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by FireInsight 978 days ago
I find that most these sorts of projects are for people just toying around or who have an irrational hatred of the JS ecosystem... Ultimately they lock devs into a tight, less supported ecosystem, and they might end up writing some parts in the languages native to the web anyways. And I mean, the page doesn't even load for me on my browser, just stuck at 0%. What kind of documentation page even needs a progressbar, just use a static page, right?

Edit: for what it's worth, I gave this a second chance with raw Chromium. Loaded up to 400%, heh, but tbf the page does have product examples for seemingly useful products.
2 comments
jeroenhd 978 days ago
Loads just fine in my browser. I wonder what's causing this to fail for so many people. If I hold down F5, I do see the progress bar rise to 484%, but it loads in a flash for me. Maybe it's a bandwidth issue? The 4.5MB WASM file could've overwhelmed the website when it got slashdotted by the (many bots crawling the) HN front page.

These projects make a lot of sense, I think. You only write one system, not a separate frontend and backend, and let the middleware sort everything out.

The code rendering the plain HTML is the same code that re-renders the entire page when you switch to another page, without necessarily re-fetching data from the backend.

This is terrible for websites (ironically, like this website, which documents the framework), but great for web applications. Most native browser navigation is pretty jarring unless you add a bunch of javascript to hide navigation taking place, but if that frontend expands, you're pretty quickly building two systems (a frontend and a backend) to solve one problem.

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jackson1442 978 days ago
The progress bar is (presumably) for PWA installation, it really shouldn't be showing beyond the first load (yet it is, lol). Ideally it should just do the install in the background while you use the site normally, too. It's a shame the offline functionality of the doc site just _isn't very good_ even though documentation is one of the easiest types of application to serve offline.

The page _does load_ offline, but several pages are showing markdown render errors (may just be unvisited pages), images are generally missing and showing alt-text instead, etc.

I'd say offline access is the killer feature of PWA as documentation, but it's just not executed well enough here.

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