Svelte Hot Takes - Reacting To Web Hot Takes from Rich Harris

THANK YOU VERCEL AND RICH AND LEE AND EVERYONE FOR LETTING ME REACT TO THIS

[allesarfint]

I feel Theo didn't understood the "Sites should work without JS" take, it's not about making the web fully functional without javascript, is about getting a good enough experience when it is not available, and frameworks should enable devs to do that.

[adrianjdelgado]

I think most of Theo's disagreements are misguided. The talk is presented from the point of view of a tool maker. Rich is not saying that developers should carry the burden, instead, the frameworks and tooling should do the heavy lifting.

[OurDivineKing]

Such a well needed talk! Rich has the ear of the industry and for a good reason.

[danvilela]

Incredible that people complain about Svelte’s DSL and they completely forget that JSX is also DSL. And they hated it at the beginning too. Svelte is just awesome and people should use it more :)

[DiegoBM]

I love this because you can see both Svelte and RSC approach hand in hand. I'd love to see a Rich's react video to Theo talking about RSC to have the complete circle

[MattBolt]

"I could rant for 2 hours about datetime stuff." - I felt this in my soul.

[Divisibly]

Just a note, I see a common theme here he makes an opinion and you immediately decide to agree or disagree. I feel it's generally better to let someone state their position before we decide on which side of the argument we fall.

[Hwyadylaw]

"Most sites should work without JavaScript" is something I agree strongly with. I think "most" does some heavy lifting here, because even if most what Theo does can't work without client-side JavaScript, most of what is deployed on the web *can*. Even if I don't disable JS, I have to deal with the consequences of the JS requirement regularly. The number of times in the past month that broken JS has made a site inaccessible without me having to do DOM manipulation or patch the broken script isn't high, but it's ridiculous that it's more than twice.

18:50 Rich isn't saying we should get rid of JS, he's saying removing the JS shouldn't break everything.


14:10 I think Rich's message is basically "we should ensure that people *don't* have to work with datetime themselves"

[cocoscacao]

Date time picker that works without JS? Uhm:
<input type="datetime-local" />

[dovh]

When I add an item to my cart I should be able to see it done immediately. Bunk for SPAs. Most SPAs go all the way to the back end to update the data. He's arguing for offline first capability. SPAs don't necessarily achieve this.

[riolly]

We are so thankful to have an awesome journalist on the JS land.

[ISKLEMMI]

A thoughtful response to Rich's thoughtful talk! Thanks for sharing this.
26:51 - "React's whole thing is it's just JavaScript."
React folks often say this. This isn't true about any front-end framework, but it means React (and others) are so good that they *feel* like just JavaScript.
Most obviously, JSX is widely used and is objectively not JavaScript. It's not in the standard or in any JS implementation. (Linters like TypeScript support it for obvious reasons.)
Solid, Vue, React, Svelte, etc. also all need compilers for their abstractions to work and add hidden control flow to do many things such as automatically re-rendering your components when data changes.
(Full-stack frameworks are a whole other can of worms that you and Rich already opened in your respective videos. lol)
There's a lot more, but this comment is long enough.

42:08 - You *do* have to call signals on props as a function. The code on the slide would only work if those components were passed the return value of the signal <One count={count()}/>

[mileselam]

Yes, I don't like TailWind, and I don't like React. This is not because I think I'm a CSS genius. It's because I'm old enough to remember <center><font face=arial size=5>. We've lost sight of why CSS was created: that styling in markup is convenient but inflexible. In addition, React has no CSS styling isolation between components. There was bleed through. TailWind absolutely helped with that. But once you're not using React, using a framework that scopes CSS to the component (like Svelte does), that need for TailWind to solve that problem evaporates along with the problem.

If TailWind were a Sass mixin or used CSS variables like Open Props, I'd have no problem with it. It's not the idea of TailWind—collections of related, pre-made, consistent styles—that bothers me. The implementation when viewed through the lens of React's scoping deficiencies even raises it to truly exceptional engineering.

I accept good engineering overcoming bad decisions, but I struggle with accepting the bad decisions as part of good engineering. (And I fully acknowledge that they were not objectively bad decisions a decade ago. 20/20 hindsight and all that.)

[nowheremap]

i don't think sveltekit users are typically all that aware of performance. svelte was always targeted to casual programmers to an extent; it started as a tool for data visualization professionals to build widgets fast without having to learn much on top of basic javascript.

[jhonyortiz]

I'm not anti react. It's cool. But I am a svelte lover and oh man, I can still admire react, but I won't touch it if I don't have to now that I know how simple, elegant, and concise web development can be.

[DrClocktopus]

Has CSS ever been the problem when it comes to performance? Tailwind or not is a matter of DX taste imo - personally I prefer styled components or even just css modules - anything that will let you write actual css

[owenwexler]

44:42 as a regular Amtrak traveler who frequently works/codes on the train I feel this deep in my soul

[roberthall]

I'm part of the sliver of your Tailwind Venn that isn't complaining based on React performance. Tailwind sucks because it's not vanilla CSS.

[wobsoriano]

"The web sucks because of capitalism"

hmmm I see what you did there...

[dovh]

No, React websites do suck. Yes, some websites need React because of a lot of state. But most don't. .NET Rocks website started using React and the user experience went way down. The thing is most websites a static page with a little interactivity is OK. Other websites something like HTMX works fine.Others, that need a lot of interactivity on the front end, React could be a smart choice.

Yes, ads on web pages suck too and can overshadow the problem of SPAs for sites that don't need SPAs.