Hacker News Reader

Comment by beardedman | Hacker News Reader

Let the "soap box brigade" commence!

I got introduced to Rich Harris via a podcast (not personally), but am a big fan of his perspective on JS. I think we can all agree that; if you don't like Svelte, then fine. If you love JSX/TSX - then great! If you're a Vue person, then awesome - its exactly what makes this community great - the diversity & innovation. Not the soap-boxing antics, polarised opinions & vilification of opinions that aren't congruent with your own.

As someone much wiser than me once said - "always bet on Javascript".

View on HN

Totally agreed that the diversity of technical innovation is how we got here and its fantastic. Hopefully we keep up with more innovations (such as npm alternatives :cough:).

Its easy to see why some folks would get riled up over this crap though. Like, if you don't like React right now, but want to do frontend development professionally, your job prospects get slashed in half or more. Really like Vue? That's awesome! But you might have a small fraction of the options your peers do when interviewing. Like a more exotic solution like Svelte or Elm? Hope you like working remote or are okay with relocating for that, because there's probably not that many places to work at in your area.

So people will try really hard to get the community to rally around their favorite choices. And the tools without cheerleader squads often fade away and die. Rock and a hard place.

> *"always bet on Javascript"

I've been keeping all the modern javascript frameworks at arms distance, because I've always preferred to bet on HTML, for the client at least. That said, I've no issues with heavy reliance on JS on the developer machine, but I always prefer pages that can work without the reliance on JS.

So, it seems opportune to ask: Is there a JS framework around that actually compiles to HTML and CSS rather than embedding the HTML in JS/DOM calls? In my rudimentary analysis of React/Vue and others (eg svelte), I can't find out how to have the end result without the framework sitting in there too. Perhaps I keep missing something in my understanding?

So this is what Svelte does, the app gets built at build time so you don't need the include any script in the browser for it to run. I remember RH talking about the React Hooks inspiration thing, so whether the API will go more in that direction (and eventually be a runtime thing), I'm not too sure.

GP wants something that compiles down to HTML and CSS.

Svelte compiles down to JS.

Some client-side libraries can also perform server-side rendering, giving them the label isomorphic. Most such are ones that use a VDOM, which makes it easy to do (though it becomes a bit harder again if you worry about rehydration, which is strictly optional but normally desirable, so that you can still add things like event handlers on the client side). Svelte is one that does it more efficiently, compiling to a different result: fiddle in its playground and look at what it compiles to depending on whether you ask for the dom target or the ssr (server-side rendering) target.

I think Web Components are an interesting mix where you are creating html tags using JS/HTML/CSS and they are natively interpreted by the browser.

It can't 'compile' to HTML, because it doesn't know at compile time what data you're going to give the component. Instead, if you compile with `ssr: true`, the JavaScript it generates is a module that generates HTML through efficient string concatenation. It's very easy to bake out static files as part of a build step, or generate markup dynamically as part of a Node server.

CSS is extracted at build time; typically your styles will be served as static .css files for maximum efficiency.

At a job I had years back, we built our application with Ractive, it was really nice to use.

I had a similar experience. I wish Ractive would have gained more traction; it was a good balance of "enough functionality that a web UI requires" and "simple enough to avoid cognitive overload and allowed for quick ramp up".

Reactive is still actively being worked on. We use it for all our projects. Fantastic library, powerful and simple to use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com