culi 4 days ago

Not remotely! Unless you meant Preact. React ships an entire rendering engine to the front-end. Most sites that use React won't load anything if javascript isn't enabled

  • [removed] 4 days ago
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mrweasel 4 days ago

Then you'd have to learn React, and for many of us the point is that we really don't want to learn React, or other frontend frameworks.

realusername 4 days ago

In theory yes, in practice good luck maintaining that if you are just a solo blogger.

I doubt your blog would last a single month without some breaking change of some sort in one of the packages.

  • spoonfeeder006 3 days ago

    you mean npm packages? why would you need to update those anyhow?

    • realusername 3 days ago

      Because at some point it will cease to work? It needs upgrades like any other project.

      Every upgrade in the JS world is very painful.

      • spoonfeeder006 3 days ago

        Why will they stop working eventually? Assuming they are all self contained and you don't upgrade even node js for that project

        Edit: Oh right, OS upgrades could do it. Or network keys changing etc...

lmm 4 days ago

Yes, it is. Unfortunately HN has a crazy bias against JavaScript (the least crazy part of the web stack) and in favour of HTML and CSS, even though the latter are worse in every meaningful way.

  • dickersnoodle 3 days ago

    It isn't crazy, judging by the number of times I've seen posts here and on other blogs talking about a 100k web page ballooning to 8Mb because of all the Javascript needed to "collect page analytics" or do user tracking when ads are included. Granted that may not be needed for personal websites, but for almost anything that has to be monetized you're going to get stuck with JS cancer because some sphincter in a suit needs for "number to go up".

    • lmm 2 days ago

      > I've seen posts here and on other blogs talking about a 100k web page ballooning to 8Mb because of all the Javascript needed to "collect page analytics" or do user tracking when ads are included

      Perfect example. HN will see a page with 6Mb of images/video, 1Mb of CSS and 200Kb of JavaScript and say "look at how much the JavaScript is bloating that page".

  • oneeyedpigeon 4 days ago

    I don't even know where to begin with the pretence that you can compare HTML with JS and somehow conclude that one is 'better' than the other. They are totally different things. JS is for functionality, and if you're using it to serve static content, you're not using it as designed.

    • lmm 4 days ago

      I don't particularly care about "designed for". If you've got to serve something to make the browser display the static content you want it to, the least unpleasant way to do so is with JS.

      • TeMPOraL 4 days ago

        Least unpleasant to the developer. Most unpleasant to the user. It breaks all kinds of useful browser features (which frontend devs then recreate from scratch in JS, poorly; that's probably the most widespread variant of Greenspun's tenth rule in practice).