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Comment by part1of2 | Hacker News Reader

> because most people are driving the Web, and the only way to make the Web bearable is to load yourself up with huge toolchains.

Are you talking about browser app toolchains? If so, I disagree. HTML and CSS are all you need, with some vanilla JS. For example, HN users love the fact that it’s fast and responsive. It doesn’t use huge toolchains of React or whatever

Using huge tool chains is making the internet slower and more painful for devs & users.

But if you’re talking about dev tool chains for templating, I follow the “less is more” here too. Some templating tools can speed a dev up, but learning a dozen tools is really a waste of time

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Yeah, but show HN to regular users. Most of them would be appalled by the looks, the way it is structured, the simplicity.

Users say they want simplicity like they say they want to start diets: everyone says they want it but when they're actually forced to do it, nobody wants it for more than 5 minutes.

I really don't think so. The reason other sites look so bad is more marketing/AB testing centered around engagement, not because users like it.

Most users hate or fear what software does but don't think things can be better.

> For example, HN users love the fact that it’s fast and responsive.

It can be that because it is downright ascetic.

It's easy to be fast and responsive and at the same time eschew all the fancy toolchainy stuff when you have very few features.

Counter-point: I've built a P2P social media application that doesn't use any client-side JS. There are challenges, mostly around composing rich text (how is <textarea/> the best we have?!) but it's entirely possible to ship features without front-end JS.

IDK, I started a blog recently with server rendered react and the thing builds on <15s for a production build (from the time the GitHub we hook runs a push to me seeing the new site deployed), and in ~2s for a local dev build.

It also loads lightning fast.

https://charron.dev

This is using next.js and preact.

The menu is broken for me on Android Brave.

Unfortunately I'm unable to reproduce (BrowserStack doesn't seem to have Brave). Works in Chrome, Firefox, UC Browser, and Samsung internet from what I can see though.

> HTML and CSS are all you need, with some vanilla JS

For a modern web application?! Absolutely not, the things the OP mentioned (webpack, 1000 node packages etc) are essential.

Even on the IDE side, I have...100 extensions installed?

> For a modern web application?! Absolutely not, the things the OP mentioned (webpack, 1000 node packages etc) are essential.

Till this very day I can count a handful of devs who can give me a reasonable use case for react and why evey website should be a webapp. Im bad guy uno at every dev meeting because I have the audacity to suggest that not every webapp is facebook or something similarly complicated.

God bless NPM but Ill be damned if I dont get heart palpitations at the node modules ever increasing bundle. Its all magic or filth under the carpet. Magic is good when sprinkled and self contained but not when its all made of magic.

So Im detoxing and going back tk life without node modules and using jquery a lot more.

Huge toolchains don't imply complex projects. I'm writing a browser extension with Webpack, the Firefox browser extension tool and one or two libraries; Node.js has about 1000 packages.

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