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1. Luci for Chai Tea (zens@merveilles.town)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Jan-2023 08:46:52 JST Luci for Chai Tea

   i don’t necessarily hate react.js in *principle* but why the heck is it used for *everything*, and mostly stuff that plain static templates would be fine for?
   it’s like owning and maintaining a passenger plane to go to the grocery store and back

   • Luci for Chai Tea (zens@merveilles.town)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Jan-2023 08:53:23 JST Luci for Chai Tea

     in reply to

     in short, react.js is a framework for building facebook; and whatever your sociocultural feelings on it, facebook has a vastly complex front end that required react.js to make it work at all.

     the mastodon and twitter front ends are complex enough to need react or something like it too- notifications, threads, live updating feeds, all interlinked…the expectation that notification count matches the number of notifications for instance…

     but why news articles?

   • Luci for Chai Tea (zens@merveilles.town)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Jan-2023 08:53:24 JST Luci for Chai Tea

     in reply to

     usually the rationale is “well, we have decided we need this passenger plane anyway, might as well use it to get groceries”

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
   • Luci for Chai Tea (zens@merveilles.town)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Jan-2023 08:53:25 JST Luci for Chai Tea

     in reply to

     using it to render articles that are published once and rarely edited strikes me as the anti-usecase

   • Luci for Chai Tea (zens@merveilles.town)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Jan-2023 08:53:26 JST Luci for Chai Tea

     in reply to

     i understood it to be for situations where your underlying data model is so interlinked, rapidly changing and prone to inconsistency that just hitting refresh on your browser now and then isn’t good enough anymore

   • meduz' (meduz@m.nintendojo.fr)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Jan-2023 10:48:55 JST meduz'

     in reply to

     @zens Back to news content: even without React, they would still load a shitton of JS through ads, uncompliant consent banners and whatever marketing techniques leading to bloated websites.

     So at the end, when developers can do something performant, it only serves the 10-30% of users having an adblocker. And I’m all-in to say it’s a number of persons big enough to give them the best, but power dynamics and/or lack of skills are giving us the web we have today.

   • meduz' (meduz@m.nintendojo.fr)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Jan-2023 10:48:57 JST meduz'

     in reply to

     @zens I agree with you that most features of content website shouldn’t be implemented using a framework such as React/Vue/Angular.

     But I disagree they are good for Facebook or Twitter: these companies can afford top developers able to do high performance web apps, and these frameworks are not fast enough for such heavy SPAs. As far as I remember, the use of React is marginal at Facebook since a couple of years. And Twitter for web has always been slow on phones.

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.