HTML is the Web • Hacker News Board

Re: HTML is the Web

#321

Post by arantius » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 4:15 PM UTC

NohatCoder wrote: post #82

okaleniuk wrote: post #21

As an experiment, I started https://wordsandbuttons.online/ in plain hand-crafted HTML+CSS+JS (JS for the interactive bits only). Every page is self-sufficient, there are no dependencies, no dynamic data exchange, no HTML generators, - nothing. And it works so well, I don't really want any frameworks now. It's perfectly malleable - I can make every page do exactly what I want it to. It's lean and fast - every page ev…

It is truly astonishing how much people believe that they need frameworks. Your site looks nice, but one comment I'll make about your coding style is that you (or anyone getting inspired from your code) should probably switch away from innerHTML as the default choice for DOM modification. In a lot of otherwise useful contexts it is an HTML injection hole. (For the record it doesn't seem to be a security issue for the…

I did something very similar back in 2006: https://programming.arantius.com/dollar-e

Re: HTML is the Web

#322

Post by dshacker » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 4:46 PM UTC

hypertexthero wrote: post #200

Someone I met recently met who delegates work to web developers for a living had this to say about JavaScript frameworks: They are very seldom necessary for a job, and their main function is to create more work for more developers to get paid. As an “old school” designer who writes HTML and CSS by hand, with JavaScript for progressive enhancement, I found myself agreeing, and it reminded me of this, from back in 2001…

I'd argue the opposite point, the problem with static websites is that they were bad at capturing state. That is what lead to the bloat of JQuery messes in websites and inefficient parsing of the HTML tree. Now that developers have so many platforms to target in so many ways, having a consistent way of state to permeate through websites reduces work.

Don't take me wrong, I love crafting my website 20kb of CSS over static files. Always sign me up for a static site, but for complex websites, where interactivty and state are needed, it's important to have these frameworks.

Re: HTML is the Web

#323

Post by pixelbash » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 11:01 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #303

pixelbash wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I'm going to be in a huge minority here but I am one of those developers that builds websites that won't load without js. Hear me out though. I primarily work with ecom, and we build highly dynamic sites in an increasingly rapid arms race for engaging design. Before vue I worked with jQuery like everyone else, controlling the dom manually to react to changes in application state. Those were dark days. Now…

There is a big difference between 100% JavaScript everywhere and having Vue component to manage cart state though. A large majority of whizz bang the design team decides, can be done just with HTML 5 and CSS 3.

Where it can be done with H5 and CSS3 we use those things, we don't invite complexity for the sake of it, but it's really very easy to run into the limitations of CSS3 when doing something even slightly unusual.

Vue replaces the dom of wherever the app is, so the choice is between having everything within a single app div or having a ton of apps talking to each other. Given that the ton of apps solution still breaks fairly essential functionality (for online shopping) and requires a fair amount more structure it's a bit hard to see the benefits.

Re: HTML is the Web

#324

Post by amw-zero » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 1:30 AM UTC

This way of thinking just isn’t aging well. HTML is the view part of the web, and it turns out users want more application-like behavior and developers want to build applications and not websites. Caveat, this is still only true for some applications. Static HTML is still fine for certain applications. Just never the ones I work on.

It started with AJAX and now we’ve converged on single page apps, which are effectively native clients where the target platform is the browser. There is simply a real demand for rich client UX and you can’t get that with pure HTML. Which is no surprise because it wasn’t designed for that. It was designed for sharing textual documents, as the article proclaims. But is that an accurate model of an application? I don’t think it is. The web has evolved to support more than just hyperlinked documents. Good or bad, that’s why people want.

Re: HTML is the Web

#325

Post by amw-zero » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 1:34 AM UTC

gargravarr wrote: post #38

The biggest takeaway is that HTML was originally designed to degrade gracefully. If your browser didn't support the intended graphical layout, it would still be able to extract the hierarchy and display a usable web page, even if you were using pure text (e.g. lynx). This kept the web accessible no matter what you were using. These days, none of that occurs. Just try switching off Javascript (I use NoScript heavily t…

This graceful degradation doesn’t make sense in the application world. I know that’s not what the web was initially designed for, but this is what the web has evolved into. It’s now an application platform just as much as a document platform.

Re: HTML is the Web

#326

Post by amw-zero » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 1:36 AM UTC

thomascgalvin wrote: post #98

gargravarr wrote: post #38

The biggest takeaway is that HTML was originally designed to degrade gracefully. If your browser didn't support the intended graphical layout, it would still be able to extract the hierarchy and display a usable web page, even if you were using pure text (e.g. lynx). This kept the web accessible no matter what you were using. These days, none of that occurs. Just try switching off Javascript (I use NoScript heavily t…

> The biggest takeaway is that HTML was originally designed to degrade gracefully. ... These days, none of that occurs. This can be directly attributed to the fact that the purpose of the average webpage is no longer to convey information, but to display ads. I frequently see people say that if a site doesn't allow people with an ad blocker to read their content, they immediately bounce off the site, and that site lo…

I don’t think the ad part is the biggest influencer in the lack of ability for a website to degrade into a less styled form. I think the bigger factor is that people are also designing applications that run in the browser, and those make less sense to let degrade since they rely on a rich UI with lots of styling and behavior.

Re: HTML is the Web

#327

Post by nashahg » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 12:40 PM UTC

"HTML is not hard to learn properly, especially if you’re already accustomed to learning Javascript frameworks. I haven’t counted, but I’m pretty sure there’s only about 116 elements, and most of those you’d never normally need. Why would you not learn it?"

Couldn't agree more..

https://finance.uonbi.ac.ke/node/115029

Re: HTML is the Web

#328

Post by c0vfefe » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 1:03 PM UTC

TuringTest wrote: post #95

manbearpiggy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web pages should be designed to load without js.

This. People have forgotten why the World Wide Web was needed to begin with, and nowadays think of it merely as an integrated delivery/communication platform.

If it wasn't intended to be a communication platform, then what was it intended to be?

Re: HTML is the Web

#329

Post by c0vfefe » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 1:05 PM UTC

MadWombat wrote: post #240

manbearpiggy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web pages should be designed to load without js.

What do you mean when you say "should"? In an ideal world? Maybe. As it stands though, there is basically zero incentive to do so and quite a few incentives not to. Analytics, ads, referral networks etc. All of these require JS (at least the most popular solutions of the day) and if non of this works, what exactly is the reason to show you the page?

> What do you mean when you say "should"?

Probably "according to the original designers' intent," see this comment below you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20284550

Re: HTML is the Web

#330

Post by c0vfefe » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 1:11 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #5

A Web page is a document. No it's not. It never was. Even a long time ago when websites were static things rendered by the browser once and then left alone there was always a tree of nodes underlying everything. The only thing that's changed in the past three decades is that now when we make websites and web apps we often ship a little JS application that lets the user modify the underlying tree. That's what the web…

You've drawn a false dichotomy between document and tree. A tree is a mathematical abstraction, a document is a text-based file, and markup languages are the intersection of those. Web pages were always documents according to the HTML specification, as one of your replies linked to.