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The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

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Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#171

Post by rhines »

ryandrake wrote: post #147
jedimastert wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> worse in almost all ways How so? I dislike the text color choice, but other than that it seems perfectly fine to me.

Admittedly most is just personal preference but the line width thing is the cardinal sin. Forcing huge blocks of whitespace on either side of the text for nebulous "readability" reasons is just wasteful. Too many web sites ape this pattern too. Look at John Gruber's website [1] on a nice wide 27" monitor for an extreme example. The content takes up less than 1/5 of the width of the screen. 1: https://daringfireball.n…

While it is wasteful, I think the readability gain is far from nebulous. If you look at newspapers, they break pages up into columns. If books exceed a certain width, they get broken down into columns. Journals often break their articles into columns.

Now, a fair follow-up to this is that why don't we make text on the web into columns, so instead of big sidebars of white space you fit multiple columns of text on the screen? I'd say this is probably because the web uses scrolling instead of pagination. If there's more text than can fit on the page, it's faster and easier to just scroll down than it is to load a new page. But if you have a layout with columns, you'd have to scroll down to read, then scroll back to the top each time you finish a column, which is a hassle. So just having one long column requires the least user effort.

All said, of course some people might have different preferences. I'm sure some people find it easier looking from side to side with full screen text than scrolling down, or easier to click a next page button than scrolling down. But I think the trend for fixed width single columns on the web is one that's meeting many if not most peoples' preferences.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#172

Post by vxNsr »

benbristow wrote: post #120
ogre_codes wrote: post #10

This is a fantastic article, it does miss one very key point about bog-standard HTML which is worth mentioning though. The standard widgets are all accessible, people with screen readers, limited mobility, poor vision, etc, all rely on pages being written so the devices they use to read the web can function properly. People who choose to eschew these standard components very frequently end up with a site which is unu…

> Very few people have the skill to turn a div into an effective button, yet over and over I see web sites with rows of buttons which are in fact just divs with javascript behind them. You can add role="button" and a modern browser will treat it just like a normal button and all the accessibility that comes with it.

That's kind of missing the point though, most bad browsers the author mentions don't do modern web very well. They're likely using an older renderer and are missing many features.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#174

Post by michaelpb »

ratww wrote: post #68
apabepa wrote: post #19

I am not a front-end developer but looking at it from a distance I really don't get modern web design. Sure some sites might need fancy javascript single page features, like if your webpage is an interactive map or realtime game, but most sites are just text and some pictures. Whats with all the javascript? Your site looks just like the next one anyway! It feels like an "Emperor's New Clothes" situation or maybe more…

As someone involved in hiring, this is what Bootcamps and Universities are teaching, and what companies are looking for: backend spits JSON, frontend consumes it using React. Rendering HTML on the server is not really "the default" anymore as it was 10 year ago: it's more of an optimization for when your React site is slow, and it's a black box to most people. Even static websites are "strange tech" to new graduates…

A few years ago when teaching at a previous coding bootcamp that started with FE JavaScript, I remember my surprise when well-performing students got through 3 months or so of it and were confused and very impressed when I showed them how an tag worked, since they had only been aware of (jQuery) JavaScript powered pages. When you are stuck just doing JS powered SPAs, an tag seems like advanced technology!

I ended up at a new school creating a new curriculum. This approach is where we "recapitulate the evolution of the web", so we start with SSGs & server-side programming (Python/Django), then only at the end cover SPAs and React.JS -- since, as you mentioned, that's still the main skillset that companies are new devs for.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#175

Post by tommica »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #168
chrismorgan wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pity that you must expose everyone’s passwords in plain text to achieve this (those older browsers won’t support TLS).

Not every website requires passwords or any other secrets to be transmitted. I use a combination of fingerprinting and WoT to allow (but not require) anyone to maintain an identity without having to register or sign in.

What is WoT? Does your system send a single-use code to the email, or some other method? I cant imagine a way to login to the account without some secret key, and that creates a dependency that might make the app unusable in another way on older devices.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#176

Post by dvdkon »

ryandrake wrote: post #147
jedimastert wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> worse in almost all ways How so? I dislike the text color choice, but other than that it seems perfectly fine to me.

Admittedly most is just personal preference but the line width thing is the cardinal sin. Forcing huge blocks of whitespace on either side of the text for nebulous "readability" reasons is just wasteful. Too many web sites ape this pattern too. Look at John Gruber's website [1] on a nice wide 27" monitor for an extreme example. The content takes up less than 1/5 of the width of the screen. 1: https://daringfireball.n…

I find it much worse that so many sites nowadays expect users to have their browsers maximised. Noticed how most books aren't wider than an A5, and how any publications wider than this use relatively narrow columns? Because reasonably narrow text is easier to read.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#177

Post by hbn »

grishka wrote: post #86
lovelyviking wrote: post #73

Those are not ‘crappy browsers’. If we call it “Browser” it should be browser, isn’t it? It should brows pages. It was never intended to be overweighted virtal machine and not a good one by the way. Past 8 years or so Youtube has nothing really more to offer then it was offering back then. The only new things it offers for me is overweighted dumb slow shit that fails to perform what it was perfectly doing 8 years ago…

Oh, YouTube. I'll never understand how they made it such that when you open your subscriptions page it first loads the list of videos, and then, 5 seconds later, shows their durations. Or how the player UI is unresponsive for several seconds after you open a video. That took some special talent apparently.

>you open your subscriptions page it first loads the list of videos, and then, 5 seconds later, shows their durations

Every time this happens I have this horrible feeling that they just removed showing video durations entirely. Which wouldn't even surprise me, I could imagine them doing some stupid A/B testing to discover they got more people clicking around when durations were removed.

But regardless, it's insane that one of the biggest sources of internet traffic on the planet is software that can render a bunch of images (thumbnails) but it takes several seconds to display a few characters of text on them. I don't know if they're grabbing durations as a separate API call, or if that's just how slow their JavaScript is. Either way, it's pathetic.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#178

Post by allenu »

pbronez wrote: post #20

Love this: > Go sit in an uncomfortable chair, in an uncomfortable location, and stare at an uncomfortably small screen with an uncomfortably outdated web browser. How easy is it to use the websites you’ve created? It's so easy to get disconnected from the real-world applications of our technology. Build user empathy.

Years ago I noticed that when I was hungry and tired, I would notice just how much bad design got in the way of completing a task. Things that I would work around easily when I was well-rested and sated all of a sudden became incredibly frustrating. Unclear instructions, or buttons that were hard to find, or error messages that were inscrutable suddenly became very obvious.

I posited that it would be an interesting user test to have someone who was in an irritable mood try to use your product. I've never actually done this, and I still think it would generate interesting feedback.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#179

Post by dvdkon »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #71
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #2

Client-side javascript is underrated. We put simple websites in embedded devices with shockingly low memory/flash. They're for configuring the device. The pages are pretty serviceable with html controls, color schemes, logo etc. Embedded javascript to make them responsive. A couple of kilobytes total html.

> Embedded javascript to make them responsive. We must have different definitions of 'responsive'. You don't need javascript to make a website look different due to different screen sizes.

They might have meant actual responsiveness, as in the absence of lag. On low-end embedded devices, rendering a template with something like PHP could easily take high units or even tens of seconds, whereas JS on a much more capable client device can respond to the user's input immediately.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#180

Post by michaelpb »

ziftface wrote: post #117
apabepa wrote: post #19

I am not a front-end developer but looking at it from a distance I really don't get modern web design. Sure some sites might need fancy javascript single page features, like if your webpage is an interactive map or realtime game, but most sites are just text and some pictures. Whats with all the javascript? Your site looks just like the next one anyway! It feels like an "Emperor's New Clothes" situation or maybe more…

The fact is, the Javascript ecosystem is unmatched when it comes to very quickly creating frontend applications. Maybe another set of tools would have been better, but that doesn't really matter. This set of tools is what everyone uses, and a lot of effort and creativity goes into making js frontend development as smooth and fast as possible. I often need to very quickly make internal services at my job and while I l…

This is just a personal preference. I would say the same about Python / Django: You get extensible login/signup/password-reset/etc authentication & user-permissions management, and even an admin interface with user groups, right out of the box. I can put together a web app in "60 seconds" that would take weeks to assemble using the JavaScript ecosystem. Having taught classes on both, I'd also say it's also easier for beginners. Again, might be my own bias or other factors, but it seemed to me that the Python/Django student's final projects have on average "out-shown" the JavaScript SPA student's final projects in terms of features that they had time to complete.

This isn't to hate on JS, this is just to acknowledge that other languages and frameworks have substantial advantages in many use-cases.

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