I always have cognitive dissonance about this kind of stuff. I read this article and “In defense of the modern web” and I feel like I agree with both of them.
I think new things don’t necessarily make older things obsolete. We have printers, for example, but it’s not like pens, pencils, and even chalk aren’t useful.
Whenever I start a new project (admittedly, these are personal projects so not the same kind of scale—but in my job where the where the scale is bigger I’ve noticed a similar sentiment), I like to think about everything I have available to me. I could make a Vue SPA, a generated static site with 11ty, a backend CRUD app with PHP (I like Fat-Free Framework), WordPress (haters gonna hate), a site with no JavaScript, a site with only vanilla JavaScript, or anything in between.
I at once feel like a wide-eyed optimist ready to plow into the future and a curmudgeonly get-off-my-lawn skeptic who’s been burned too many times.
It's a good thing I consider building websites/apps good fun or else I would be really stressed out. :-)
>new things don’t necessarily make older things obsolete. We have printers, for example, but it’s not like pens, pencils, and even chalk aren’t useful.
When first reading your example, I expected the printer to be the old technology. I think printers and pens have very different use cases. Using a pen establishes a creative loop with direct feedback, while printing is about making a copy of something that already exists. I think its fairer to compare a printer to digital storage/digital display of a document. The former exists due to ancient legal requirements when signing contracts.
Similarly delivering a cached SSR HTML document fast and hydrating it with JS afterwards is the way to go. TTI is only a problem if you don't use regular links as fallbacks to make requests before hydration replaces them with JS-based event Handlers.
Implement the modern web by using the established web as a fallback.
I think new things don’t necessarily make older things obsolete. We have printers, for example, but it’s not like pens, pencils, and even chalk aren’t useful.
Whenever I start a new project (admittedly, these are personal projects so not the same kind of scale—but in my job where the where the scale is bigger I’ve noticed a similar sentiment), I like to think about everything I have available to me. I could make a Vue SPA, a generated static site with 11ty, a backend CRUD app with PHP (I like Fat-Free Framework), WordPress (haters gonna hate), a site with no JavaScript, a site with only vanilla JavaScript, or anything in between.
I at once feel like a wide-eyed optimist ready to plow into the future and a curmudgeonly get-off-my-lawn skeptic who’s been burned too many times.
It's a good thing I consider building websites/apps good fun or else I would be really stressed out. :-)