Yeah, but your blog is not a full featured chat system with integrated audio and video calling, strapped on top of a document format.
There are a few architectural/policy problems in web browsers that cause this kind of expansion:
1. Browsers can update large binaries asynchronously (=instant from the user's perspective) but this feature is only very recently available to web apps via obscure caching headers and most people don't know it exists yet/frameworks don't use it.
2. Large download sizes tend to come from frameworks that are featureful and thus widely used. Browsers could allow them to be cached but don't because they're over-aggressive at shutting down theoretical privacy problems, i.e. the browser is afraid that if one site learns you used another site that uses React, that's a privacy leak. A reasonable solution would be to let HTTP responses opt in to being put in the global cache rather than a partitioned cache, that way sites could share frameworks and they'd stay hot in the cache and not have to be downloaded. But browsers compete to satisfy a very noisy minority of people obsessed with "privacy" in the abstract, and don't want to do anything that could kick up a fuss. So every site gets a partitioned cache and things are slow.
3. Browsers often ignore trends in web development. React style vdom diffing could be offered by browsers themselves, where it'd be faster and shipped with browser updates, but it isn't so lots of websites ship it themselves over and over. I think the SCIter embedded browser actually does do this. CSS is a very inefficient way to represent styling logic which is why web devs write dialects like sass that are more compact, but browsers don't adopt it.
I think at some pretty foundational level the way this stuff works architecturally is wrong. The web needs a much more modular approach and most JS libraries should be handled more like libraries are in desktop apps. The browser is basically an OS already anyway.
> CSS is a very inefficient way to represent styling logic which is why web devs write dialects like sass that are more compact, but browsers don't adopt it.
I don't know exactly which features you are referring to, but you may have noticed that CSS has adopted native nesting, very similarly to Sass, but few sites actually use it. Functions and mixins are similar compactness/convenience topics being worked on by the CSSWG.
I hadn't noticed and I guess this is part of the problem. Sorry this post turned into a bit of a rant but I wrote it now.
When it was decided that HTML shouldn't be versioned anymore it became impossible for anyone who isn't a full time and very conscientious web dev to keep up. Versions are a signal, they say "pay attention please, here is a nice blog post telling you the most important things you need to know". If once a year there was a new version of HTML I could take the time to spend thirty minutes reading what's new and feel like I'm at least aware of what I should learn next. But I'm not a full time web dev, the web platform changes constantly, sometimes changes appear and then get rolled back, and everyone has long since plastered over the core with transpilers and other layers anyway. Additionally there doesn't seem to be any concept of deprecating stuff, so it all just piles up like a mound of high school homework that never shrinks.
It's one of the reasons I've come to really dislike CSS and HTML in general (no offense to your work, it's not the browser implementations that are painful). Every time I try to work out how to get a particular effect it turns out that there's now five different alternatives, and because HTML isn't versioned and web pages / search results aren't strongly dated, it can be tough to even figure out what the modern way to do it is at all. Dev tools just make you even more confused because you start typing what you think you remember and now discover there are a dozen properties with very similar names, none of which seem to have any effect. Mistakes don't yield errors, it just silently does either nothing or the wrong thing. Everything turns into trial-and-error, plus fixing mobile always seems to break desktop or vice-versa for reasons that are hard to understand.
Oh and then there's magic like Tailwind. Gah.
I've been writing HTML since before CSS existed, but feel like CSS has become basically non-discoverable by this point. It's understandable why neither Jetpack Compose nor SwiftUI decided to adopt it, even whilst being heavily inspired by React. The CSS dialect in JavaFX I find much easier to understand than web CSS, partly because it's smaller and partly because it doesn't try to handle layout. The way it interacts with components is also more logical.
The privacy issues aren't just hypothetical, but that aside, that caching model unfortunately doesn't mesh well with modern webdev. It requires all dependencies to be shipped in full, no tree shaking to only include the needed functions. And separately as individual files.. and for people to actually stick to the same versions of dependencies
There are a few architectural/policy problems in web browsers that cause this kind of expansion:
1. Browsers can update large binaries asynchronously (=instant from the user's perspective) but this feature is only very recently available to web apps via obscure caching headers and most people don't know it exists yet/frameworks don't use it.
2. Large download sizes tend to come from frameworks that are featureful and thus widely used. Browsers could allow them to be cached but don't because they're over-aggressive at shutting down theoretical privacy problems, i.e. the browser is afraid that if one site learns you used another site that uses React, that's a privacy leak. A reasonable solution would be to let HTTP responses opt in to being put in the global cache rather than a partitioned cache, that way sites could share frameworks and they'd stay hot in the cache and not have to be downloaded. But browsers compete to satisfy a very noisy minority of people obsessed with "privacy" in the abstract, and don't want to do anything that could kick up a fuss. So every site gets a partitioned cache and things are slow.
3. Browsers often ignore trends in web development. React style vdom diffing could be offered by browsers themselves, where it'd be faster and shipped with browser updates, but it isn't so lots of websites ship it themselves over and over. I think the SCIter embedded browser actually does do this. CSS is a very inefficient way to represent styling logic which is why web devs write dialects like sass that are more compact, but browsers don't adopt it.
I think at some pretty foundational level the way this stuff works architecturally is wrong. The web needs a much more modular approach and most JS libraries should be handled more like libraries are in desktop apps. The browser is basically an OS already anyway.