BBC World Service - lite (mastodon.social)

submitted 6 months ago by lemmyreader@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.ml

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My pals in BBC World Service have been doing some awesome work on "lite" versions of their news articles (other page types to follow). They essentially skip the Server-Side React hydration which means you end up with a simpler HTML+CSS page, no JS. Page sizes drop significantly:

Transferred: ~600KB -> 30KB
Total: 1.65MB -> 135KB Just append .lite on a URL e.g. https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/crgyyvdz1dro.lite There's no on/off UX at the moment but they're working on that too. #WebDev #WebPerf #WebPerformance #BBC

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[-] technojamin@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago

Skipping React hydration… so, only rendering on the server? BBC just re-invented server-side rendering, bravo 👏😆

I say this as an 8-year React developer. Damn, our industry really drank the kool-aid on on this one. Of course, plenty of people have been saying that React for static content like this has always been a misapplication of the tool, I’ve been reading opinions like that the entire time I’ve been working with it.

I’m glad BBC is doing this, though. Legitimate kudos to them for recognizing the issue and working towards fixing it. I actually think there are some great benefits that React has given us:

A universal component interface for all JavaScript-targeting languages
An enormous ecosystem of components
Popularization of the “component model”, which has spread to basically every other language that is used to render user interfaces (the mental model is just that much better)
A quickly-evolving (React is arguably on its third major paradigm shift) testbed for what works best for UI development

I would be happy if React was supplanted in the near future, but I also have some fondness for it. I know I’m way off topic on this post, just felt like talking about React.

this post was submitted on 14 May 2024

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