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Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

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Re: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

#161

Post by phiy »

JonathanBeuys wrote: post #21

You don't even need a fancy "send html fragments over the wire" approach to create a better user and developer experience. Just sending full pages, server side rendered, like Hacker News and Wikipedia do is fine: Going from the HN homepage to this topic we are on: 36 KB in 5 requests. Going from the Wikipedia Homepage to an article: 824 KB in 25 requests Going from the AirBnB homepage to an apartment listing: 11.4 MB…

This disregards the business model behind the companies. There are no transactions for wikipedia or hacker news.

Both AirBnB and Reddit are incentived to collect a massive amount of data on their users and to maximize the experience in any way possible. They need the data to understand user behavior and feed it back into the recommendation algorithms. For both hospitality and social media, users look for images/video content since it is much more powerful than text for most people. All of their competitors have equally bad performance for similar reasons, so they don't lose a competitive edge.

Hacker news specifically goes for a retro look with an interface that has not changed significantly in decades. Wikipedia simply doesn't have the money or engineering capacity to support a more robust platform like airbnb or reddit.

Re: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

#162

Post by xcrunner529 »

lolinder wrote: post #116

> Even if you use React in small areas where it pulls its weight but generally try and stick to simplicity of sending plain ol' HTML The reason why so many apps use React/Vue/whatever for everything is because this hybrid setup is far from simple. It leaves you with two different ways of rendering views, which creates unnecessary context switching for developers, and the interface between the two is often ugly and co…

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

#163

Post by turtleyacht »

dr_monster wrote: post #153
turtleyacht wrote: post #148

Browsing HN on lynx (not logged in, haven't figured out cookie jar, settings, etc) in the early morning, it was a completely different experience: a dark screen, monocolored text, and comments. It felt like a darkened cafe of inquisitive, sometimes humorous--at turns indignant or snarky--conversation: even intimate, close-quarters, sipping at coffee or wine. That's what I miss about HN's past feature: we can't browse…

Is there a way to collapse HN comments on lynx? I tried it but could not tell which comments were replies to others vs stand-alone comments.

There may be a way to collapse comments, but I didn't try it yet. If there's no complete page refresh on click, it could be Javascript manipulating the DOM, and that may not work on lynx.

I couldn't tell which are replies versus standalone, since everything is left-indented. However, some comments are definitely replies if there's ">" for example, or abbreviated and curt. But I found this "contextual friction" let me be more forgiving in a way.

The comments all seem to float in the ether, utterances in the night. The extra effort to traverse to each comment--arrow, arrow, arrow, arrow--somehow made the whole thing like an exercise in deliberate consciousness: I was seeking after content, rather than having it just be laid out and scrollable.

I was also using the framebuffer. It didn't take much to fill the screen. Moving to the next page happens more often and is so manual; you almost want to wring meaning out of every screen.

Re: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

#164

Post by john2x »

avmich wrote: post #37
intrasight wrote: post #19

You can also go to the extreme of "jpeg over the wire". Your "web browser" could probably be implemented in <1000 lines of of code ;) No state, no cookies, no million lines of bundled JavaScript.

Little problems with scrolling but constant updates when a page is resized (changes in layout) - maybe it's worth it...

You could probably split up the image into smaller pieces (let's call it slicing), put them together in a table, and only update the cells that changed.

Re: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

#165

Post by quickthrower2 »

MrPatan wrote: post #80

I think I get it. You really don't want to shift your mind to the browser. Your mind is in the server, you know what's up in there, and distributed systems are complicated, so one of the ends should be made as dumb as possible. I get it. Except, guess where the mind of the user is? On the other side of the browser. Embrace the browser, server people, it's closer to the user!

Crafting the HTML is embracing the browser, no?

Re: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

#166

Post by bradgessler »

JonathanBeuys wrote: post #21

You don't even need a fancy "send html fragments over the wire" approach to create a better user and developer experience. Just sending full pages, server side rendered, like Hacker News and Wikipedia do is fine: Going from the HN homepage to this topic we are on: 36 KB in 5 requests. Going from the Wikipedia Homepage to an article: 824 KB in 25 requests Going from the AirBnB homepage to an apartment listing: 11.4 MB…

I did a similar test on news websites at https://legiblenews.com/speed about 6 months ago that made the rounds here. It’s insane how many MB some news sites push over the wire and the number of requests they make from ads and other JS “features” that should be a few hundred KB.

Re: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

#168

Post by nicbou »

JonathanBeuys wrote: post #21

You don't even need a fancy "send html fragments over the wire" approach to create a better user and developer experience. Just sending full pages, server side rendered, like Hacker News and Wikipedia do is fine: Going from the HN homepage to this topic we are on: 36 KB in 5 requests. Going from the Wikipedia Homepage to an article: 824 KB in 25 requests Going from the AirBnB homepage to an apartment listing: 11.4 MB…

Too much of the web is developed on fast machines with fast internet and high quality monitors.

I spend a lot of time in trains, hotels and airports, and I carry a 2017 12" MacBook. It strongly influences how I build websites. It's infuriating to wait for pure content to load because it's tied to a bunch of crap that isn't what you want to read.

In that context, developer docs are often the best kind of websites.

Re: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

#169

Post by simonhamp »

slotrans wrote: post #57
basch wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IF you want the page to be interactive without refreshes though, you gotta do something. Unless you are advocating a completely pre-ajax web. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

Why are refreshes assumed to be bad?

If you have a complex user interface with the possibility that many parts might be in use at any given moment, full page refreshes mean your users could lose work.

This would definitely be a bad user experience.

But it doesn't mean refreshes are bad, just that the architect of that application hasn't factored them into the user experience appropriately, or they've made their interface unnecessarily complex.

All modern browsers have enough tools baked in that we can work around this without reinventing the execution and rendering pipeline (e.g. localStorage).

Re: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

#170

Post by half0wl »

I've been having a blast writing plain old HTML templates for the past few weeks. It's a traditional Django app. I also use plain old CSS instead of frameworks like Tailwind (well, I use Bootstrap, but I don't use its utility classes).

It's practical, pragmatic, and allows me to ship faster.

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