And as if the words "COO" and "jquery ui" in the same sentence weren't enough to raise eyebrows, what came next was probably one of the most mind bending software engineering episodes I'd ever witness. It turned out he was trying to put together a web UI for displaying a number of reports from some computationally intensive data warehouse query crunching. We're talking visualization of tables and tables full of data. Conventional wisdom would dictate that implementing this the traditional way would involve query optimizations, various layers of caching, separation of concerns, a framework to manage all the complexity, etc, etc, etc. His approach? Just do the naive queries (slow as they were), print directly to HTML old school PHP style, then save the HTML file to disk.

He was a bubbly happy type of guy and you could see the child-like joy on his face when he showed me how lightning fast the thing would load from navigating from one page to another because it was effectively looking at a static website once the pages had been generated once. I distinctly recall feeling a mix of confused feelings at seeing the guy break every rule in the "programming best practices" book and the undeniably good performance results from the sheer dumb simplicity of the solution.

Ideally, folks would use a thinner stack with _less_ JS, as that's rewarded across all the metrics. But in recent years, many teams build a "site" by building a SPA. As they're entrenched in that dubious decision, the only path to making it performant is adding SSR complexity. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Perhaps its the apparent conflict between UX and DX that leads to tooling complexity?

And to nitpick: Core Web Vitals debuted with 3 metrics, one of them being FID. The focus on runtime/JS performance has been there from the start. Regardless, I hard agree on your last paragraph.

A big problem with this is that html is extraordinarily limited as a widget framework. You only have a handful of widgets available, and many of them offer very little (if any) customizability from CSS.

For example, say you wanted a checkbox, but you wanted to use a custom shape (Edit: shape - color is more easily controlled today) instead of the browser default. Well, tough luck. From HTML you'll have to put the checkbox inside a label, add an empty span next to it, and from CSS make the checkbox invisible and then get creative with drawing some boxes that look like a checkbox [0] (or, more realistically, load some custom graphics). So, if you're doing all of this effort anyway, why go through the effort of using the HTML input checkbox at all?

I always find it fascinating just how barebones and bad HTML+CSS is as a GUI framework. I really don't understand why people insist it's in any way superior to using a JS toolkit for anything requiring more than the simplest interaction (say, more than a newspaper article).

[0] https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_custom_checkbox.as...

I feel like "don't use tooling/frameworks" is the web dev version of "you don't need Java or .NET or WPF or WinForms, just use assembly and gfx drivers and draw pixels on the screen". HTML and ECMAscript evolve very slowly relative to the needs of software businesses, and it would take 30x (if not 300x) as long to write complex apps in those alone. Having a "build and bundle" step is just the webdev version of compiling developer-friendly code (React and frameworks) into the "lowest common denominator" code of browser-parseable HTML + JS.

It's not about "cleverness", but being able to do your job in a reasonable amount of time and effort, vs going back to a 90s-style internet where every page is basically a dumb terminal and all the actual interactivity has to happen on the backend.

I think is a better option is to know your target audience, their expected device and connection speed (metro desktop? rural mobile?) and not to worry about over-optimization. Nobody cares if your website loads in a second if it's so hard to use that it takes THEM more time to do what they need. Better to take 5 seconds to load, and then be actually usable as an app.

FWIW I don't think web apps are getting slower because developers are getting worse, but because the newer frameworks are enabling new use cases that weren't before possible. Photo editing? You used to have to download and install Photoshop, which can take minutes or days depending on your network and connection. Now you can run Photopea in a browser window in a few seconds and do most of the same things.

As for core web vitals? It's not a bad thing to use a performance arms race to get websites to be faster. It forces frameworks to evolve their delivery, caching, loading, hydration mechanisms. But that doesn't have to mean "give up on frameworks and complex apps". It can also just mean keep up with their latest performance improvements, and/or hope that ECMAscript evolves faster, that things like Web Components or PWAs etc. become more commonplace.

Having worked on one of the most bloated SPAs at Google and doing an SRE rotation to optimize exactly these metrics, I couldn’t agree more on the hypothesis that this is where complexity, jank and fragility arises.

This is why our startup set out to build the best-in-class frontend for cloud computing and making a bet on SSR. I’m from a JavaScript background and personally think hate for the language is undue. V8 is also a marvel of engineering. We elected Go for our application language. It’s faster for our purposes but with SSR the domain language isn’t as important. We could use Haskell if it was fit for the problem domain. We empathize with how ideas such as “user-perceived latency” came about but SSR is a much simpler model and our philosophy is that “simpler is faster is faster”.

Another theoretical advantage is that you can get better colocation of content, style and functionality.

Basic JS is pretty annoying to write. It reminds me of using goto for control flow. It’s a lot cleaner to be able to put functionality alongside the document structure.

Of course, you can use HTML + CSS + JS but you can also use Assembly for all code. But the end solution here is not Frontend frameworks.

I think it’s time browsers give us a better abstraction to HTML + CSS + JS. Webassembly and friends are nice, but I think the 3 fundamentally need to be replaced together in a performant way such that the simple case of no client side code is well optimised. Frontend frameworks are just a symptom of the problem which is that Web devs have to use the only abstraction creation mechanism available to get nicer development properties.

I agree with you, but there’s some sort of complexity agreement in corporate environments, because people aren’t willing to accept that you don’t need a large build process, or any at all these days, maybe outside of a build pass for JSX.

If you do this and have a sufficiently complex application... you will end up where the modern frameworks are. They exist for a reason.

Hydration is... an automated system to do this? Am I missing something

What if it doesn’t? I mean by requirements from various departments/analysts and user’s common sense.