I disagree taste is a very real thing and there are multiple levels to taste from shallow and easily changed, to deep and relatively constant.
Shallow taste is stuff like popular trends that come and go, and hating the taste of beer until you’ve had it a few times (not saying everyone has to like beer, that’s not the point).
Deeper taste is more like your deeply held cognitive biases. Like a current of a river or the valleys cut into a mountain. It’s the shape of your cognition that determines how information flows through your brain.
Deeper taste is heavily connected to you and your identity. It’s part of who you are. I think most people would agree that parts of themselves change very slowly, and some not at all.
I know there are parts of me that feel the same as when I was a child. To deny the existence of taste is to deny the existence of a “you” that is different from others.
The process you’re describing is humans extending our collective distribution through a series of smaller steps. That’s what the “shoulders of giants” means. The result is we are able to do things further and further outside the initial distribution.
So it depends on if you’re comparing individual steps or just the starting/ending distributions.
React itself is a frontend-agnostic library. People primarily use it for writing websites but web support is actually a layer on top of base react and can be swapped out for whatever.
So they’re really just using react as a way to organize their terminal UI into components. For the same reason it’s handy to organize web ui into components.
I understand some people like skeuomorphism and that's fine. But I've noticed a certain arrogance skeuomorphism fans tend to have as if it's THE right way to design and everyone else is wrong.
Given the choice between "These icons look a bit garish in a subjective sense" and "what abstract art piece describes the Pages app" I'd rather have the one that's still useful. One benefit of skeuomorphism was the level of detail, that's fully been abandoned along with the affordances that brought.
I've honestly never had an issue with using flat design. Or if I have, it hasn't been enough of an issue to remember. I don't mean this in a judgemental way, just that I legitimately don't understand why people care.
That's fair, it's not like this is completely breaking usability. But I have to ask, do you think the most recent pages icon is really the most accessible and useful version for this app? The logical end of the flat design and minimalism trend got us here and I think it's grossly over done.
That's hard to answer because clearly my opinion is disconnected from most people. If this thread didn't exist I wouldn't give it more than a second though "that's the new icon ok"
Because it is literally the best way to design and everyone else is wrong. Look at actual HCI studies. There's exactly zero arguments for any kind of flat or minimalistic design outside of art, or if you want to make a statement.
The only reason it's used that it's cheaper and faster to make, is perfectly soulless not to make anyone upset, and it's trendy.
>There's exactly zero arguments for any kind of flat or minimalistic design outside of art
Here’s one: helping the interface stay out of the way, removing clutter so the actual content of the app takes focus instead.
I can tell you it works because with the new Glass stuff everything is begging for attention again, and I hate it.
And just to be clear, I’m not voting for design overflattened to the point one can’t tell icons apart. For me, around 4 in the diagram is the ideal middle point.
What’s he’s saying (behind too many opinions) is that actual HCI studies collected in something resembling a scientific manner show very clearly that skeuomorphic work better, for many clearly defined metrics of better.
What's your decision tree for when you feel you need a SPA in 2025?
At least some of what you may not be getting in this space is how many developers right now seem to be hugely deprioritizing or just dropping SPA from their decision trees lately. Recent advances in CSS and ESM and Web Components such as View Transitions and vanilla/small-framework JS (ESM) tree-shaking/"unbundling"/importmaps give MPAs more of the benefits of a complex SPA with fewer of the downsides (less of a "mandatory" build process, smaller initial bundle load). It is easy to feel less of a need for "complex SPA" to be on your architecture options board.
I recently tried a hello-world in react. It made ten network requests on page load and probably had a sizable first download. That’s why web pages are so slow today.
Hello world in react is just a few lines of code that mounts a react component to a dom element. There should be zero network requests beyond the initial download of html and js.
You’re either doing something wrong or not actually doing a hello world.
I don’t know but vite was involved, looks like it was setting up live updates. This is part of the problem, you can’t just include a script apparently.
vite adds additional things to your page in dev so that it's easier to debug. when you are running it in production, it is just one js bundle & one css file.
That’s just Vite’s dev mode. I think React is way overused but your example here is a bad one. You just weren’t aware what the dev tool was doing, it has nothing to do with the experience end users will have. It isn’t even anything to do with React.
Plain react is arguably just as simple if not simpler than jquery.
And I’m not saying every site needs to be an SPA. I’m saying if I can write everything from a simple site to an SPA in a single framework then why not use that for everything?
React is an implementation of View component of MVC, View is responsible for displaying Model contents, not for handling routes. You are trying to use the wrong tool.
