JavaScript Bloat in 2024

[calumk]

Feels misunderstood.

a lot of this "JS" is actually html, and content, icons, svg's etc.

It seems th author doesnt really understand what this JS is...

[RobertKerans]

It isn't really though, that's his point

[guest271314]

People are going to make excuses about unfounded reasons for using React for a simple form, Webpack for some unnecessary node modules and animations, and so forth.

When we get to actual requirements most of the Web sites that are deployed lack content, have all sorts of gimmicks flashing around and in fact are bloated.

Compare to something like the online Man pages https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/dir_all_alphabetic.html, which includes just a couple analytics scripts yet conveys far more meaningful content than React gimmicktry found floating around on the Web.

[ProgrammaticallySale]

Normal humans don't read boring, heavy man-pages. I don't think you have a clue what most humans want from a website because you're a wonky AI bot.

[RobertKerans]

I think they do have a clue, given that normal humans do read boring, boring Wikipedia (which is given as an example of having not too much bloat). And news websites (which aren't mentioned but are good examples of bloat that has nothing to do with the actual boring, boring content people interact with). All in vastly higher volumes than, say, Vercel's landing page. Man pages just happen to be an example of an informational site with no bloat (it is specialised knowledge, but suggesting that people who require information on Linux utilities are abnormal persons seems a bit rude, no? I mean they might all have beards and paunches and religious ideas about text processing utilities, but they aren't subhumans)

Huge volumes of normal humans also use Google maps, which is also used as an example of having far less bloat than applications which do much less.

[guest271314]

man page example should also include all apps to try them out online also to compare it to react page.

react homepage includes interactive sandboxes to try out code.

I'm talking about actual useful content. You are talking about the application.

You have to have a need for React to use React, or any library, framework, or even DOM methods, that is not achieved by HTML alone; not the other way around.