Comment by idlewords
2 years ago
I wrote this seven years ago and haven't studied the issue much in the interim. Can people who are up to speed on modern web design comment on what's changed (for the better or worse) in the interim? Do the tools and frameworks still change every few months, or have things settled down a bit?
React is now the default choice. Google made everyone aware of page speed with their Core Web Vitals — speed/UX metrics affecting SEO. There’s noise about tools and practices to reduce page weight with JS-heavy sites, but in practice it still goes up linearly: https://httparchive.org/reports/page-weight. Your piece is still relevant.
There is a recent resurgence of backend-driven website interactivity micro-frameworks like Phoenix LiveView, Rails Stimulus/Hotwire, and most recently (and most generic) htmx. These all advocate for writing minimal (sometime zero) custom JavaScript and driving interactivity through use of partial HTML fragments returned by the backend. They also allow for ultra-simple tooling setup like just throwing a <script> tag into the page instead of having to set up an npm project.
htmx btw is about 12 KB gzipped and enables a surprising amount of interactivity on pages.