Ask HN: What does the front end dev world need to make better applications?

3 pointsRobbieGM3y ago1 comments

I finished a side project web app recently and am about to come upon a chunk of free time before uni starts again. It struck me how difficult it was to do things like:

- Make an animation performant (lots of CSS properties trigger paint or layout unexpectedly) - Make components with good keyboard accessibility (not just tabbing), common mobile gesture support, etc. - Do styling properly (CSS modules aren't quite cutting it, and on the perf side sometimes recalculating styles takes up to 50ms!)

I'd particular like to improve the performance story in the frontend world but I'd be interested in creating or contributing to anything (build tools, libraries, linters, etc.) that makes it easier for devs to make a nice user experience. I was going to experiment a bit myself with things like shadow DOM, wasm, and web workers to see if those things might be suitable for the mainstream web (for wasm we have yew, for example, but it's niche). I thought that first, I should get the opinion of web devs more experienced than myself.

To repeat the title question: What does the frontend dev world need to make better applications?

1 comments

verdverm3y ago

Stop changing things so much and using so many animations and design fads.

This complaint is more about the designers than the devs. They seem to be designing for their peers rather than the user.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

Ask HN: What does the front end dev world need to make better applications?

3 pointsRobbieGM3y ago1 comments

I finished a side project web app recently and am about to come upon a chunk of free time before uni starts again. It struck me how difficult it was to do things like:

To repeat the title question: What does the frontend dev world need to make better applications?