Writing a post on how frontend technology choice-making is extremely broken in 2024, even by on the Lemon Vendors [1] own terms, and I ran across the perfect word to describe how the React ecosystem is trapped in a legacy cage of its own continual re-m...
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Writing a post on how frontend technology choice-making is extremely broken in 2024, even on the Lemon Vendors [1] own terms, and I ran across the perfect word to describe how the React ecosystem is trapped in a legacy cage of its own continual re-making: stovepiping:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stovepiping
Folks trapped in these priors spout zombie ideas and undead arguments because they've never experienced the modern web as developers. Not really.
[1]: https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/
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As a result, they construct an echo chamber that *assumes* framework choice is totalising. That the idea of sharing componentry from multiple frameworks *must* be unwieldy and expensive. And then they perpetuate those entirely falsified premises to the next set of bootcamp grads.
They're constantly erecting mini-shrines to IE 9, and let me tell y'all...it had some real upsides, but it wasn't a good enough browser to be worth *this* sort of veneration.
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I *frequently* have the experience of telling folks that they can pull in some components from a Web Components design system (Fluent WC v3, or Material, or Spectrum, or Web Awesome), only to have people who *were just telling me that 45KB is "not a lot" for a framework* get cold feet at the idea that there might be 5-10K of library coming along for the ride.
So then you press a little...ok, so if size is an issue...will you *at least* switch to Preact?
🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗
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Don't let these people gaslight you or your team. They might not be trying to get one over on you, but that doesn't mean they have any idea what they're talking about.
And yes, this effect gets *worse* the fancier the titles are, not better.
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@slightlyoff I think React and to a lesser degree Angular are basically the IBM of frontend. They’re not the best choice for most projects, but nobody will blame that choice when projects go south. It is a brave team that goes for a vanilla web setup.
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Joeri Sebrechtsreplied to Joeri Sebrechts last edited by
@slightlyoff Another part of the problem is the lack of learning resources. There’s a gazillion books and videos on building a complex frontend with react, but for vanilla web dev there’s very little guidance past the building of simple pages. That’s part of the reason why I made my plain vanilla site.
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@joeri_s This is getting better, but the real surprise for most folks is that there's not as much "framework oriented" teaching in WC/vanilla land because the answer to most problems is just the way you do it with DOM APIs. So you just teach and learn fundamentals and then fill in the gaps about what's left, which isn't as much.
Here are a few good WC resources and guides:
https://daverupert.com/2023/01/html-with-superpowers-the-guidebook/
https://frontendmasters.com/courses/web-components/