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0 pointsfreetonik2mo ago0 comments

>If you are writing complex web applications with state, local processing of data and asynchronous interactions it's not enough.

>Next objection usually is: do you need complex apps on the client?

It's not even an objection, it's a question I ask and almost never hear a coherent answer to. The vast majority of web applications I use every day (online banking, github, forums, social media, admin interfaces of various developer tools, etc.) don't really need to be dynamic and frontend-rich. I don't care if submitting a form refreshes the page. Funnily enough, full page refresh with a full round trip with "old school websites" is often faster than dynamic SPA interaction.

I don't care that when I click "delete", the item may not disappear from the screen immediately. I don't want to see some in-between state descriptions like "Deleting..." because I know it's a lie in a distributed, eventually consistent system. Just tell me the truth: the request has been sent. I can then refresh the page and see the new current state, whatever it is.

I really don't understand this desire to make websites behave like local apps while in reality they aren't.

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hombre_fatal2mo ago

> it's a question I ask and almost never hear a coherent answer to.

There are a lot of coherent answers though.

One is that responding with HTML encumbers the server with brittle UI over the wire when it could instead be a simpler API server that any client can talk to.

Returning data instead of UI from the server is a clean separation of concerns.

There's nothing incoherent about that.

lunar_mycroft2mo ago

That's the theory. In practice, if your UI is changing a lot, the data your UI needs is also changing a lot, meaning that your data API will either have a lot of churn or you'll allow a lot of flexibility in how untrusted clients can use it, which introduces it's own pile of issues.

SL612mo ago

> I don't care that when I click "delete", the item may not disappear from the screen immediately.

The disconnect here between tech people and non-tech people is that most users do care about stuff like this.

I run a popular website as a solo project so all the feedback/complaints are routed to me, and one thing I've learned is that users really don't want websites to "feel old". Sure, they want it to be fast, but they also want all the bells and whistles like loading indicators and animations.

If you show Hacker News to someone who's not a developer, especially if they're under 30-35, their reaction to the layout and functionality will be visceral disgust. I really can't stress enough how much modern users hate the traditional plain HTML look. If you're trying to convince users to use your site and it looks or functions anything like HN, they'll get angry and close the tab within seconds to look for an alternative. Even if you've made a SPA with plenty of bells and whistles, users will still get upset if anything feels "clunky", which is often user-speak for "this component needs animations and a transition state". They don't know or care that all the fancy stuff increases the complexity of the codebase.

Every software project hits a point where the super clean abstractions the developers came up with start to clash with the messy way it's used in the real world. This is the frontend version of that. We have no choice but to give users the UX they want.

12_throw_away2mo ago

> I really don't understand this desire to make websites behave like local apps while in reality they aren't.

Since the dawn of time, humans have sought to eliminate mushy laggy UIs, such as having to wait for a full page reload whenever you click a button. I don't like SPAs either, but dunno, I don't find it particularly hard to understand how we got here.

curtisblaine2mo ago

Immediate feedback informs the visual language in order to convey meaning in a easier way to a larger public. You may know what an eventually consistent system is, but many users don't, and they want visual information abstracted to something they can understand. It's reassuring.

Also, not everything can be reduced to static forms. Charts with knobs, drag and drop interfaces, interactive diagrams are all useful visual aids that you would like to erase because... they don't conform with your naive views on how things should look like?

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