<story><title>The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ratww</author><text>As someone involved in hiring, this is what Bootcamps and Universities are teaching, and what companies are looking for: backend spits JSON, frontend consumes it using React.&lt;p&gt;Rendering HTML on the server is not really &amp;quot;the default&amp;quot; anymore as it was 10 year ago: it&amp;#x27;s more of an optimization for when your React site is slow, and it&amp;#x27;s a black box to most people. Even static websites are &amp;quot;strange tech&amp;quot; to new graduates outside the HN bubble.&lt;p&gt;Also, developers hate mixing tech. You mentioned an &amp;quot;interactive map&amp;quot; in your example. This can be made with React or something like that, right? The issue is that a lot of developers will want to use React for everything else on the page, because they think it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;icky&amp;quot; to use other kinds of tech in other parts of the website. They sorta have a point (the &amp;quot;microfrontends&amp;quot; discussion was a thing a couple years ago), but on the other hand they&amp;#x27;re not considering the tradeoffs.&lt;p&gt;Also, the frontend is officially the centre of the application on medium sized companies (50+ devs). It&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;way&lt;/i&gt; easier to add new code to the frontend and spin another microservice than to coordinate between multiple teams of backend engineers.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not saying this is good or bad, btw. It&amp;#x27;s just how it is.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: One thing that really bothers me that people fresh in the industry don&amp;#x27;t really believe that websites were faster 10 or 20 years ago, so I don&amp;#x27;t really see any light at the end of the tunnel. Sure we can do new things on the web, but what was already possible before has been made slower by our collective refusal to &amp;quot;use the right tool for the job&amp;quot;. Even the frontend tooling today is very heavy and slow, and I&amp;#x27;m in a 2020 MBP. I don&amp;#x27;t think we progressed much. React is an amazing idea (and the implementation is great), but the community has become too dogmatic.</text></item><item><author>apabepa</author><text>I am not a front-end developer but looking at it from a distance I really don&amp;#x27;t get modern web design. Sure some sites might need fancy javascript single page features, like if your webpage is an interactive map or realtime game, but most sites are just text and some pictures. Whats with all the javascript? Your site looks just like the next one anyway! It feels like an &amp;quot;Emperor&amp;#x27;s New Clothes&amp;quot; situation or maybe more likely I just don&amp;#x27;t understand the allure as an clueless user.. I am almost tempted to make a webpage to see what the big fuss is about!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>michaelpb</author><text>A few years ago when teaching at a previous coding bootcamp that started with FE JavaScript, I remember my surprise when well-performing students got through 3 months or so of it and were confused and very impressed when I showed them how an &amp;lt;a&amp;gt; tag worked, since they had only been aware of (jQuery) JavaScript powered pages. When you are stuck just doing JS powered SPAs, an &amp;lt;a&amp;gt; tag seems like advanced technology!&lt;p&gt;I ended up at a new school creating a new curriculum. This approach is where we &amp;quot;recapitulate the evolution of  the web&amp;quot;, so we start with SSGs &amp;amp; server-side programming (Python&amp;#x2F;Django), then only at the end cover SPAs and React.JS -- since, as you mentioned, that&amp;#x27;s still the main skillset that companies are new devs for.</text></comment>
<story><title>The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ratww</author><text>As someone involved in hiring, this is what Bootcamps and Universities are teaching, and what companies are looking for: backend spits JSON, frontend consumes it using React.&lt;p&gt;Rendering HTML on the server is not really &amp;quot;the default&amp;quot; anymore as it was 10 year ago: it&amp;#x27;s more of an optimization for when your React site is slow, and it&amp;#x27;s a black box to most people. Even static websites are &amp;quot;strange tech&amp;quot; to new graduates outside the HN bubble.&lt;p&gt;Also, developers hate mixing tech. You mentioned an &amp;quot;interactive map&amp;quot; in your example. This can be made with React or something like that, right? The issue is that a lot of developers will want to use React for everything else on the page, because they think it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;icky&amp;quot; to use other kinds of tech in other parts of the website. They sorta have a point (the &amp;quot;microfrontends&amp;quot; discussion was a thing a couple years ago), but on the other hand they&amp;#x27;re not considering the tradeoffs.&lt;p&gt;Also, the frontend is officially the centre of the application on medium sized companies (50+ devs). It&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;way&lt;/i&gt; easier to add new code to the frontend and spin another microservice than to coordinate between multiple teams of backend engineers.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not saying this is good or bad, btw. It&amp;#x27;s just how it is.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: One thing that really bothers me that people fresh in the industry don&amp;#x27;t really believe that websites were faster 10 or 20 years ago, so I don&amp;#x27;t really see any light at the end of the tunnel. Sure we can do new things on the web, but what was already possible before has been made slower by our collective refusal to &amp;quot;use the right tool for the job&amp;quot;. Even the frontend tooling today is very heavy and slow, and I&amp;#x27;m in a 2020 MBP. I don&amp;#x27;t think we progressed much. React is an amazing idea (and the implementation is great), but the community has become too dogmatic.</text></item><item><author>apabepa</author><text>I am not a front-end developer but looking at it from a distance I really don&amp;#x27;t get modern web design. Sure some sites might need fancy javascript single page features, like if your webpage is an interactive map or realtime game, but most sites are just text and some pictures. Whats with all the javascript? Your site looks just like the next one anyway! It feels like an &amp;quot;Emperor&amp;#x27;s New Clothes&amp;quot; situation or maybe more likely I just don&amp;#x27;t understand the allure as an clueless user.. I am almost tempted to make a webpage to see what the big fuss is about!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SulfurHexaFluri</author><text>&amp;gt;The issue is that a lot of developers will want to use React for everything else on the page, because they think it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;icky&amp;quot; to use other kinds of tech in other parts of the website.&lt;p&gt;It is though. I work on an app thats 80% react and 20% rails SSR and when working on anything, seeing that an area that needs change is written with SSR makes the job 10x harder as you have to come up with alternative methods to get it working or just rewrite it in react. When everything is react everything is quite easy and you can pass around data and update things without a refresh easily.</text></comment>