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Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

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Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#281

Plasmic is a web design tool / visual page builder that works deeply with code, builds web apps as well as websites, and doesn't lock you in (exports anywhere). https://www.plasmic.app It plugs into React stacks, including SSGs like Gatsby/Next.js, and continuously generates code that you can override/extend. (I work on this!)

We’ve been seeking the “holy grail” being web dev tools our design team can use. What we’re also seeking is a way that limited end-clients could also use the tool to make minor copy changes (A poor mans CMS if you will). How might your tool support the three different users. 1. Devs who need it to create handcrafted grade code 2. Designers seeking to drag and drop with flexibility 3. Power users seeking to update cop…

Plasmic's user base is in fact split about 50/50 designers/developers. And "visual CMS" exactly describes our most common use case—letting non-developers publish changes.

1. Developers can use it as a UI builder, removing the pain of things like CSS layout (for ex., we use Plasmic to build Plasmic; and engineers at companies small and large use it on their flagship websites/apps).

2. Designers versed in tools like Figma and Webflow are probably the segment with the highest "starting proficiency."

3. Currently Plasmic is most comfortable for designers and developers, but we very much want to accommodate the end-client persona (a "copy-only-mode" is on our roadmap).

Prioritization is heavily influenced by early users, so would love to hear your feedback on how this works for your team!

Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#282

This is the first thread in a long while that's given me a lot of FOMO anxiety. I've made a lot of one-off server-side rendered apps in Flask, and right now I'm doing some backend work ASP.NET Core for my job, but I have this overwhelming feeling there's so much I don't know and I'm not sure where to start. I only bring this up in case I'm not the only person sharing these feelings.

It's not a feeling, it's an observation. Technology is like a tree, branching infinitely in all directions. When I was a baby web developer, just knowing CSS on top of HTML was considered advanced. (This was back when the bleeding edge was using tables for layouts.) Today, I can't keep up with all the different ways there are to do something as simple as loading a web page. This splintering is true in every area of t…

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Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#283

This partially might be more of a what's old is new again, but here's what I use: - 100% server side rendered - Progressively enhanced (fully works without JS, but having JS enabled makes it nicer) - In select places where I need SPA-like snappiness I use a ~100 line long DOM diffing algorithm (I request full HTML through AJAX and diff it into the current page; if the user has no JS enabled then the page just refresh…

What are the requirements that need it to have no database?

Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#287
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Rust framework/crate are you using for webserver?

My own. (: In general I was a little frustrated with the state of Rust's web server ecosystem since it has, what I personally call, the NPM syndrome. Pulling a single crate will often pull along with it hundreds of dependencies, and murder your compile times. I know that those dependencies are often necessary, but during development I do not need all of that. So I made my own. But of course it's generally a bad idea…

Any chance any of this can be made open source? Sounds like a killer feature

Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#288
post #47

- tailwindcss I moved a React side-project from CRA to Next.js for server-side rendering benefits, but the latter doesn't support directly importing css styles in jsx to avoid problems with the global scope. The two options offered were CSS modules and CSS-in-JS. I didn't like either approaches having hashes in the classname when opening the website in devtools, and both seemed too locked into React/JSX. Tailwind 1.…

I really don't get the appeal of tailwindcss, and I feel like I must be missing some obvious benefit of using it vs something like bootstrap. But at first glance, it just looks like the framework recreates css rules with class names. What epiphany am I missing here?

There's a few major benefits with Utility CSS.

1. You don't have a dependency on raw CSS which is inherently nested and globally changeable. Instead you depend on tailwind.css and all your HTML describes the styling. This also means you can reliably copy chunks of HTML with tailwind classes.

2. Composition over inheritance. CSS is based around the idea of classes and selectors inheriting each other, which makes the style brittle and hard to follow and copy. Tailwind is composed of completely separate classes, which don't affect each other.

3. You actually learn CSS!! Other frameworks like bootstrap hide a lot of CSS features behind classes intended to simplify development. But this actually obscures what's going on with the CSS. Tailwind actually helps you understand how CSS works by having them easily accessible by utility classes.

    class="flex flex-col" 
   
Is the same as

    style="display: flex; flex-direction: column;" 
   
So you learn how to write better raw CSS too!

Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#289

This partially might be more of a what's old is new again, but here's what I use: - 100% server side rendered - Progressively enhanced (fully works without JS, but having JS enabled makes it nicer) - In select places where I need SPA-like snappiness I use a ~100 line long DOM diffing algorithm (I request full HTML through AJAX and diff it into the current page; if the user has no JS enabled then the page just refresh…

How does progressively enhanced work without Javascript please?

Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#290

Chiming in here with my latest "weird but cheap" stack: * Use a Trello board as a free CMS. * Write cloudflare worker code to read cards from the board via Trello APIs and render card content as plain old HTML. I use labels as tags for the categories, and have specific formatting in the card descriptions. If an attachment is a YouTube URL, it renders the video as an embed, otherwise it uses image attachments as post…

Damn! That's certainly novel.

Nice work.

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