As I pick apart yet another bundle not unlike a tangled ball of Christmas tree lights, it’s become clear that the web is drunk on JavaScript. We reach for it for almost everything, even when the occasion doesn’t call for it. Sometimes I wonder how vicious the hangover will be.
I love everything about this article and I can’t wait for part two.
What we tend to forget is that the environment websites and web apps occupy is one and the same. Both are subject to the same environmental pressures that the large gradient of networks and devices impose. Those constraints don’t suddenly vanish when we decide to call what we build “apps”, nor do our users’ phones gain magical new powers when we do so.
Needless to say, I endorse this message:
Whether you think of your site as an “app” or not, adding a service worker to it is perhaps one of the most responsible uses of JavaScript that exists today.
You might not need (much) JavaScript for these common interface patterns.
While we all love the power and flexibility JS provides, we should also respect it, and our users, by limiting its use to only what it needs to do.
Yes! Client-side JavaScript should do what only client-side JavaScript can do.
This is a spot-on analysis of how CSS-in-JS failed to deliver on any of its promises:
CSS-in-JS was born out of good intentions — modularity, predictability and componentization. But what we got was complexity disguised as progress.
So instead of asking yourself, “How can I write code that does what I want?” Consider asking yourself, “Can I write code that ties together things the browser already does to accomplish what I want (or close enough to it)?”
It seems like the misguided perception of needing to use complex tools and frameworks to build a website comes from a thinking that web browsers are inherently limited. When, in fact, browsers have evolved to a tremendous degree
Why single-page apps are just not worth it:
Here’s the problem: your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript.
Meanwhile, the browser marches on, improving the UX of every website that uses basic HTML semantics. For instance: browsers often don’t repaint full pages anymore.
In which I find a tagline for Web Day Out and a tagline for React.
How I switched to high-resolution maps on The Session without degrading performance.
Fear of a third-party planet.
The enshittification of React …which was already pretty shitty for users.
Embedding YouTube videos without sacrificing performance.