
"Old" SSR apps are mature, not obsolete. It's ridiculous when they're not considered even when they'd be the right tool for the job. I wouldn't try to clone Google Docs in Django, but something like Linear could 100% be modeled as a CRUD app with new page loads on click without a substantial loss of functionality from the user's POV. Not to mention built-in, automatic support for pervasive "deep linking", aka "linking", because you access a URL's contents by GETting and rendering that URL is just how it works.
I agree but you and I aren't the audience and I think experts in general should be a little more holistic when critiquing other people's choices. For any given problem there always exists a perspective from which your solution is over-engineered. People who (like us, I presume) understand processes, files, the command line, compilers, a computer language or two, a bit about computation theory (e.g. Turing, big-O, Knuth..) can get to a very broad swath of places along many different (often shorter!) paths. This is not where most people are starting from.
Speaking of Knuth, imagine being asked to "write a program to add two numbers" and using something like Python instead of assembler, or because really that's complex too, machine code. Do you think that the amount of housekeeping and computer activity is justified for adding two numbers? Objectively, it is not, its just that steady-state dominates the transient over time.
I don't understand how having to pay 20 different vendors so hackers can run commands on your server barely impeded is somehow simpler.
The message you just wrote involved how many complex systems, from your keyboard switches and firmware to your BIOS and OS interrupts, to your browser, the internet and middle boxes, just to say one sentence to someone. It would be much simpler (and more secure!) if you just told me with your mouth, but you didn't do that.
Of course, and if you use all these services you can be a pedantic ass who never has to actually ship a product.
As a web dev a lot of this is simply ongoing maintenance of a largely unknown quantity. Most web devs know React and use it extensively; Astro is something they'll have to learn on the job or hire for specifically.
It's akin to writing a backend in Haskell. Chances are you could write something performant that leverages FP in a way that serves as a magic bullet for your domain. But now everyone after you needs to learn Haskell and how to model all future problems in a way that conforms with it - or rewrite things again.
Not a web-dev myself and I was wondering if, apart from unfamiliarity with astro or HTML being treated as unknown technology, it also has to do with having to handle fallback cases, eg the 3 point validation (web component, browser default, server), esp when one is used to have react (libraries) just handling it all without any more considerations.
> Astro is something they'll have to learn on the job or hire for specifically.
Before LLMs I would have agreed.
LLM + framework you don't understand goes in ... unmaintainable garbage comes out.
Before LLMs, learning on the job looked like reading documentation. Now it’s a guided tour with verification. When I produce things in this way, I’m not just blindly accepting it. The goal is that by the end of it I have learned more about the codebase and architecture, not less. I feel that’s important.
Many people don't understand this, even big tech engineers. They see LLMs as a bottleneck. It's more that they don't understand how to use it to multiply their skills, just basics and code gen.
I use multiple Claudes at a time, daily. It's precisely because of that experience that I wrote:
Claude follows code patterns and structure. If you setup that structure and those patterns properly, it will produce great code. If not, it will follow ... whatever it feels like, with each commit.If you just have it built something with a framework you don't understand, it will do so just fine! But over time every "vibe coded" change you make will drift it further and further, until you are left with a mess of vibe-coded spaghetti.
Using it to understand a framework is fine.
I agree that's fine in that at least it's doesn't cause unmaintainable garbage. And might even get you up to speed quicker that reading the docs old school.
But the GP point, that you're better off finding people that already, truly understand and are familiar with the tech (ie. Astro), imo still stands.
We cant all be wise enough to use php.
I read a fun comment the other day from a frustrated windows user who failed to configure linux in previous attempts but now with LLMs it was very easy for him.