Simplify sharing with built-in APIs and progressive enhancement - Set Studio

Introducing the Web Share API  |  Web  |  Google Developers

This is an interesting API that just landed in the newest version of Chrome behind a token—it gives you programmatic access to the OS’s share functionality via a (secure) website.

Paul finishes this rundown with the interesting bit:

Future work will also level the playing field for web apps, by allowing them to register to be a “share receiver”, enabling web-to-app sharing, app-to-web sharing and web-to-web sharing.

Maybe I’ll get to see a native “huffduff this” option in my lifetime.

HTMX and Web Components Instead of React

So instead of asking “why not React?” we asked: Which of our actual problems would React solve? We went through the list. There were none.

Also, this is good advice when you’re about to make a web component:

Every component starts with the question “does a semantic element already exist for this?”, and remarkably often the answer is yes.

JS-heavy approaches are not compatible with long-term performance goals

Frameworks like React are often perceived as accelerators, or even as the only sensible way to do web development. There’s this notion that a more “modern” stack (read: JS-heavy, where the JS ends up running on the user’s browser) allows you to be more agile, release more often with fewer bugs, make code more maintainable, and ultimately launch better sites. In short, the claim is that this approach will offer huge improvements to developer experience, and that these DevEx benefits will trickle down to the user.

But over the years, this narrative has proven to be unrealistic, at best. In reality, for any decently sized JS-heavy project, you should expect that what you build will be slower than advertised, it will keep getting slower over time while it sees ongoing work, and it will take more effort to develop and especially to maintain than what you were led to believe, with as many bugs as any other approach.

Where it comes to performance, the important thing to note is that a JS-heavy approach (and particularly one based on React & friends) will most likely not be a good starting point; in fact, it will probably prove to be a performance minefield that you will need to keep revisiting, risking a detonation with every new commit.

dead framework theory | AI Focus

This is depressing.

Who’s Afraid of a Hard Page Load?

Why single-page apps are just not worth it:

Here’s the problem: your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript.

Meanwhile, the browser marches on, improving the UX of every website that uses basic HTML semantics. For instance: browsers often don’t repaint full pages anymore.