Tom MorrisJul 6, 2023

This is view source on the Threads homepage. Modern front end development is beyond satire at this point. In desktop Firefox with out-of-the-box uBlock Origin, it renders a completely black page.

At some point, people will rediscover the unfashionable idea that plain old HTML is pretty good if your goal is publishing bits of text on the internet. Maybe after that, if they want to make it look nice, they could look into these exciting new Cascading Style Sheets we hear so much about.

Show threadPranay MartinJul 6, 2023
@tommorris politely going to pushback against the arguably eye-catching FUD: this is not “modern”; this is industrial. Modern frameworks like Astro see this problem and are doubling down on no-JS / low-JS by default. Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are obvious targets but I know vanishingly few leaders in the space would consider them paragons of web development.
Show threadHeather BuchelJul 8, 2023
@jpmartin @tommorris I keep thinking about this post and how React feels so much like the large corporate legacy code you can't wait to get away from after work when you can finally work on the "fun" stuff.
Show threadKegan Myers
@hbuchel @jpmartin @tommorris I used to love react (and even redux) for development when it was fairly immature, and you didn't have as much of an overbearing crush of supporting infrastructure (though TBF bundle size has always been a struggle in that ecosystem). It was certainly a damn sight better than Angular (which I never really liked) and jQuery.

I moved on to Next (react-based) and loved how simple it made a lot of things and some of the performance gains you got super easily. I moved on to Remix (also react-based) and loved how easy it made true progressive apps that could (mostly) work with no JS at all.

Now I am on to Svelte, and am loving how it gives me all of those benefits and is super tiny and fast at the same time. Until I heard about Svelte I kept saying that I hadn't seen anything better than React, if React was done right, which it often wasn't.

Every time it has seemed like the JS ecosystem was settling down something better has just had to come along and show us how bad that approach actually was. Maybe web 1.0 was closer to having it right. At least those pages still work and don't suck near as much as "modern"/"corporate" stuff. I see a lot of the ideals of it making their way back in to the newer things that actually get me excited enough to bother learning about them.
Jul 8, 2023 at 5:24amWeb
Show threadHeather BuchelJul 8, 2023
@terribleplan @jpmartin @tommorris This was nearly my exact progression as well! It's kind of a breathe of fresh air stepping back from it. I've also really enjoyed Svelte on a little side project of mine.