I absolutely completely agree and do this myself. Unfortunately all of my peers and bosses don’t see the value, and the shop is overrun with trend chasing resume driven developers. React/node/next hosting on aws and containers and it will all be out of date next year. Everything we do has such low amount of users we don’t need anything but a single VPS and simple backend. Many of my apps from 10 years ago still run the same rails and jQuery just fine. Actually upgrading the rails versions and pulling out the jQuery dependencies is easy now too. It’s just so much simpler and works perfectly. But this is seen as detrimental to my career. It’s not appreciated. I sound like a dinosaur to the bosses and coworkers. But I enjoy it and my shit works fine. I’m saving so much time and hosting costs. Everything runs on a $40 VPS.

Often this works out to a better user experience too

Case in point: this site versus Reddit. HN is 100x snappier. Just a few lines of un-minified plain JS. Reddit crashes the browser on my iPad

Also CSS! CSS grid, :has(), custom properties and improved browser compatibility. CSS is an amazingly powerful and beautiful language.

Embrace the cascade - check out ITCSS methodology.

Fluid typography and spacing - https://utopia.fyi

HTML and Javascript (the vanilla kind, written right into <script> tags like a caveman) is still one of best ways to experiment with UIs. It's not sustainable or maintainable but why do you need those qualities in demo software? I still maintain that a competent developer should be able to bang out an HTML/JS demo faster than they can draw the same complex flow in Figma.

I agree, modern browsers, CSS and JS can do so much now.

However, the frontend build systems are often complex to do complex state management. Sure, it's possible to reimplement it all and accidentally end up rewriting your own vanilla JS frontend framework, but beyond a point, that's equally as unfun as modern webdev.

It's not hard to shift the state management though, and when I find myself sat with a nice architecture that's formed without a complex frontend system, and with some really simple, uncluttered backend that could probably serve millions of requests a day from a homeserver and internet connection.... it gives me a profound feeling. It's a satisfying and familiar feeling from webdev I enjoyed around 2 decades ago as a teen. It feels like the old way of doing it.

Now, having designed, built and run systems from on-prem, through VPS & VMs onto serverless and static site stuff, doing it the old way again just feels better overall. Maybe it's nostalgia.

But then I feel the reason why we moved away from doing it the old way was because the complexity of the applications needed more efficient ways to make use of relatively limited bandwidth, storage and compute resources at the time. Now these things are all commoditised, and my home desktop and internet connection now has probably the same capabilities as a small datacentre back then... the dreamer in me wants to believe there's no reason why we can't all go back to the old ways of doing it now.

Tbh, I would be pretty frustrated developing any non-trivial frontend code without a type system. But I am interested to try dropping frameworks.

Yes! I have to do front-end work occasionally but have been bad at staying on top of trends, so I would resort to jQuery if the requirements aren't super complex. Discovering querySelectorAll() and fetch() eliminated 75% of what I used jQuery for.

In the bad old days, there were a handful of canonical tutorials you used to learn the basics (HTML, CSS, JS) of web dev. Is there anything like that now that starts from those three technologies to build an understanding of web apps?

It seems like it could fill a real need for beginners who want to start by grasping the DNA of the web, so to speak, instead of the complex/sophisticated tools that are popular (not that there's anything wrong with that approach, if you need those skills for a job or project immediately).

The hate towards modern front end tooling such as React/TS/JSX is nothing but a phase. 10 years ago engineers were hating and raging against PHP, but today they want to bring PHP back and make it a fundamental part of their tooling? They hated writing plain old CSS but now they want it back instead of Tailwind? None of this hate is actually based on any engineering value, sure you can build a little dumb todo app in plain old HTML, CSS and JS and it will work flawlessly, and if that's your goal you better stick to that, React, Next, Webpack, Vite and all these other tools aren't built for that purpose. Its nothing but nostalgia and elitism.

Along those lines, I've found Alpine.js a very friendly framework to use for stuff benefits from one. It doesn't have a build system and works alongside vanilla JS or jQuery if you want it.

React does not require a build system. Just alias createElement() to e() and you get the exact same capabilities with a slightly more verbose syntax. I’ve done just that in the past to add small bits of interactivity to vanilla JS client side without modifying anything else.

It is a similar sort of confusion that comes from people thinking React is a Web framework. It’s actually a small library.

Personally I'm pretty happy with Vite + Vue + Typescript (+ whatever for css).

I usually don't make a SPA though, only using it for specific parts (with their own entry file).

Front-end is now a cesspool of numerous complex layers that try so hard to work with each other, all while only trying to deliver mostly the same kind of experience from 10 years ago or older.

Many big companies and startups blindly jump into the React/Vue/Angular stack, along with other complexities like Vite, Webpack, SSR, Zzzzzzzz... etc, where things are tied so loosely with 100s of dependencies and with a fragile underlying platform such as NPM. The output produced is only very marginally different from what could be achieved by the traditional MVC frameworks like Django/Rails/Phoenix etc. What do we lose here? a breathtaking amount of productivity and time. In addition, all the complex layers brought in place to make React FEs work with the backend such as GraphQL etc, also only increase the number of places you will have to maintain.

With SPA and all the modern snake oil like "serverless", engineers only will have to make changes at several places and implement some extra adapter logic, and spend a lot more time writing crap, than actually getting things out the door. With something as simple as JQuery which still holds its ground today, coupled with helper libraries like HTMX, Stimulus/Turbo, you can replicate 90% of the SPA experience, and ship things insanely fast, and maintain logic and state only on the backend. Your user only cares about seeing new features and existing features being easy to use. They don't give a fuck about whether you're using React or plain JavaScript or JQuery at the end of the day.

opinionated, but i add tailwind to this. sometimes makes code less clean with no components but if you're insistent on reusability you can @apply

I agree that allowing yourself to forgo learning another library or build system is valid, particularly when you're working on a project alone. However, I disagree with reverting to 2009 standards for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Instead, you can adopt 2025 standards, including Web Components, JavaScript and CSS modules, and modern JavaScript (ECMAScript 2022, also known as ES13, and even ES15). Additionally, CSS Level 3 features such as variables and container queries, along with WCAG 2.2 guidelines, are all widely supported by the latest browsers.

Same. I’m using Django with fast api. Then I have a nextjs front end. I do wish I could bake it all into Django but I’ve learned that it’s best to keep Django api first unless it’s a simple site/app. But with a lot of interaction, using react helps.

Yeah we do this. Ninja is great.

React, not so much fun

Exactly. AI makes everything less fun because it turns what was once fun into an industry by its design.

completely opposite experience from me. i loved the original idea but i just can't get into the code fences and server/client rendering, nextjs has a clearer separation of concerns for me

This is fun. I remixed this sci-fi black hole particle simulator by adding some sliders to adjust the particle movement. Amazing what a few prompts can do these days... https://openjam.ai/shocked_impala_852/jgoz80mge0/3

The recent vibe coding parlance confuses me. We have been vibe coding the whole time. If you write code before you have a design then you're vibe coding.

> I started out with Server Side Includes on a shared host, but converted to using PHP along the way to be able to make a base file with all the stuff that is repeated (header, main, footer etc), and then injecting the content from index.php, /contact/index.php etc.

I have a static file download only webapp[1], and I managed to get the includes done with only a 99-line JS component.

Honestly, once you get a decent way to specify, in HTML tags, include files, a significant portion of what you use a framework for (DRY) becomes redundant.

[1] Dynamic data to hydrate elements on the page is via API-only URLs.

AspNetCore w/ absolute minimal usage of the abstractions has been my favorite web development experience by miles. Things like MVC and *.cshtml are really powerful but I find basics like PHP-style string interpolation to be way more intuitive and ergonomic.

All of my web resources have code like:

  httpContext.Response.WriteAsync(Layout(... inner HTML content ...));

Did you retire or switch industries?

I agree, NextJS used to be my go to for building any kind of web applications, it was essentially a full stack framework capable of handling complex requirements, however since they decided to go all in on this new React Server Component bs, I'm so done. Sure there are some benefits here and there but overall, its a huge loss of DX and UX. React was always supposed to be a front end library, not a full stack framework and now the direction of React is being lead by the NextJS team so there is no hope.

The amount of JavaScript required to submit a form should be zero. Browsers can already do basic validation of form fields.

Worse still are sites that require JavaScript to read them.

"Speaking of AI, is it any use? Well, somewhat. It writes half-useful CSS. It saves time on some things (but also makes bizarre choices on other things -- whatevs). I basically paired with it occasionally. It was OK."

Hardly a ringing endorsement there!

Apparently even saying "I tried AI and it was somewhat OK" is enough to summon the anti-AI comments.

Fair enough. If it makes you feel better, I have a very different project where I have deliberately avoided any AI-generated code: https://github.com/jchester/spc-kit

maybe check out fixi, our minimalist implementation of generalized hypermedia controls?

https://github.com/bigskysoftware/fixi

we are hopeful that w/the work of alex petro and the triptych project that we can get some of the core ideas of htmx into the HTML spec itself:

https://alexanderpetros.com/triptych/

I don't get the impression the author (of this post, or most others like it) is saying this approach should necessarily be used for complex apps in large organizations. The opposite, rather; that when working solo on hobby projects, modern frameworks are often unnecessary, and foregoing them can be more fun and productive than one might expect.

The "detailed knowledge of the problem space" appears to me to be "detailed knowledge of the hammers in use", not necessarily the problems these hammers once solved.

Often I find that the common web app needs nothing more than a few dozen helper js functions.

Having done back and and front end, I’m fully convinced that the frameworks are there only to help mediate a large team of developers all fiddling with the same codebase.

I haven’t been working on any sort of crazy features with elements moving around the page or excessive Ajax components (do they still call it that!?). On the other hand, most sites don’t have these features.

It's a blog. Not everything has to be communicated through a polished and organized corporate machine.

Requiring a company to tell you whether you’re having fun or not is certainly a take.