[philihp]

For a frontend developer who is younger than jQuery, starting a project following this advice would be a good opportunity to learn why we do the things we do like build steps, and remember how much development sucked before HMR.

I suspect the author hasn't actually done this on a project with more than one person, supporting 99% of browsers in the wild. I also suspect they didn't run their own code, because either my screen is not as tasty, or "onlick" is not an handler of div.

[tonyennis]

Your suspicion is incorrect. Currently running 10 or so codebases with 8 devs using this approach. Thanks for catching the typo

[codeptualize]

Thats great. Show us!! What projects, is it 8 devs per project or total, what was the impact, any downsides?

Nothing is more convincing than real world success stories.

[tonyennis]

Coming soon

[docmars]

Do you find that your team often has to reinvent the wheel in terms of what libraries like React/Vue/Svelte have to offer? Doesn't that increase time and scope tremendously?

[whstl]

I actually find that I often have to reinvent a lot of the browser's wheel when using React and friends, so it's often a wash.

Complete back button support beyond what the router offers, saving search/sort/filter in query string so users can copy/paste/bookmark/back/forward, handling connection and other errors gracefully, loading, accessibility, having to wrap Vanilla JS components into their own framework-compatible components, having to update things in different parts of the screen. And the last often requires a total paradigm change in terms of how data is handled in the app thanks to the introduction of state managers (React-sans-Redux looks totally different from regular React). All those require extra work on every project I worked, and no, libraries often don't solve them completely or as easily as it is with previous backend tech.

These frameworks are also steering a lot of software into some very problematic product decisions. Like using fancy third party components where stylized native would suffice (and be more useable/accessible), using date pickers for absolutely everything that looks like a date (it sucks to type your birthday in those unless you were born this month), saving things in the browser instead of in the backend (so the site looks different in different computers), or just having some specific UI-framework forced on you so you have to use a certain framework.

There are obvious advantages to frontend frameworks, and I'm a big fan of React/Vue/Svelte. I really like those things, been using those for years and I was doing what used to be called "DHTML" since the late 90s. But it takes so much more complexity than the average web app to reap those advantages... IMO they are definitely overused.

[darkerside]

Vue.js has led the way on HTML first in a lot of ways. You can pull it in with no build step, you can add dynamic content to pages without making it a SPA, and it mostly works through overloading HTML attributes for basic use cases.

[codeptualize]

Good old times, I used to have a file watcher that would refresh the page on change using a browser extension, not anywhere near the convenience of HMR though haha.

I do agree with you, it's why I'm skeptical about the results of following this advice. I vividly remember how much things sucked, and obv the web has come a long way, but the tools have gotten even further. If I see how much mileage I get out of the tools I use on the daily, I would not be nearly as productive without them, and produce a lot more buggy, inaccessible, and shitty apps.

[epiccoleman]

> starting a project following this advice would be a good opportunity to learn why we do the things we do like build steps

Honestly, and sarcasm aside, I think this is an incredibly important thing for any new web developer to do.

Trying to learn web development in 2023 (or even in 2014, when I started my career) is so hard, because you're constantly standing on top of the shoulders of giants without even knowing how far you are from the ground.

I started a refresh of my personal site a few months back and resolved to write all the html and css "by hand", vanilla style, as a way of forcing myself to relearn the basics, and it was really refreshing to strip away all the layers of extra stuff and build it with simple tools. And I actually learned a ton of stuff that was useful on a daily basis while I worked on a React project during my day job, stuff that I just had never had to do or learn or use because some framework was always helping me out.

Recently I've been working on a little toy app in Phoenix, and I had the "revelation" that Eex / Phoenix components were slowing me down instead of speeding me up, because I didn't understand the underlying concepts as well as I needed to. As soon as I said "fuck it, I'm writing vanilla html and only using Eex where it's absolutely necessary" I was able to get through a whole host of issues that were giving me friction and actually build what I wanted.

I had a similar experience a few years ago when learning Phoenix. I just didn't get Ecto at all, and the reason was simple - I didn't know SQL and database design. Once I resolved to just figure out how to do the thing I was doing with raw SQL, Ecto immediately made way more sense.

We obviously can't peel back layers of the onion forever, or we'd never get anything done. At some point you have to get comfortable with abstracting away the details. But what I've found in web dev is that the big frameworks are written by people who've done the "vanilla" way so much that they've identified places where things hurt and built solutions that abstract that pain away. That's all well and good when you understand why the abstraction exists and the problem it solves, but it can really be confusing before you've put in the work to gain some of that context.

[iopq]

and this is why that example doesn't work - you find out onclick doesn't work where you thought it would work

whereas you can addEventListener anywhere you want