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by mgomez 1453 days ago
The "Why Vite?" button on the homepage is fairly "front and center" to me and is only a single click away: https://main.vitejs.dev/guide/why
2 comments

It's still not concise enough. It's a long article you have to read to figure out what you are reading about.

"WTF IS IT?" is an endemic problem with marketing and startups.

Marketing is a skill, that many people in marketing so often don't have, and lot of leaders fail to grasp. It's so sad.

Imagine losing 1/2 of your potential uptake because of poor choice of words.

I think is more of an indictment on the javascript ecosystem generally, because there's so much more to building an app that runs JS than just your standard MVC/MVVM/pick-your-pattern web frameworks.

You have to deal with various layers of transpilation on your JS, styles and assets and that all needs to be flexible enough to fit a wide set of use cases for the community. It's gotten to the point you need to be an expert in all of the different ways you can bundle and deploy a JS app in order for the jargon associated with these tools to make any sense.

You're right that JS is a mess, but this is not a JS problem, it's a tech problem.

I see it over, over and over again.

I see young people pitching their tech and I have no f*ing clue what they are talking about.

I would say >50% of web sites don't do a very good job of explaining anything.

Vercel is one of the worst offenders.

I see the same issue with libraries and frameworks in any language. For example, I came across Dark Lang [1] yesterday, and the front page is similarly cryptic if you aren't familiar with back end work.

[1]: https://darklang.com/

Hilariously I came across that one as well as a good 'WTF' example.

That said - I feel for some of these dudes just wanting to make a framework, struggling a bit with the 'communication' part.

The front page is right there and could've included the copy "Next generation replacement for Webpack" and I would've known exactly what it's for.

Literally one sentence.

It's not really a correct sentence though
Isn't it? I use it and it's not clear to me what's incorrect about it.
It's too imprecise:

- People might interpret that as "drop-in replacement for webpack", which is definitely not true

- Even as just "a replacement for webpack"; Webpack and Vite have a lot of overlap, and it makes sense to compare them, but I think there are too many asterisks and nuances to say they're equivalent, in official materials, unqualified

Rather imprecise then have people confused of what it does - especially when the confusion could be fixed by a sentence.

Just have a hyper link that directions to a comparison page explaining the nuance. Even without the hyperlink I wouldn’t assume people would think it’s a 1:1 clone drop in replacement. People don’t just drop in a new tool without research and comparing it against their new tool.

An 80% true statement that sets the tone followed by a deeper explanation is fine. What is currently there tells us 0% about what Vite does.