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by MatthewPhillips 2288 days ago
This is a bad idea. If you look at the list of advantages to doing this only 1 is user-centric (things would be reactive). The rest are all related to how it makes development easier. When you choose a developer-centric workflow your users will suffer.

You only have to look at the numerous server to SPA conversions to see how consistently bad of a choice this tends to be; Reddit is a big and obvious example.

They could take a half-measure and move away from the brittle jQuery based front-end they are currently using by adapting those to use something like Preact, while leaving the rest of the page alone. This would give you more dynamic and more maintainable page widgets without the sacrifices that inevitably occur when you move the entire site to being front-end rendered.
2 comments
EvanYou 2288 days ago
Who said they are going to make the entire page SPA? They picked Vue specifically because Vue allows them to progressively enhance parts of the page with interactivity without going full SPA (AND without hard reliance on a build step).
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MatthewPhillips 2288 days ago
They listed SPA capabilities as a requirement when choosing a framework.

Every framework allows only rendering to part of the screen, but all of them also allow and encourage the building of SPAs, including Vue. Building SPAs is the overwhelming norm when using any of these frameworks.

If they are bucking the trend here, that's great, I encouraged using a declarative library for the truly dynamic parts in my above post. However this post contains a lot of red flags such as the term "Server-Side Rendering" that are unnecessary if using it not for a SPA. So it's worth pointing out the risk.

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brabel 2288 days ago
It's not just a bad idea... it's a horrible, dangerous idea. All of their points can be easily addressed with a static site generator or just some CMS that lets you write pages using templates instead of just pure HTML. That's absolutely declarative, a lot more than a JS-framework based app. The only point that would be missing is the reactive part as you mention: but who the hell expects a wiki to be reactive?! I expect it to be as close as possible to the printed version! A Wiki is NOT a web app!
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otterlicious 2288 days ago
> a static site generator

You really think 140,000 people are going to learn git all of a sudden?

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Fnoord 2288 days ago
Learning Git (there are GUIs for it as well) can aid one in so many additional ways though.
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