People think React or similar SPA libraries are the way to do frontend development, so all frontend development seems to be React at this point.
"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" is the problem. Another new library / framework will not solve this.
Frontend dev should go for the bare minimum when designing web sites, only introduce libraries as they're needed -- and really think about whether they're really needed or not. They need to ask some questions like:
- Maybe you can roll your own specialized solution that'll be smaller and faster than a general solution?
- Does the thing you're working on need to be an SPA or does a good old multi-page web site be enough for your use case?
- If you need parts of your website to be interactive, can you only update that part (the "islands" approach) by hand instead of introducing a dependency to do that?
There is a lot of complexity going on in our field right now and not enough people seem to care about that. The complexity is needlessly inflating our application / web page sizes and reducing performance.
"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" is the problem. Another new library / framework will not solve this.
Frontend dev should go for the bare minimum when designing web sites, only introduce libraries as they're needed -- and really think about whether they're really needed or not. They need to ask some questions like:
- Maybe you can roll your own specialized solution that'll be smaller and faster than a general solution? - Does the thing you're working on need to be an SPA or does a good old multi-page web site be enough for your use case? - If you need parts of your website to be interactive, can you only update that part (the "islands" approach) by hand instead of introducing a dependency to do that?
There is a lot of complexity going on in our field right now and not enough people seem to care about that. The complexity is needlessly inflating our application / web page sizes and reducing performance.