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The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

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Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#251

Post by opensmtpd »

rhines wrote: post #171
ryandrake wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree. For this reason, I frequently invoke reader mode on the browser when reading wikipedia articles in full screen. It is much easier to read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#252

Post by michaelpb »

SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #192
michaelpb wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Almost every JS app I have seen uses a tags though. Even if they are just links to # pages. With most router libraries you can even use real paths and it works all on the front end. Sounds like you found one anecdotal case that didn't know this.

Maybe I wasn't clear -- What I meant to say is that the curriculum barely covered tags, but instead started just with JS DOM manipulation, which meant students were using document.location on click events since they weren't taught anything else. This isn't a criticism of JS best practices, instead it's a criticism of how it's taught, specifically in this curriculum that's sold as a white-label curriculum and used by MANY bootcamps across the US. It might even be the most popular coding bootcamp curriculum in the country. It's possible they've improved it since I was teaching it, but definitely it was not the case a few years ago!

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#253

Post by gonzo41 »

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…

Big lols on this, ~They think it's "icky" to use other kinds of tech in other parts of the website.

Does anyone remember Google Web Toolkit when Java came to the front end.

History repeats. Again and again.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#254

Post by qwantim1 »

scrollaway wrote: post #239
pvorb wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree with all of your points. I just wanted to point out the irony that the manual and other documentation for this "inclusive design" toolkit come as PDFs – the worst choice you can make if you strive for accessibility.

PDFs can be accessible, and many of them are! Everyone who works with PDF needs to know about PDF/A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A PDF/A is a small family of sub-formats to PDFs which amount to the accessible subset of PDF + some requirements. PDF/A and PDF/UA are mandated by a variety of governments for PDF distribution. They're very suitable to archival and are accessible (screenreaders can work with them, th…

PDFs are fine but their time will come to an end for one big reason: they were invented to reproduce defined-size paper forms.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#255

Post by forgotmypw17 »

tpxl wrote: post #113
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, a thousand times. No one is going to mitm someone browsing my text blog. On the other hand, https creates many barriers to access, including recent version requirement, time sync, and extra cpu and bandwidth.

ISPs regularly MITM http websites to inject ads (in the US even).

It happens. I think I'd rather my site be served with ads, than not at all.

It would be great if we could always automatically choose the right option, but browsers don't do that.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#256

Post by pier25 »

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…

It would be great if browsers implemented other common elements such as sortable data tables, carousels, etc.

https://open-ui.org/

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#257

Post by gcblkjaidfj »

pier25 wrote: post #256
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…

It would be great if browsers implemented other common elements such as sortable data tables, carousels, etc. https://open-ui.org/

You have a great point. Browser UI elements are stuck in time and all the attention now is directed to things that Google can make money from (e.g. DRM, sandbox for rich apps/extensions, webrtc for their video call products, etc)

but your cited site is not a good advocacy of that. Not even the most exalted UI framework fix the most obvious problems with those either. e.g. tables still won't hold the header and first column(s) while scrolling.

Most of the these elements does not help consuming information, like carousels. And any true UX designer abhor them all for the fallacy they are.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#258

Post by scrollaway »

michaelpb wrote: post #180
ziftface wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Django's user system is .. limited. You need a bunch of third party libraries to add very commonly used things such as auth APIs, oauth, 2fa, etc.

I've worked with Django for over a decade and i dislike it more and more. It hasn't evolved to match the environment around it and how to best use it. Typing is missing. Something like FastAPI is very promising but Django's admin is still superb for prototyping and its orm is a lot more instinctive so i put off switching away ...

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#259

Post by hn_scripter »

SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #202
kome wrote: post #185

I loved this article so much. For real. I hope web designers will follow the advice, and focus all their efforts on html+css. It's more complicated, I know. But it's better.

Its not simply better. Going HTML only means killing features and conveniences that users want for a benefit they mostly won't see. Its perfectly possible to make web apps run very fast.

With careful architecture, it is perfectly possibly to run performant web apps with a lot of JavaScript, or Wasm even.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#260

Post by roelschroeven »

jedimastert wrote: post #138
ryandrake wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that bettermotherfuckingwebsite is worse in almost all ways. I wonder if that was what the author was going for. I don't know what's truly satire anymore!

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

The "better" site looks mostly better to me, but there are two things I don't like about, and what I like even less is the authors assertions that his ideas about those are absolutely and obviously and undeniably better.

My pet peeve is line length. Too long lines are not comfortable because it's difficult to find the start of the next line, that's true. But too short lines force you to find the start of the next line every couple of words, and that's annoying too. There's a middle ground somewhere, and I think it's not the same for everyone. The 650px used on the "better" size is certainly too short for me. I can't count the number of sites where I open the style editor in dev console and go hunting for max-width or whatever to set it to a more comfortable width. So just respect the width of the browser window, which anyone can choose to their own liking. Some margin left and right is OK, perhaps even preferable.

The other thing is font size. Browsers have settings for font size, and in modern browser you can change the size with ctrl+ and ctrl-. Why override that choice?

I like overview: being able to not just see the sentence I'm reading, but a whole lot of context. Short lines, large fonts and large line-heights all work against that.

What I do like, I think, is #444 for the text instead of pure black. Looks less aggressive that way. And some amount of margin left and right. Something like the original page plus "body { margin: 40px 100px; color: #444; }".

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