[tabacitu]

Why? Why does it need to be good for big projects in order to be good practice?

I’m genuinely asking. I never understood this argument that people bring.

In my view, the web is 95% small to medium projects. Most technologies should be focused on that - simple solutions for simple projectS. Add complexity later.

[xgb84j]

Because in practice there is little value in making easier things easier. While 95% on the web are small projects, 95% of work is done on large projects.

Many developers also dislike using many different frameworks, because that would require more learning. If you have to choose one technology it's better to use one where you can do everything. Not one where you can do 95% really fast, but 5% not at all.

I personally always use "complex" frameworks like Angular or React because sooner or later feature requests come in, where those frameworks pay off. On average it saves time for me to always use those frameworks. That might be different for you depending on the work you do.

[squidbeak]

Do you have any data to support that 95% claim? As big as FAANG and other huge development teams are, it seems to me it's still only the tip of the pyramid, with the overwhelming majority of people in the industry working full time on small or midsized projects. It'd be interesting to see some concrete info on it.

[xgb84j]

The point where frameworks like Angular and React pay off and what I think of as complex projects are those where there is a some nontrivial feature. This coukd be a project with 1 developer working on it for 6 months.

For example a static page with a booking process with various entry points on the website, which slightly change the booking logic. Also you can book as a new user, as a logged in user, for somebody else etc. Also the logic is changing at regular intervals, because the business owner is trying different things out.

Using Angular with reactive forms makes this easier to develop, maintain and hand off to other Angular devs.

While it makes writing the static parts of the website more complicated, it makes developing the booking process easier. And overly complicated business processes are what is mentally challenging for me. This is where I want all the help I can get. Writing static pages is something I can do in any framework even when I am tired. Making this part easier or reducing boilerplate is nice but doesn't make me much happier. Being able to build ridiculously complicated forms without my head exploding does :) Of course if you work on projects with relatively straight forward requirements there is 0 advantage in using Angular or React for you. It always depends on the type of work you do.

[listenallyall]

> a booking process with various entry points on the website, which slightly change the booking logic. Also you can book as a new user, as a logged in user, for somebody else etc. Also the logic is changing at regular intervals

The more complex the business logic, and the more options there are, and the more it is expected to change, the more it benefits the development team to write that code in their language of choice on the backend, close to the data store(s), using native classes/objects -- rather than being forced to write it in JS/TS, serialize everything to/from JSON, reliant on magic under the hood to lay it out in the DOM, with more and more "state" necessary to be managed client-side.

[_gabe_]

> the more it benefits the development team to write that code in their language of choice on the backend

Why?

TS is maintainable and very pleasant to code in. Most people’s computers are way faster than making round trips to a server. You talk about serializing everything to/from JSON, but my phone can do that in milliseconds (if not faster). Compare that to 100-200ms of latency between a faraway server, and all of a sudden doing things client side makes sense.

Engineering is all about tradeoffs. I’m tired of people trying to make blanket statements like “React is always better”, or “SSR is always better”. It’s not, and we know it’s not. There are several successful, performant, maintainable apps written using React. There are plenty written using a backend framework and SSR too. Heck, there’s successes that use both!

The common denominators in the success stories? Competent engineers. And I expect a competent engineer can analyze requirements and determine what would be the best outcome for their target users. A booking site absolutely benefits from a front end framework that handles client side logic. It probably also benefits from a clever backend for processing the data after the user is finished with it. Let’s not pretend there’s a one sized solution that fits everything, because there isn’t.

[porker]

> Why?

A tangential answer (focusing on backend not language) is because I'm (we're) going to have to reproduce much of the fronted complexity of the business logic on the backend to validate what the frontend sends.

I'm mostly agreeing with you. I've built multiple web-platformed insurance systems and booking systems in the last decade and moved from fully server rendered pages to client rendered forms. The complexity increased with that change but as you highlight once it's done the ability to test different frontend flows is great.

But I'd like a way to share more of the business logic rather than writing it twice.

[listenallyall]

> Compare that to 100-200ms of latency between a faraway server

A complex booking engine like an airline or Stubhub needs constant, almost real-time connectivity with a database, otherwise you risk selling product at a stale price, double-selling, selling to an unauthenticated person, getting taxes and fees wrong, missing custom post-sale add-on opportunities, and lots of other potential problems. The client has to make a lot of network calls, so you're going to deal with latency, there's no client-side solution that avoids it without risking the issues above.

[josephg]

I suspect even at Google a lot more than 5% of effort goes into small to midsized projects. Bazel, ninja, protobuf, grpc, the API documentation website for Gmail, VP9, the Google transcode api, takeout, various corp network tools & services and so on.

The big projects are of course important. But even chrome needs a simple little website with a download link.

[xgb84j]

That's a good point. I personally always like Angular and React, because even with most simple projects there is this one feature that is so ridiculously complicated that making it slightly easier to develop and maintain is important to me. I'll gladly write thousands of lines of boilerplate just so I make it easier for me to succeed in developing this one endboss feature. If you do not have at least this one insane feature, Angular and React are definitely overkill.

[marcus_holmes]

I always see this as a communication/management failure.

Product folks come up with features. They have no idea how hard those features are to implement. Which in a way is a blessing; they'll come up with the best features if they don't have to consider the implementation details. But because there are always trade-offs in implementation they also don't understand those.

A feature that is super difficult to implement, and that therefore has trade-offs on speed, maintainability, etc, should be communicated back to the product folks. If you have to move to a framework just to implement this one feature, then that is either because this one feature is really badly or over-designed, or that one feature is absolutely critical to the entire site, which is stupidly rare and again a symptom that someone hasn't really thought this through enough.

The failure in communication is usually "you're just the nerd pushing the nerd buttons, you don't have valid opinions on product design" which is a cause of so, so many problems in our industry.

[Karrot_Kream]

> The failure in communication is usually "you're just the nerd pushing the nerd buttons, you don't have valid opinions on product design" which is a cause of so, so many problems in our industry.

But are they that wrong? We compute to, well, do things with our lives. To find out how to go places, to pay bills, to talk with friends, to meet with people, to learn about things. A view that computation should come with technical (e.g. tech bloat) limitations in mind feels important only to technical people and not to actual computing.

[andybak]

The "big" projects can do what the hell they want. They can afford to throw a ton of money at a problem.

The small projects are where the people I care about are struggling.

[MrJohz]

Are people really struggling at that level, though? It has never been easier to write a complex page with minimal Javascript - there are more and more HTML elements that do what you expect (expandos and modals as some recent examples), Javascript is cleaner and more consistent across browsers (you really don't need jQuery anymore), and CSS is more powerful but also so much simpler (flex+grid solve so many problems).

Then if that's not enough, you've got things like HTMX if you're keen on doing everything in terms of html templating, you've got tools like Svelte if you want an isolated chunk of dynamic UI in a mostly static page, you've got bundlers like Vite that just work without any configuration if you get to the point where you need a build step, and you've got a multitude of lightweight frameworks for the next step.

And on top of that, pretty much all the old ways still work. The browser is an incredibly stable environment! Outside of a handful of security-related removals, if it got into a mainstream browser, without a feature flag or an explicit "experimental" warning, it's pretty much there for life. So if you want to go back to the old ways, there's not much stopping you - but a whole bunch of quality-of-life development improvements along the way to make things even easier than they were back then.

[marcus_holmes]

Find a professional front-end developer who is willing to use simple HTML, JS & CSS and I'd agree with you.

It's almost impossible. The first reaction is always `npm init`

[MrJohz]

Most professional frontend developers are working on projects that require something more complicated than just the basics, because, well, that's where the complexity lies, and so that's where the work is.

You can still find developers who are using the basics, but mostly they're designing WordPress themes or working for boutique web design agencies, because those are the sorts of problems that are solved with just simple HTML, JS, and CSS.

It's like asking a Java developer when the last time they developed something without maven or gradle is, or Python developer why their first reaction is to use pip. If the majority of problems developers had to solve were simple enough that they didn't need these tools, then there'd be far fewer developers and most of them would still end up working on the 20% of projects where they're necessary. Because, well, that's where the complexity lies.

[azangru]

> Find a professional front-end developer who is willing to use simple HTML, JS & CSS and I'd agree with you.

> It's almost impossible. The first reaction is always `npm init`

Consider a simple case — a static website containing several pages (it's simpler than anything requiring a dynamic server, right?). If you are a professional front-end developer, you are almost certain to prefer some kind of a static-site generator over copy-pasting the html template with repeated elements (header, footer, navigation) multiple times, because you know that copy-pasting will bite you when you need to change something. You could use a static-site generator written in Ruby (but then you would gem install), or in Python (but then you would pip install); or you could use a Hugo binary (I'd love to see anyone call its templating language simple); or, if you are a front-end developer, you might npm init && npm install eleventy. Is this too complex a step?

[marcus_holmes]

> or you could use a Hugo binary (I'd love to see anyone call its templating language simple)

I dunno, I'm a Go dev, so it makes sense to me ;)

> Is this too complex a step?

If it just stopped there, sure, that would be fine. But it never does. My experience of front-end devs is that they will do anything to avoid writing any actual code. So there's a tendency to pull in dependencies and bloat the thing until it suffocates in its own complexity. I've seen node_modules with thousands of subdirs, and a build process that takes minutes, for really very simple sites.

[andybak]

Sounds like we're agreeing with each other and disagreeing with the big SPA framework guy?

[MrJohz]

I mean, I am a big SPA framework guy. That's pretty much the main thing I use, day-in, day-out, because most of the projects I'm working on are complex enough that simply hand-coding the entire UI will not work.

And, while only a minority of projects are that complex, those projects are the ones most developers are working on. Most other projects are probably better served with a wordpress install and a bit of theme customisation. Which means it's going to be a minority of developers who work with the very minimal things that are sufficient in these sorts of cases.

[kugelblitz]

Are you writing that complex projects need SPA, everything else is better served with Wordpress?

I've used SPA frameworks, but try to avoid it if I can, because most of the logic is in the backend. I don't want to create and sync API interfaces, have 1-2 additional contexts (JS + frontend framework) and debug an extra layer.

With htmx I can now have interactivity via the backend. I use Alpine.js for some interactivity.

[ceuk]

Big project =/= Big company

e.g. WhatsApp back before the acquisition

Making it easier for people to build big, complex apps doesn't favour large organisations with lots of resources. The opposite in fact.

[andybak]

nb I'm not agreeing with your original hypothesis.

However I'm taking about even lower down the food chain than this.

[iopq]

Smallest projects just throw up a bootstrap template and call it a day

something like this: https://www.hotelpalacebarcelona.com/

they don't care it's not "html first"

[RunSet]

> If you have to choose one technology it's better to use one where you can do everything. Not one where you can do 95% really fast, but 5% not at all.

> I personally always use "complex" frameworks like Angular or React because sooner or later feature requests come in, where those frameworks pay off. On average it saves time for me to always use those frameworks.

I wonder whether they ever pay off. First, I don't believe the frameworks you mention really, as you suggest, enable the last 5% of functionality that would otherwise be impossible. No, those frameworks are written in the same language they work in, which means that strictly speaking they do not enable any new functionality.

Second, whatever ease / speed of development you use must be weighed against the additional cost borne by the project's users. The time you save (that you might otherwise spend learning to achieve the same result without the framework) could be less than the time spent collectively by users waiting for the framework to load.

[codeptualize]

This. Even for basic websites you benefit from some form of templating/components for example to get the nav & footer on each page.

[timeon]

Even basic websites? It is developer vs user then.

I think otherwise. I.e.: blog shouldn't be web app just because it's content management is.

[codeptualize]

Not at all. There are a lot of frameworks that support static exports and/or pre-rendering. Often those produce incredibly fast results, in many cases faster than hand rolled solutions.

If you use a CMS you have already a templating situation and dynamic content, using a framework, or jamstack like situation is not that different, depending on the specifics it might produce faster results.

[zilti]

You don't need a frontend framework for that. Fuck people who do. They're the reason most websites are slow as molasses on my three year old phone, despite them being very basic sites. Just stuffed to the brim with unnecessary bullshit.

[MrJohz]

While I agree that there is probably an overuse of frontend rendering when templating in the backend would be fine, I suspect most of the problems you see have nothing to do with that. In my experience, the number one issue with slow sites is an overuse of trackers and advertising that drags everything down.

[docmars]

Precisely. Using libraries / frameworks like React, Vue, Svelte, etc. adds nearly no overhead to the core functionality of whatever it is you're creating, _especially Svelte,_ since it compiles down to the bare minimum necessary to power any dynamic functionality (it doesn't ship with a complete runtime), and supports static templates and markdown out of the box.

I can say with confidence that unless I royally screw something up in my component lifecycles or render loops, everything is just as snappy as ever. No latency. No lag. Just a zippy fast web app with URL/route changes that fly, fetched data populating quickly, and interactions feeling wonderful -- and that's because said apps I'm developing _aren't_ using any heavy tracking libraries.

People are too quick to blame slow performance on modern view libraries, and even likelier: they've never used them before.

[codeptualize]

If you statically export you won't even notice, and when navigating it will actually be a lot faster when only the content is replaced..

Have you checked this is the reason? not slow network? and not ads/analytics and blocking assets? That's not exclusive to frameworks btw, and probably less likely as most optimize these things for you.

The website that is linked originally has a bunch of blocking assets.. lighthouse score is not amazing either.

Just like the original article, you might want to test your assumptions a bit more.

[up2isomorphism]

“95% work is done on large project” this perception might just because you have chosen complex frameworks. Remember google and facebook starts with no frameworks at all. Are they small projects? No.

[codeptualize]

I'd be more than happy to see small or medium projects and how these tips improved them. Any real world examples would be great.

I would also add that a lot of us do work on the bigger projects, which makes sense as bigger projects require more people. So at least in my life, and I expect many others, it is quite relevant.

I also don't believe the article qualifies that these tips are only for small to medium projects, I'd read it very differently if it did, but I would still like to see some real world examples though.

[hhsectech]

This.

Big companies are in the minority and what they do would not classify as "normal" or "standard practice".

It really bugs when people say "it's standard industry practice" when actually what they mean is "thats how the big businesses do it".

[edanm]

> In my view, the web is 95% small to medium projects.

I'm not sure that view is correct. For one thing, I'm not sure how you even define this.

As technology has advanced, many of the "small/medium" projects that used to require lots of dev time have turned into fully-built alternatives. The days when you need a dev to setup a blog are gone, as are the days you need one to setup a store, or a simple marketing website.

Are these part of the 95%? In some sense, yes, but in the sense of giving advice on a framework to choose, not at all, because no dev will even be making that choice - it's irrelevant.

As for medium-sized projects, there are tens of thousands of small, internal company tools that aren't even on the open internet. They probably fit your definition of being medium sized, let's say have a few devs working on them for many years, certainly medium sized compared to FB etc - but I'm not sure that whether this approach is right or wrong for them. (Genuinely not sure!)

I'm just saying, you need to much better define what you mean by small and medium sized, because some people might be thinking of my definition, while for some people medium-sized is, idk, AirBNB, which is tiny compared to FB but gigantic compared to most projects out there.

[ozim]

I would say that explaining where guidelines are applicable is on author side.

For text at hand I understand that author expects this way should be “the best” for everyone.

Then author gives examples that even in medium project at first requirement change or first additional non-trivial rule are going to have 2-way bindings plus bunch of other plumbing implemented where “html first” doesn’t have it and someone will have to write some JS monster to handle state etc.

[kissgyorgy]

If your project is small, doesn't matter what you use, it won't be complex anyway.

[elbear]

This is not only about big projects.

Their second principle, to use inline styling, makes it harder to create a consistent look across the entire website. Defining that in one place and referencing it everywhere is better and easier.

[drpixie]

Anyway, a well organised big project is a collection of related small projects :)

And what's good for one small project is likely to be good for many small projects.

[nonethewiser]

> In my view, the web is 95% small to medium projects.

In what terms? Sites in existence? I suppose. But sites by usage? Virtually all huge.