This Page is Designed to Last • Hacker News Board

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#161

Post by saagarjha » Fri, Dec 20, 2019, 3:27 AM UTC

waiseristy wrote: post #21

"Return to vanilla HTML/CSS" This is by and large, impossible. The hoops you have to jump through and downsides you have to endure are just a death by 10,000 cuts. Try writing a tabulated container in raw HTML and CSS that flex sizes and behaves nicely with the browser back button. Partial page reloads, containers with native (no reload!) sorting, there's so many features in modern web design that are just downright…

You probably don't need those features for content you put on your personal website.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#162

Post by m-p-3 » Fri, Dec 20, 2019, 3:29 AM UTC

charlesdaniels wrote: post #112

tempestn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was what made me convert from bookmarking to clipping pages into Evernote around 6-7 years ago. I realized I had this huge archive of reference bookmarks that were almost useless because 1) I could rarely find what I was looking for, if I even remembered I'd bookmarked something in the first place, and 2) if I did, it was likely gone anyway. With Evernote I can full text search anything I've clipped in the past…

Shout out to https://joplinapp.org/ I was an Evernote user when I was on macOS. When I switched to Linux, a proper web clipper was something I really missed. I'm now on Joplin and it does everything I used to use Evernote for and then some. It even has vim bindings now! As far as longevity goes, I think they got their archive / backup format right - it's just a tarball with markdown in it.

The developer behind it is doing some awesome stuff so I decided to sponsor him on GitHub.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#163

Post by simonsarris » Fri, Dec 20, 2019, 3:29 AM UTC

Good rules, I follow all of them, making a pure HTML/CSS single page homepage of uncompressed HTML, except... it's not at all designed to last. I nuked my last site to make it, and I'll nuke this one one day when I wanna make something even cooler. Website as art installation plus a few links.

My content is spread about, on medium, on github, twitter, instagram, wherever. But this too I feel is mostly ephemeral. It's still not clear to me why that's a bad thing. I dislike hoarding physical objects. I'm not sure about digital, either, I suppose. So one alternative is to free yourself from the idea that it needs to be hoarded, that all your works need to be maximally legible and easy to find, etc. I do suppose if you're a professor your students should probably be able to find the syllabus from your website (which he has, though it's hosted on brown's site).

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#164

Post by cellularmitosis » Fri, Dec 20, 2019, 3:35 AM UTC

I feel like philip greenspun deserves a mention as one of the OG's in this practice. https://philip.greenspun.com/sql/trees.html

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#165

Post by taftster » Fri, Dec 20, 2019, 3:35 AM UTC

juliend2 wrote: post #146

alpb wrote: post #45

Frequently appearing http://danluu.com/ on HN is one of these sites that are absolutely minimal.

On my large screen, the lines are so long that it's difficult to read. But other than that, it's a nice inspiration for how minimal a website can be.

FYI. The content looks real nice in "reader" mode (at least in Firefox).

I kind of think this is the best approach. Write your content with as minimal markup as possible. Let the user-agent render the page in my own styling.

I wish the web was a bit more like the gopher protocol, where the page markup was very minimal. Just give me the plain text (or close to it) and let my client render it the way I want to read it.

Markdown (or similar) would be an ideal representational format. This would push all the rendering decisions to the client.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#166

Post by incompatible » Fri, Dec 20, 2019, 3:37 AM UTC

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #159

incompatible wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

: "in a world where you're self-hosting all of your scripts." Anything self-hosted is already fragile: it will go away when you don't continue to actively maintain it (paying for a domain, keeping a computer connected to the Internet etc.) or when you die.

I've outlived and outhosted all of the third party hosts I've used.

I guess you can last 10 years, which is apparently what "This Page is Designed to Last" aspires to, but what if we have greater ambitions? Like 100 years?

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#167

Post by filereaper » Fri, Dec 20, 2019, 3:43 AM UTC

winfred wrote: post #135

whack wrote: post #124

Let's be honest with ourselves. The best way to make your content last for a long time is to host it on a platform that is free and very successful. For example, whatever photos I posted on Facebook 12 years ago? Still alive and kicking. The articles I've published on wordpress.com 7 years ago? Still in mint condition, with 0 maintenance required. In comparison, the websites that I've built and hosted or deployed mys…

>Let's be honest with ourselves. The best way to make your content last for a long time is to host it on a platform that is free and very successful. For example, whatever photos I posted on Facebook 12 years ago? Still alive and kicking. The articles I've published on wordpress.com 7 years ago? Still in mint condition, with 0 maintenance required. You view on timeline is too short. We're not talking about keeping so…

Clearly the only reasonable way is to store it in a Mainframe...in EBCDIC

It'll live forever...

/s

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#168

Post by JasonFruit » Fri, Dec 20, 2019, 3:45 AM UTC

simonsarris wrote: post #163

Good rules, I follow all of them, making a pure HTML/CSS single page homepage of uncompressed HTML, except... it's not at all designed to last. I nuked my last site to make it, and I'll nuke this one one day when I wanna make something even cooler. Website as art installation plus a few links. My content is spread about, on medium, on github, twitter, instagram, wherever. But this too I feel is mostly ephemeral. It's…

> It's still not clear to me why that's a bad thing.

Human advancement comes from the process of building knowledge on knowledge, using what our predecessors learned to move our starting point forward. (You're the predecessor in that sentence.)

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#169

Post by BowBun » Fri, Dec 20, 2019, 3:52 AM UTC

mark242 wrote: post #14

I fundamentally agree with the principle -- that pages should be designed to survive a long time -- however the steps the author lays out I completely disagree with. "The more libraries incorporated into the website, the more fragile it becomes" is just fundamentally untrue in a world where you're self-hosting all of your scripts. "Prefer one page over several" is diametrically opposed to the hypertext model. Please…

I didn't perceive the author to be doing any technical gatekeeping, quite the opposite. I feel like their article was targeted at people like me or others who use stuff like Hugo/Jekyll, or those who use free website builders or use large frameworks for simple websites.

I agree a couple of the points seem out of place (the monitoring service one made me laugh. visiting my website is the first thing I do after uploading a new page), but the intent of this article I wholeheartedly agree with:

Reduce dependencies, use 'dumb' solutions, and do a little ritualistic upkeep of your website to keep it around for a decade or more. The things you propose are the norm and the reason nothing sticks around, IMO.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#170

Post by panic » Fri, Dec 20, 2019, 3:53 AM UTC

To last a long time, you need a lot of people hosting copies. Think about PDFs -- it's easy to host a local copy of a PDF, so popular PDFs tend to be widely available. But a site hosting a local copy of every webpage it links to would feel weird.