Posted by begoon 1 day ago
let table = [
['one','two','three'],
['four','five','six']
];
let b = document.body;
let t = document.createElement('table');
b.appendChild(t);
table.forEach((row,ri) => {
let r = t.insertRow(ri);
row.forEach((l,i) => {
let c = r.insertCell(i);
c.innerText = l;
})
});
It takes time for the contrarian dynamic to work itself out (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and once that happens, the original problem subsides but and the secondary problem (shallow objection to the objection) sticks out like a sore thumb.
It's usually enough to downvote (or, in egregious cases) flag a post that shouldn't be at the top. In really egregious cases, emailing hn@ycombinator.com is also a fine idea.
From the guidelines: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's a small critique, I'm sorry it got upvoted by other people.
It's a brain scramble because you can't just read in toto.
Well, you can literally, but, you don't feel like you grok it.
And when you take a second pass you gotta slow down and stop and parse "what's r here? is it relevant? oh rows?"
It's one of those things that's hard to describe because it doesn't sound like much if you got it. And this example is trivial, especially if you're not open to the idea its a problem (r/c = rows/columns) But it's nigh-impenetrable in other scenarios.
You feel like you're barely understanding something that you actually might grok completely.
I agree, it's highly context-specific.
In a small demo for a small blog post with basically no complexity? Go ahead, use 1 character variable names, it really isn't difficult.
In the 1000 long CUDA kernel where you barely understand what's going on even though you understand the concepts? I'd be favoring longer descriptive names than one letter names for sure.
In just 4 lines you have r, row, t, ri, l, i and c.
The full variables names are so short anyway that personally I'd write them out. Code does evolve and there's a risk of this suffering as a result.
RowIndexFactoryGeneratorService rowIndexFactoryGeneratorService = new RowIndexFactoryGeneratorService();
RowIndexFactory rowIndexFactory = rowIndexFactoryGeneratorService.getTheFactoryOrSomethingIDontCare();
RowIndex rowIndex = rowIndexFactoryGeneratorService.generateRowIndex();As someone who likes to program in Haskell, I feel this pain very strongly. :)
I like to joke, "you think programmers are bad at naming thing, you should see the mathematicians, programmers are infants before the infernal naming sense of the common mathematician".
```python
bar = [foo(e) for e in elements]
```
If you're going to use short names at least make it clear which belong together. Especially don't use different lengths when things ought to be similar.
data.forEach((row,i) => row.forEach((ele,j) => ... ))This one hurts the most. Save a few bytes for an ungodly amount of mental friction.
that's like saying in spoken language "don't ever use pronouns, or even first or nicknames, use full given names"
> document.createElement("table").rows[Symbol.iterator]()
// Array Iterator { constructor: Iterator() }
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLTableEl...
const te = document.createElement('table');
document.body.appendChild(te);
[
['one', 'two', 'three'],
['four', 'five', 'six' ],
].forEach((r, i) => {
const re = te.insertRow(i);
r.forEach((c, j) => {
re.insertCell(j).innerText = c;
})
});
Disclaimer: I have not tested the code and I only write JavaScript once every few years and when I do I am unhappy about it.
As for variables, I (again personally) find it taxing to have many variables in scope, so I do net see their presence as a universal good. If we instead simply use expressions, then there is no need to concern yourself with whether the variable will come into play later on. Thus, I think it increases clarity and favour that over the ease of future modification argument you propose (heck, I would argue that you get better diffs even if you force the variable declaration into a future modification).
As for bikeshedding this piece of code further, if I steal some ideas from chrismorgan [1] and embedding-shape [2] who appear to be way more seasoned JavaScript programmers than me:
const $t = document.createElement('table');
for (const r of
[
['one', 'two', 'three'],
['four', 'five', 'six' ],
]) {
const $r = $t.insertRow();
for (const e of r)
$r.insertCell().innerText = e;
};
document.body.append($t);
I fear this will be even worse now that we have the origin File System API and people can bring their own database engines (like web-assambled SQLite). But for those of us that are striving towards smaller download sizes this is a disaster.
https://github.com/w3c/IndexedDB/issues/230
I personally think that this stall is simply a symptom of the larger issue that the IndexedDB standard was bad to begin with, and that lead to lax adoption from developers, which deprioritized vendors from fixing the standard, leading to a vicious cycle where even a seemingly trivial issue like adding BigInt support goes unimplemented.
I personally think that IndexedDB is salvageable, and not only that, it has the potential to be an amazing web API. But the way things are progressing with the standards committee, I very much doubt it will be any better in the foreseeable future.
Topic is reminiscent of a submission from yesterday about XSLT:
I doubt that's true for .insertCell() and .insertRow().
The Google deprecation notice fails to address why a gigantic company with nearly unlimited resources couldn’t implement this feature themselves instead of forcing a breaking change.
I remember doing this 25 years ago, but I assume (and hope) it's a huge minority who do this today?
If was much simpler to build tables in javascript with this rather than using document.createElement.
Perhaps this was one of those things that you just had to know about, or be working on data heavy web apps.
"table" was never deprecated in HTML at all, but was discouraged for general layout (we were aware of this even in the early 2000s). But for representing tabular data - like... data in rows/columns from spreadsheets (with column headers and such)... HTML tables were absolutely the right (only?) way to present this.
I was at that company less than a year...
Best case I'm hoping it's because they were required to get an exact design, but they really should have pushed back on that one if so.
Just use <a> please :)
Seems to me that we have redundant mechanisms for specifying semantics: tags and attributes (and classes as a specific attribute). Seems to me that tags are really just syntactic sugar for things like roles. Tables in particular are easily abused.
Of course I use the tag names, because they're idiomatic. But I feel like a newbie who identifies divs as the only true structure builder has a proper developer's intuition for separating presentation from content.
As long as you think about semantics and accessibility and does the extra work to add those things, then not really.
But why add those extra things when we already get those for free by doing <h1> and then customizing the style? Everything you'd need to manually add, automatically works fine then, so seems like a no-brainer to avoid putting more work on your table.
I was replying to the wrong comment, because I was responding to this:
> I still use this pretty much everywhere to create HTML tables. Do people use something else now?
Regarding React: what would be the benefit for using this old syntax sugar in its vDOM implementation?
Page reflow is not an issue for vDOM as it batches such updates anyway?
And using syntax sugar without benefits in the DOM reconciliation would be pointless.
React also doesn't locate form input elements using document.forms.[name]?.[name] because... why should they?
Just because they can...
Regarding the creation of tables, the most common way to do it would be... parsing initial document's HTML?!
It's not that long ago when people were fighting here about React, Vue etc being too complex and comparing bundle sizes.
Using this right now would increase bundle size for no good reason whatsoever.
I hear you!
For me though, it made me feel old for a different reason
I had first developed webapps in the late 90s (96 onwards) using cgi-bin, perl, etc. My first webapp, done for money, was something similar to MRTG.
At some point in the last almost-30-years) I had actually used this API! I have, however, forgotten all about it and was only reminded of it with this post.
So, yeah, I feel old because I can legitimately say to many modern web-devs that "I've forgotten more about web dev than you you currently know" :-)
Tables are great. I don't doubt that CSS stuff is more capable, but the old ones are still useful.
What is discouraged is using tables as invisible layout grids - and that was their primary de-facto usecase before CSS and grid layouts. But that had always been a hack, even though a necessary one.
After too.
I've seen enough "Introduction to CSS"s filled with caveats and hemming & hawing to know that it's all to be avoided when+if possible. I know, I know, there's a whole wide wonderful world out there full of aligns and borders and containers and insets and margins and masks and offsets and paddings and positions oh my. Bleccch..
Hack implies brittleness. Using tables for layout was just fine for all but the most ideologically pure pedants.
According to who?
Doing table-free multi-column layouts involved doing crazy “float: left/right + padding + margin” with an heavy sprinkle of IE6 clearfix hacks to work right. I mean eventually people dialed in the correct incantations to make table-free designs work for IE6 but it was never quite as straightforward or reliable as a good old fashioned table. Many megajoules of energy were wasted on webform drama between the pragmatic "fuck you, tables just work and I have shit to ship" webdev and the more academic "tables break the semantic web and aren't needed, use CSS." crew.
Like most things, the "tables are evil" mantra was taken too far and people started to use floated divs (or <li/>’s or <span/>’s or whatever) for shit that actually was tablular data! (I was guilty of this!).
And like most things, a lot of the drama went away when IE6 finally went away. People who weren't around back then simply cannot understand exactly how much IE6 held back modern web design. You could almost count on half your time being spent making shit work for IE6, despite the ever decreasing amount of traffic it got. I'm pretty sure I almost cried the day Google slapped a "IE6 will no longer be supported" on it's site.... the second they did that, my site got the exact same banner. Fuck IE6. The amount of costs that absolute pile of shit browser caused the industry exceeded the GDP of entire nations.
Anyway.... back to adding weird activex shit in my CSS so IE6 can support alpha-blended PNGs....
Aside: I started with Perl CGI scripts, then ColdFusion, and finally Classic ASP back in the 90s. I had a chuckle a couple years ago dealing with a younger developer who was shocked that and oldster like me was up on new-fangled SSR patterns.