alt Hacker NewsMost of the stuff these Ed-Tech companies taught is counterproductive. Much of it was unnecessary solutions to problems that didn't exist. So so many Web tools are things created because their creator didn't properly understand HTML, JavaSript, CSS and the DOM. Then these schools taught everyone these unnecessary things and they become the standard and made things overly complex and give us massive build times for stuff that was never meant to need a build phase in the first place.
LLMs with HTMX and plain old CSS and JavaScript (maybe Typescript) is the future. Getting back to little to no build times and frontends that don't take up 1+ GB of RAM on the clients
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I've personally been using a Phoenix LiveView-like approach extremely successfully, combined with LLM coding. It is extremely, stupidly fast. We are talking about loading an entire multi-window desktop environment in the web on spotty 5G networks in half a second, transferring less than 1MB of data.
I think traditional web frontends might be dead for any applications with servers that can afford to keep server-side state of a logged-in user.
(Notably this includes almost any kind of AI application, because the LLM costs dwarf the web hosting costs anyway.)
And for the stateless ones, there's always htmx
>LLMs with HTMX and plain old CSS and JavaScript (maybe Typescript) is the future.
1. LLM webpages in my experience have definitely not gotten simpler, nor load faster. It just pushes out more of the same junk underneath without any of the oversight we'd give a human
2. I'm not even sure the webpages are the big resource hog anymore. Chromium itself has had the reputation for eating RAM for well over a decade at this point.
3. In many ways, we did this to ourselves. In the name of shipping faster, we (or perhaps the executives) outsourced solutions that would sacrifice the simplicity of the code for "more mainainable, cross platform" frameworks. Electron was a solution for software companies not wanting a dedicated Windows and Mac (and perhaps Linux) team. React was a very specific solution for one of the largest websites in the world, that the rest of the industry adopted as a trend.
What Ed-Tech companies? This article isn't talking about Ed-Tech companies. Axel Rauschmayer isn't an Ed-Tech company. He's an individual author who wrote books about JavaScript, the language. He wasn't pushing these "unnecessary solutions", he was helping developers understand JavaScript, exactly the thing you say is necessary. Josh W. Comeau isn't an Ed-Tech company, he's an individual who writes content about new CSS features like Anchor Positioning[1]. What do educators like this have to do with 1+ GB RAM frontends?
[1] https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/anchor-positioning/