221–230 of 364 posts
Craigslist. Here is something novel: let html and browsers do their job. Let your browser process simple html at light speed. Let GET be idempotent. Let users be anonymous while getting information.
Hacker News is pretty minimal in terms of UI. I like it for that.
I think the weirdest way is using React. I mean, it feels so unnatural for me, compared to the jQuery way. You have to download thousands of packages, keep track of various dependencies and their security holes, adding an overhead for auditing them. HTML5 with jQuery IMHO still beats everything in simplicity and getting work done fastly
I learned how to build dynamic web pages off of jQuery and for that I'm very grateful. I also appreciated the way there was little overhead if you just wanted to create something simple.
When HQ gave our business unit the task of redesigning the entire UI in whatever way we wanted - as long as it looked like the mockups - we decided it was time to move on from JQuery. I had some experience with Angular 2+ at the time, so I tried that one first, but it was too heavy. Same with React for the reasons you outlined. The learning curve on both were steep as well.
Then I came across Vue. When I learned I could easily create an app as quickly as I could in jQuery, without all the dependencies, I knew I found a winner. We moved forward with Vue and although eventually we couldn't avoid npm/node, I still think it's the most beginner friendly and lightest JS framework of them all. That's just my opinion of course, i'm sure plenty will disagree.
Here's an article demonstrating how it can be used without node/npm: https://medium.com/@steveolensky/create-a-spa-vuejs-applicat...
EDIT: BTW that article includes Vue-Router and some other frameworks, but you don't have to use any of it. You can simply include vue.js into your HTML pages just like jQuery and write Vanilla JS for the most part, with the added benefit of turning duplicate code into components. Win-win.
I've heard that some people build UIs with thousands of dependencies, in JavaScript that hits the server for text that is then parsed to object that are then passed through all sorts of classes that each spit out HTML. They also do some weird stuff with events like key-ups in order to re-render input fields based on objects rather than letting the browser manage those kinds of things. Sounds pretty weird to me.
Yes! Web development is "weird" because we (developers) are basically constantly trying to put square pegs into round holes. Over the past ~25 years, a document delivery system has been perverted into a application delivery system. The underlying, fundamental technologies were not intended for "UI" app development.
* build your own runtime
* running in your own window
* using your new protocol
* using a sane UI language
I favor brutalism. A 1998 style design completely contained in inline code in the header. Using base fonts and features that are supported by all browsers. It has a unique capability: it loads quickly.
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
Think it's been around for a while, but pretty fun and weird. :)
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We target IE11 with angular1.6, React and Vue and it all runs very fast. The only time we ever had trouble were lists over a few hundred items long that our internal customers didn’t want paginated. But delivering those more demanding apps in react and vue solves all our IE11 is slow problems. On any other brothers the code might as well be native.
Wait why are you using all three of AngularJS, React, and Vue?
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They just hope that Google will keep pouring infinite money into making their JavaScript engine faster. And they never kept track of their dependencies in the first place. That's the job of some build tool. Whatever it pulls in is fine.
We target IE11 with angular1.6, React and Vue and it all runs very fast. The only time we ever had trouble were lists over a few hundred items long that our internal customers didn’t want paginated. But delivering those more demanding apps in react and vue solves all our IE11 is slow problems. On any other brothers the code might as well be native.
I've heard that some people build UIs with thousands of dependencies, in JavaScript that hits the server for text that is then parsed to object that are then passed through all sorts of classes that each spit out HTML. They also do some weird stuff with events like key-ups in order to re-render input fields based on objects rather than letting the browser manage those kinds of things. Sounds pretty weird to me.
Yes! Web development is "weird" because we (developers) are basically constantly trying to put square pegs into round holes. Over the past ~25 years, a document delivery system has been perverted into a application delivery system. The underlying, fundamental technologies were not intended for "UI" app development.
The Web is much more than a document delivery or archiving system, it is hypertext and the boundary between hypertext and apps is fluid. Is Wikipedia an app or a collection of articles? Is HN an app or a collection of comments and links? There is no precise boundary.
When Berners-Lee invented the Web he was heavily inspired by Hypercard [1], an app development kit based on linking cards together.
Web development is "weird" because the web tries to be device- and platform-agnostic. The web works on large widescreens, laptops, smartphones, in text mode or on a Braille display.
Other technologies that have been used to develop UI apps from the beginning, such as Adobe Flash, assume that the display is a kind of fixed screen on which you can draw, with little or no accessibility and linking in mind.
I once worked at Chase Manhattan Bank and one of their internal networking teams had a web site for wiring requests. They didn’t want to work too hard so their UI was designed to make data entry as slow as possible, mostly by using huge multi-level drop down lists where the slightest twitch would make them collapse and you would have to start over navigating through them, repeat a dozen times for every run of cable,…
That has got to be the worst system to not have any type of stop gate in the API.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes! Web development is "weird" because we (developers) are basically constantly trying to put square pegs into round holes. Over the past ~25 years, a document delivery system has been perverted into a application delivery system. The underlying, fundamental technologies were not intended for "UI" app development.
>Over the past ~25 years, a document delivery system has been perverted into a application delivery system. ...and a protocol for inter-object communication. That's probably the most important part, because that's what creates most of the complexity and security holes today. There is no end to this in sight. Alan Kay warned web developers about this in 1997: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY Nobody listened…