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by danabramov
2718 days ago
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I think this page is written for that exact use case! https://reactjs.org/docs/add-react-to-a-website.html And it’s linked to from the other pages you mention with a disclaimer that a simple HTML page is still the best way to get started. Sure, you can ignore that, but what can we do. But whether we like it or not, plenty of people want to kick off a single-page app with a whole toolchain rather than just “try React”. Earlier docs that you fondly remember didn’t help with that at all, leading to a lot of frustration. Some people will be unhappy with either approach. That’s why the docs include instructions for both. |
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I understand that this is what the React team think. I am trying to explain that that page (and the other "getting started" level material on the current React site) is not necessarily working very well.
Maybe we're unusual, but among my professional network the overwhelming majority of React users do so with what now seems to be considered a custom tool chain, even if it's just "Bundler + Babel plugin for JSX". The first question everyone asks when they want to try out React, like any other new JS library or tool, is what they need to npm-install or yarn-install to get a minimal example going. And this information has now been hidden away several layers deep on the React site, as if it's an unusual use case.
Loading scripts from CDNs is fine for a very early experiment but quickly outgrown in production environments. There is create-react-app, but most people I know are sceptical about such tools and in any case it's debatable whether you want to start with scaffolding/framework tools if you're learning a new library for the first time and want to understand how it fits into everything else you're doing.
In short, the current site (and your reply here) seem to be predicated on a false dichotomy. Presumably you have access to better metrics than I do as a random individual and you know that most people really do fall into one of those two groups. All I can tell you is that almost no-one I know does, including those I have introduced to React myself in recent times.
Maybe it's just the curse of the modern JS world that everyone feels obligated to try to show how their individual tool or library works with 500 different other tools and libraries. Even so, there's probably a reason that almost every modern JS library's home page seems to have a screenshot with the words "npm install" in it above the fold.