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Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

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Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#381

Post by quickthrower2 »

FreeHugs wrote: post #85
_ps6d wrote: post #57

HN is lightweight in some ways, but also quite bad in others. For example, every single time you vote on anything, the site sends back a 302 redirect and then a copy of the entire page's HTML in response. This means that every vote results in a response that's usually around 10KB gzipped. As of right now, for me, voting on any comment in this thread currently causes a 14KB response and takes about 1.3 seconds to fini…

This means that every vote results in a response that's usually around 10KB gzipped I have Facebook open in another window and opened the network inspector to compare it: Just moving the mouse towards the like button created 824KB of data transfer. Not sure if it is because of tracking the mouse movement or if it preloads stuff it thinks my mouse is moving towards. Or maybe it loads stuff that it would display if I h…

This is a diversion to the point being made.

Facebook is a very different site, and could be lazy loading anything, and do you know the mouse move was causal? was there a window.setTimeout initiating it?. Facebook is not a site i'd expect to use on a low bandwidth connection, or if I did I'd use a low bandwidth version if possible (like Gmail has a HTML only version).

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#382

Post by Can_Not »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #309
adtac wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one said anything about SPAs. You can keep the site modern whilst still serving content in separate pages with a little JavaScript here and there. Being ideologically against any and every form of JavaScript is being pretentious and holier-than-thou. As for concrete examples of the above, see lobste.rs for an excellent interface that's still minimal and responsive. Typing this comment on HN took me to a separate H…

> No one said anything about SPAs. You can keep the site modern whilst still serving content in separate pages with a little JavaScript here and there. But that's not modern web development, that's jQuery-style coding. Modern web development is about heavyweight SPA frameworks like React or Angular.

Heavy weight SPA frameworks might be popular, but there are also tiny SPA frameworks like choo, svelte, hyper.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#383

Post by ASCII-only »

ngold wrote: post #222
dmarlow wrote: post #101

I love hearing stories about people choosing to forego large frontend frameworks, or even not using JS altogether. Is there a community or name for this? If not, I'm going to call it #neverscript. I find the web works far better, more often, for me when SPAs and JS aren't used. There's something about minimalistic sites that's very appealing to me. I know it doesn't work for all sites, but a lot of the web could be i…

I have a hobby webcomic, and it made me realize how little code you need for any website. Works great on any device and it is 2mb. That 2mb is the actual comic page. It has every navigation and contact button you could want. And I believe it is about 80 lines of html total. Boggles my mind how bloated and down right creepy the modern web is today. A webcomic is a far cry from some main stream site, but it served as a…

doesn't have a way to interact with the server (e.g. chat/feeds etc.) - which most sites need to have

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#384

Post by JaRail »

simias wrote: post #324
JaRail wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're not using frameworks/libraries, it's typically referred to as vanilla js . Probably the name stuck thanks to this amazing satire of a js library. http://vanilla-js.com/ . This was basically around the time browsers got good enough that jQuery was no longer needed. It essentially emphasized that all the showcase features of popular 'must-have' js libraries were now a standard part of modern browsers.

>Probably the name stuck thanks to this amazing satire of a js library. http://vanilla-js.com/ Using "vanilla" to describe a standard, unmodified and un-customized version of something is a very common idiom. This satirical website followed the convention, it didn't coin the expression. I don't think it's even jargon, it's just based on the meaning of the adjective "vanilla": Lacking adornments or special features; b…

Of course. But within the JavaScript community, it has taken on specific meaning: no 3rd party libraries at runtime.

For "vanilla js," I can still have compilers, type checking, advanced ECMAScript 2019 features, local storage, webgl, etc. Without that understanding, you could qualify something as "vanilla js" in lots of different ways.

If someone said "vanilla c++," they might mean c++ without the recent language features, or they could mean the latest language spec but no standard library. Maybe it's still okay to link OpenGL but not okay to use a desktop GUI framework? Maybe OS frameworks are okay but nothing more? There's no communal understanding there that I'm aware of.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#385

Post by JaRail »

dmarlow wrote: post #359
JaRail wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're not using frameworks/libraries, it's typically referred to as vanilla js . Probably the name stuck thanks to this amazing satire of a js library. http://vanilla-js.com/ . This was basically around the time browsers got good enough that jQuery was no longer needed. It essentially emphasized that all the showcase features of popular 'must-have' js libraries were now a standard part of modern browsers.

What if you don't want to use JS at all? I want to cater to people who want to turn off JS altogether.

Would just be called non-JS. However you don't need to avoid javascript completely to cater to non-js users. The term "progressive enhancement" is used for a site that works without javascript but gets enhanced when it loads. Hacker News is like that. The links/buttons would trigger full page loads except the javascript cancels those actions and handles them without. The vote button won't refresh a page, for example.

I personally don't think there's a market for non-js users. Most of the web is pretty broken without. I've never encountered someone in the real world who lives this way, even in the tech world. At most, someone will install a no-script browser plugin. That makes whitelisting and enabling javascript dead easy for the user. The only legitimate non-js use cases, IMHO, are for extreme political cases where you'd also be using TOR.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#386

Post by r00fus »

baby wrote: post #259
r00fus wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On mobile, I use MiniHack (there are tons of other HN apps). On desktop, HN's interface works well enough that I don't try to mess with it. I really wish I could do one feature on the desktop/web that mobile MiniHack.app does on mobile - to enforce all links opened launch in reader mode in Safari webview. 99% of the time that's exactly what I want when I click through.

Paying to browse a free website? Check premii

My time isn't free. I don't mind paying a small up-front fee for usability. Plus, upvotes with HN's site ui on mobile resulted in mis-votes - that's fixed with MiniHack or other HN apps.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#387

Post by TeMPOraL »

Can_Not wrote: post #382
TeMPOraL wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one said anything about SPAs. You can keep the site modern whilst still serving content in separate pages with a little JavaScript here and there. But that's not modern web development, that's jQuery-style coding. Modern web development is about heavyweight SPA frameworks like React or Angular.

Heavy weight SPA frameworks might be popular, but there are also tiny SPA frameworks like choo, svelte, hyper.

I like Svelte, but it's not exactly tiny. And it still has the cost of generating everything with JS.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#388

Post by acangiano »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #370
acangiano wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a gigabit Internet connection with top of the line laptops and Facebook still makes me wait for a second or two simply to show me 5 notifications.

You may have gigabit, but what’s your ping time?

To Facebook.com, about 25 ms.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#390

Post by GoblinSlayer »

zamadatix wrote: post #361
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few work correctly with zoom. One of them is http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ And text has nothing to do with pixels, it's not raster.

Can you give an example of one that works poorly with zoom? Like I said literally all of the browsing I've done in the last couple of years on my work PC has been with 200% zoom and I've never noticed a site be broken/different to my 100% setup. I suppose if you have e.g. a 720p screen and do 200% zoom you might run into some problems but that's got little to do with zoom and more to do with the lack of space on your…

YC, reddit, wikipedia, github, SO (very horrible), all google sites.

Lack of space is not really a thing for html, rarely a page fits on screen without scroll and wrap.

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