> I read a blog post[0] about Wagtail,....because it's more like a CMS framework...
Yeah neither Drupal nor Wagtail sound remotely appealing to me. A CMS, in general terms, is just that: a Content Management System. Now that's pretty broad with lots of room for products which are both good and bad.
Personally I'm interested in the Business Intelligence space where people build Apps, only I'm targeting companies who wish to empower their Business Analysts (or specifically the blue to 'purple people') to build apps and streamline inefficient IT processes.
I'm not sure if BI apps are considered a CMS or not, but when I read that 'trap' article I couldn't help but relate.
> I think I'm just really pro progressive enhancement, and it's sometimes the first thing to go.
Well progressive enhancement is not, not using JS.
Progressive Enhancement is pretty much the opposite of Graceful Degradation. In GD you fallback to allow lesser technologies to handle the workload, where PE is starting with limited functionality and build up incrementally to gracefully handle the workload. JS is often what is used to achieve PE.
> I think there's a bit of a tendency to use way too large and slow JS frameworks, but I'm interested in ClojureScript now because it seems to be all about eliminating dead code and optimizing.
Yep.
All I can say here is that automation and the benefits that comes from that will have a cost. Your product/app/page will contain larger files which do some amount of work for you.
Developers have a tendency to see 'frameworks' from a maximal code efficiency perspective, but frameworks really are all about lessening the $ cost, the work burden, time to market and the operational maintenance. The argument is always "If you're building a blog you shouldn't need a framework." And that's true, but most frameworks are not built for making blogs, they're built for greater things - however if said framework makes it easier for person A to do thing X, even if it's just a blog then, really, it's hard not to see it happening (even though developers don't like to see it).
Frameworks, really, are for when large tailor made products become nightmares to manage, that's when they become the go to "solution" and start to shine. Modern day web development has a lot of pitfalls and will require a skillset that not everyone has. Not everyone can make dynamic apps that don't get bogged down by limiting factors like the DOM tree (cluster fuck), rendering/paint (bottle-necks), and single threaded environments (the async data gotcha's). Frameworks can help with all this, but it's at a cost. The file size is bigger, it's not Free Software, it uses JS and you have the potential to be caught-up in a CMS trap.
> Well progressive enhancement is not, not using JS. Progressive Enhancement is pretty much the opposite of Graceful Degradation.
Yea, exactly. I'm OK with JavaScript being used for better UX as long as core functionality works w/o JS. From W3C:
> So, graceful degradation is the practice of building your web functionality so that it provides a certain level of user experience in more modern browsers, but it will also degrade gracefully to a lower level of user in experience in older browsers. This lower level is not as nice to use for your site visitors, but it does still provide them with the basic functionality that they came to your site to use; things do not break for them.[0]
If it is assumed that voting is part of the basic functionality of HN, then HN does PE wrong by breaking it when there's no JS. It's a relatively recent change to HN and Anarki doesn't suffer from that issue.
Yet it's neat that HN uses JS to prevent page reloading on voting. I'm just doing no JS at all on my own project here to make sure I don't accidentally rely on it, because I don't really trust myself to use it in moderation.
> Frameworks can help with all this, but it's at a cost. The file size is bigger,
Yea, they're beneficial, but heavy. HN front page: 62K. HN search: 1.19M. Did they really need Angular for that search input form? That's where ClojureScript looks promising though: Their `helloworld` example is just 20K.[1]
Obviously you're more into graceful degradation than progressive enhancement.
My idea of graceful degradation is falling back to a message that says "sorry, not going to happen!" :)
So, obviously, I'm more into progressive enhancement than graceful degradation.
> ClojureScript looks promising though...
Well to be fair, ClojureScript is not a full fledged framework; It is a framework, but really it's more of a compiler with some library functions. Reagent [1], for example, is a library that bridges the gap between ClojureScript and React. So I'm not sure it's fair to compare ClojureScript to these full fledged frameworks... you're still correct though, in that ClojureScript alone can produce apps with a smaller footprint.
That said & just to compare, last time I checked, React and Elm are appx. 42-45kb, Angular is 90kb. So HN search, obviously need to add their own code to bring it in at 1.19M.
My app, written in pure Clojurescript, is currently at 90kb minified. I hope to bring that down, but chances are the first release will actually be a little larger.
