A masterful rant about the shit state of the web from a front-end dev perspective
There’s a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn’t possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSR only in the context of Node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air2.
Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shitty div soup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere.
Server-side rendering means it’s rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.
I signed up to this instance because I feel this in my bones.
I cut my teeth on PHP CGI in the late 00’s before shifting to python CGI because my university had banned PHP on the webservers.
Frontend wasn’t exactly a term back then. I’d picked up a bit of jquery into my server generated Django templates, I was playing with template fragments in 2011 and life was good.
I mostly avoided the SPA fad, but a (short) stint at Wayfair had me end up writing react and dear God the amount of indirection and tomfoolery involved with effectively writing the app a second time left a sour taste in my mouth.
These days I mostly write embedded daemons in rust for Linux devices. I wrote a munin replacement in rust because packaging perl for Yocto is a struggle. I needed to serve a website, so I found a jinja style library, setup my templates and fragments and dropped htmx into the frontend.
Life is good again.
I have friends/coworkers who argue with me that I should write SPAs but they don’t get that I mostly want to avoid fighting frontend tooling and get shit done. A backend serving templates is miles more ergo than react and I don’t have to deal with the NPM upgrade treadmill. I don’t get daily dependabot alerts.
Don’t get me started on golang, meteorjs, and lambdas
welcome!
there’s something weirdly cozy about systems development, especially coming from modern web stack work. it might be that there’s no sandbox so you can do what you want, the toolchains are usually a lot lighter, and the APIs usually aren’t designed by the least honest people you know (my rant on the fuckery surrounding the Web Components spec is still incoming)
lately I’ve been working on the rewrite for our instance’s archives, and I’ve been getting very good results from a custom static templating engine and unpoly as a progressive enhancement library. after years of dealing with react’s bullshit, it’s surprising how much functionality you can get out of carefully structured markup and CSS, with a tiny amount of strictly optional JavaScript that mostly enables partial repaints (maybe the only good bit of SPAs? I still need to benchmark it to see if that’s even faster than native rendering) and a controlled, predictable amount of markup enhancement that seems to stay the fuck out of the browser’s way
so far it’s definitely a distinct improvement on what I’ve come to expect from SPAs, which is a world of loading spinners, crawling elements, and jank so severe and universal they’ve taken to naming all its varieties