Mastodawn

RE: https://toot.cafe/@nolan/115622706069488954

Those of you who are not web devs (good choice) may not quite appreciate what this means.
You know how websites are loads slower now, and don't work without JavaScript? Well, one of the big (dubious) arguments made in favour of this transition was that you download a bunch more code first, but then it'll make everything faster once you're there. It's front loading.
What @slightlyoff has shown is that this is not relevant, because people don't stay on the sites long enough to get the benefit.

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Stuart Langridge Nov 27

as @nolan goes on to say, he is very sceptical that this supposed "benefit" was ever actually true (and I am too), but _even if it is true_, it doesn't _happen_; people get all this front loaded code in the expectation that they'll be hanging around for ages and so it'll be worth it, and then they don't hang around for ages and it wasn't. They get kicked in the teeth up front on the assumption they'll do 100 things, and then they do 1 thing and that's it.

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Michael Carducci Nov 27

@sil I need to show you one of my modern web dev rants.

We’re literally (yes, literally) bootstrapping 4,000,000 LOC for a hello world. I would say that this is peak dumbassery, but somehow people keep finding new ways to shoehorn in more accidental complexity, brittleness, and new ways to break the contract of the web into modern frameworks.

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Stuart Langridge Nov 27

@Michaelcarducci four frigging million lines?? yikes

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Michael Carducci Nov 27

@sil scaffold a blank react app and run tokei on the node-modules dir.

Fundamentally, HTML is not designed for highly interactive web apps.

To quote Roy Fielding:

“Rest is optimized for the common case of the web… large grain hypermedia transfer…”

But fielding also gave us the optional code-on-demand constraint to dynamically extend the hypermedia. This is _not_ how SPA frameworks work, but it is exactly why a little library like htmx are so effective.

https://sufficiently-advanced.technology/post/third-way-web-development-part-i

Third-Way Web Development Part I - History

When I look back on my career in technology, I’ve been seduced, over and over again, by this idea that best practices exist and that I can consider my work “good” so long as I follow those best pra...

Sufficiently Advanced Technology

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James Henstridge Nov 28

@Michaelcarducci @sil That doesn't sound like the right metric to use. It'd be like counting all of the source in libc against a C hello world program, rather than just the bits used to implement printf().

Code present in the node_modules directory that is never sent to the client is not going to affect the page load time. Maybe some of the dependencies could be split into smaller parts, but that isn't cost free either.

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Michael Carducci

@jamesh @sil oh, I admit it’s a deliberately hyperbolic statement. I guess it’s more to express my personal (and inevitable) “old man yells at cloud” frustration.

At one time a web app could be built with an editor and an empty dir. now we need 4M LOC before we write a single line. It’s kinda comical when you think about it.

But the progress is valid, too. We’ve come a long way.

My main frustrations are maintenance overhead and that SPAs are overengineering/overkill in many scenarios.