A handy guide to navigating all the new-fangled JavaScript.
There’s a big difference between the interface to a thing being one line of code, and the cost of a thing being one line of code.
A more acute rendering of this sales pitch is probaly: “It’s just one line of code to add many more lines of code.”
And as Chris puts it:
Every dependency is a potential vulnerability
It me:
Broadly, these are websites which are still web pages, not web applications; they’re pages of essentially static information, personal websites, blogs, and so on, but they are slightly dynamic. They might have a style selector at the top of each page, causing a cookie to be set, and the server to serve a different stylesheet on every subsequent page load.
This rings sadly true to me:
Suppose a company makes a webpage for looking up products by their model number. If this page were made in 2005, it would probably be a single PHP page. It doesn’t need a framework — it’s one SELECT query, that’s it. If this page were made in 2022, a conundrum will be faced: the company probably chose to use a statically generated website. The total number of products isn’t too large, so instead their developers stuff a gigantic JSON file of model numbers for every product made by the company on the website and add some client-side JavaScript to download and query it. This increases download sizes and makes things slower, but at least you didn’t have to spin up and maintain a new application server. This example is fictitious but I believe it to be representative.
Also, I never thought about “serverless” like this:
Recently we’ve seen the rise in popularity of AWS Lambda, a “functions as a service” provider. From my perspective this is literally a reinvention of CGI, except a) much more complicated for essentially the same functionality, b) with vendor lock-in, c) with a much more complex and bespoke deployment process which requires the use of special tools.
This is a great case study of switching from a framework mindset to native browser technologies.
Though this is quite specific to Jack’s own situation, I do feel like there’s something in the air here. The native browser features are now powerful and stable enough to make the framework approach feel outdated.
And if you do want to use third-party dependencies, Jack makes a great case for choosing smaller single-responsibility helpers rather than monolithic frameworks.
Replacing lit-html would be an undertaking but much less so than replacing React: it’s used in our codebase purely for having our components (re)-render HTML. Replacing lit-html would still mean that we can keep our business logic, ultimately maintaining the value they provide to end-users. Lit-Html is one small Lego brick in our system, React (or Angular, or similar) is the entire box.
Robin adds a long-zoom perspective on my recent post:
I am extremely confident that pretty much any HTML I write today will render the same way in 50 years’ time. How confident am I that my CSS will work correctly? Mmmm…70%. Hand-written JavaScript? Way less, maybe 50%. A third-party service I install on a website or link to? 0% confident. Heck, I’m doubtful that any third-party service will survive until next year, let alone 50 years from now.
Another thoughtful reponse to my recent post.
Reflections on native browser features and third-party library adoption.
Responses to my thoughts on why developers would trust third-party code more than a native browser feature.
I’m trying to understand why developers would trust third-party code more than a native browser feature.
Abstracting common interaction patterns as a starting point for accessible components.
An interface pattern for Ajax interactions that’s borrowed from video games.
Kicking the tyres on a declarative Web Share API.