Alex RussellNov 30, 2024

I've come to understand what's happening in frontend's decade-long failure to deliver decent user experiences as a sort of epistemic closure. I'm calling it "frameworkism", and the epicenter is now React.

Here's a lot of words on why we should all reject it, and what the post-React world should look like:

https://infrequently.org/2024/11/if-not-react-then-what/

If Not React, Then What?

Frameworkism is now the dominant creed of today's frontend discourse, and it's bullshit. We owe it to ourselves and to our users to reject dogma and embrace engineering as a discipline that strives to serve users first and foremost.

Alex Russell
Show threadBen
@slightlyoff One thing I've been struggling with at Etsy is that while Preact is a fantastic solution if you want to use React syntax but want to shave some KB, over time, our JS bundles have still *significantly* bloated from all of the JSX and clientside logic. Several years after @ksylor introduced "islands", I've had to introduce the term "continents" to describe when people are building full-page "islands" that often completely fail SSR and wind up in a "worst of both worlds" situation.
Dec 1, 2024 at 5:17pmWeb
Show threadBenDec 1, 2024
@slightlyoff @ksylor Saving a ton of KB off of your initial payload by using Preact is great, but if you're shipping hundreds of KB of gzipped JSX for each page, the bundle size win eventually becomes relatively minimal. And now we've gained a culture of building "highly interactive" functionality with Preact... but the highly interactive stuff is often just forms with fancy interactions and animations. Mostly it seems like our eng just desperately don't want to use PHP & Mustache templates.
Show threadAlex RussellDec 1, 2024
@sangster @ksylor The original library switch isn't the whole game, as you say. It's a chance to change the mindset, start to take client bytes seriously, etc.