[helsinkiandrew]

> The use of React complicates front-end build. We have very talented front-end developers, however, they are not React experts - nor should they need to be. > I believe front-end should be built as standards-compliant HTML/CSS with JavaScript used to enrich functionality where necessary and appropriate.

This is what worries me about React (and with other front end frameworks in general). I'm writing this as someone who choose Vue for their latest project.

Web pages started off being documents - electronic versions of printed typeset pages - and could often look very beautiful. A lot of React pages seem, to me, to look like a collection of components - like modern versions of VB forms - facebook/twitter spring to mind etc.

There are a lot of very good HTML and CSS 'coders' that aren't developers, they come from more of a design background. Are they being disenfranchised by the modern frameworks? Will we end up making the web look less beautiful?

[prox]

I use Wordpress extensively and I find the whole Gutenberg switch to be absolutely atrocious. From the design to the technical implementation.

And it is also received as such. The classic editor has been downloaded millions of times.

What worries me most is that the developers haven’t responded one bit to these issues (if I read the relevant issues) and it solves no problems. It feels a lot like the technology du jour was picked and molded in a preconceived idea of a page builder. Forgoing a lot of that professional page builder plugins do great and much better already.

So the absolutely silence on these criticisms is what worries me most.

And yes, using react feels like a bad fit, it creates another layer where none needs to be, like the article stresses.

[chiefalchemist]

True story: I opened a couple issue tickets on Github for Gutenberg. Both very real and legit. To say the reactions from that team were hostile is an understatement. I've since promised myself to not try to help. It's not worth it.

[LordAtlas]

Because Matt Mullenweg's ego trumps all design considerations.

[inglor_cz]

I have a self-hosted blog with Wordpress and the change from classic editor to Gutenberg was like re-educating yourself to writing with your weak hand. Yuck.

In the meantime, I got used to it, because I did not want to fight the development direction that was seemingly set in stone. And, to be just, Gutenberg got better. Nowadays you can pull most things off in it without thinking twice.

But once you start horsing around with something untypical in mind, woe is you.

[prox]

Before Wordpress my go to CMS was Drupal, but it suffered from the same problems. It took 3 years to even port the most standard and most used plugins to the new version.

I think its a bad sign if there is such a massive opposition to the direction and it is disregarded completely.

And like you said, once you start using atypical situations, it becomes a unnecessary complicated affair. Luckily you can dismiss Gutenberg, thats the only upside.

[zelphirkalt]

If WP ever (probably not) gets away from the "everything is a post" approach, none of the gazillion plugins will ever work again. WP only gives you things, if you use its classes, so the tendency of its users is to make everything a post, but a post is (surprisingly ha!) not the correct abstraction for everything. It is in fact a very bad design.

Many of the often touted so high number of users of WP are however, rather casual want to host a blog kind of users, who really don't need much more than posts and plugins, which take care of implementing stuff on an unfitting abstraction, ehich remains invisible to the casual user.

[noahtallen]

I think this is an easy misconception to get from the article. But react is just used for instances of the editor inside of WordPress admin because editors are extraordinarily dynamic and interactive. I would suggest that editors are one of the best examples of things that should be SPAs!

Any “front end” HTML is generated via PHP. No relation to react :) indeed, most of the accessibility issues with WordPress are in gutenberg itself, not the front end content. (When I say front end, I mean stuff you would see browsing the site as a normal user.)

> are they being disenfranchised by the modern frameworks?

Though this isn’t exactly your point, this is brought up a lot in relation to gutenberg. The reason gutenberg needs something like react is because it needs to be a lot more powerful than a simple text form. And it needs to be a lot more powerful because many WordPress users struggled to accomplish anything other than basic text formatting in the classic editor. Gutenberg is moving a lot of disparate concepts under the same roof now, and it provides / will provide a uniform, standard way for editing many parts of your site.

While yes, this is a technology shift for developers (you need to be a lot more comfortable with JS to build tools for the editor), it’s still a big win for users who aren’t developers as they can accomplish much more with less effort and knowledge. Sure, some things might be a little more effort now than they were previously due to rough spots in the experience, but overall it unlocks a lot more functionality in the long run.

[uryga]

> Gutenberg is moving a lot of disparate concepts under the same roof now, and it provides / will provide a uniform, standard way for editing many parts of your site.

yeah, and i hope it'll make the myriad mutually-incompatible page builder plugins die out. yuck. [1]

i'm a bit torn about GB... the goal of allowing tree-ish structures that map to nested DOM elements is great (and something TinyMCE, the old editor, didn't really allow). but the editor needs work. right now, it simultaneously goes too far (everything is a block => editing simple linear text is annoying) and not far enough (editing nodes and moving them around still feels clunky).

and i wish they'd gone with "everything is a node" instead. right now, inline elements are very much second-class citizens – they have to be "formats" within a RichText, a separate non-block thing [2]. they work fine for bold, italics and even links, but they're much more limited than blocks (can't remember specifics now though)

---

[1] if i sound bitter... i am, having had to untangle messes people made with some weird page builder thingy and work with themes that come with their own bespoke page builders (!)

[2] seriously, npmjs.com/@wordpress/rich-text is a package independent from Gutenberg (though it lives in the same monorepo)

[mattkevan]

Yes, basically.

Modern frameworks like React are powerful, but complicated enough to put them way out of reach of anyone not a developer.

The high and low-ends of web frameworks seems to be splitting further apart - complicated but powerful, or simple but restricted like Squarespace.

There’s a lot of talk here and other places about how the modern web is boring and it’s become a monoculture, but there’s not a lot of talk about how it’s become so much harder for a non-coder, or at least a committed amateur to make powerful websites themselves.

[7952]

I wonder if you could blend the two approaches. Let people think in terms of documents that feel static. But wrap them in a navigation system that benefits from components.

The trend is always to make every element of a document a component which is great for technical efficiency but removes a lot of flexibility. A document is still a good abstraction.