I am trying to bootstrap a SaaS business by myself and chose to split between SPA+rest for the product itself and static html + CSS + vanilla js for the landing page and documentation. I chose this because I've got limited resources and am not a designer, but with react I can get a nice polished interface quite quickly using things like material UI. I really tried hard to keep the tech as simple as possible while providing the quality I want and this was the best option.
Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
261–270 of 313 posts
Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Says who? Everyone who isn't only on the web to try to make money. That's who. But all you for-profit types are runining it. As the browser becomes more powerful it is more important to secure it. As security becomes more important features are removed and the browser begins telling the user what they can and cannot do. And on the webmaster side it becomes infeasible for browsers to display your site or search engi…
Ha. Who says you shouldn't try to make money on the web? This is a deeper argument about capitalism and exploitation of resources. Practically speaking, capitalism will always find ways to make profit from exploitable resources. If you don't like that, you have to change society.
I'm fine with that. I'm not fine with browser and HTML/etc spec being defined by for profit entities now that the w3c has been marginalized. And I'm not fine with the changes they are requiring.
Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
#263I don't even mean for this to be a plug but it's really easy to start up a VueJS site. I have done it multiple times.
``` npm i -g vue-cli; vue-cli create my-app; cd my-app; npm run build; aws s3 cp --recursive dist/ s3://my-site/; ```
Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You need experienced engineers to create performance no >matter what your domain is. Actually the funny thing with HTML is that the simplest things are fast. If you just write a old school HTML web page without a bazillion frame works and not going too heavy on graphics things are usually fast. And doing that is literally so much simpler and easier than learning all the super complicated frameworks of the day. So it…
This perspective is reasonable, until you start applying it to highly interactive / dynamic GUIs. Real-time chat is the most obvious case where the html purist won’t offer an acceptable experience. Another example: any page that displays a row/table of data that the user wants to sort (frontend libraries make sorting instantaneous, compared to full page refreshes with html-only). There are lots of people using compli…
Most of the web bloat is not used to create highly interactive GUIs.
Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
#265I have a repo of static HTML pages with my personal documentation (I develop firmware). When started it some years ago, I almost chose WordPress, since I know it from running a small store.
I didn't wanted the hassle of a DB, theming, etc. Why can't I edit webpages with Dreamweaver like 25 years ago?
Then I've found Hugo (https://gohugo.io/), set a template in like 5 minutes and now I edit my docs directly in VSCode and see them change in realtime. Also, the docs can be easily versioned (git in my case).
For a dumb like me (in the web-developing sense), static pages are a blessing. I am glad we are "evolving back".
Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
#266question... i keep hearing people say that when you use something like react, you need to have some sort of ssr in order to do any sort of seo. is that really necessary since google and other search engine can parse out js nowadays?
Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is this downvoted? I'm a big fan of PHP, but I feel something like Netlify CMS + Jekyll on Netlify is appropriate for this. It would be super fast (statically generated and on Netlify CDN) and secure (no database or app scripts) and includes an editing interface. With WordPress I don't worry about the PHP part, but for the tendency of people to bloat it by installing plugins and not updating it enough.
Netlify and Jekyll are kind of more oriented towards develoeprs, not Janine in reception. Regarding WordPress and plugins:
I'd rather Janine ping me three times a year to change some string than deploy PHP with mysql.
Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
#268This is a strange way to define static. To me, a static site is one which doesn't make dynamic requests. Sure, it might load in static images (even static JavaSceipt!), but it would run fine if all resources were burned to a CD and loaded without networking.
A static site may be archived. It may be used with any browser at all. It will probably be useful even without a browser.
Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're back to "The boring solution has a long list of inconveniences and uglinesses that everyone knows about. If we chose the new solution, nobody would know where the bugs are and we can have exciting new ones." Really the problem is that the standard solution hasn't improved. Backends are still a hassle in the 2020s. People keep reinventing CGI. Every now and again I think "why doesn't someone just produce a simpl…
> "The boring solution has a long list of inconveniences and uglinesses that everyone knows about. If we chose the new solution, nobody would know where the bugs are and we can have exciting new ones." Is this C vs Rust again? (it's a joke, but go ahead, downvote).
Rust is great, but it's so young that even the ugliness we knew about from a couple months ago is better known than the ugliness of today. The latest stabilisation of async/.await has me hard at work forgetting all the pre-futures-0.3 stuff I'd learned.
Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
#270Everyone looks at tooling like Gatsby+netlify to support their dreams of a JAM stack, but vanilla html/JS/CSS can do a lot written by hand too. I recently replaced a whole WordPress blog by saving it from the browser and cleaning it to the point where non-devs have an easier time updating it on GitHub than struggling with the mass of config pages and plugin shortcodes they needed before.