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All you may need is HTML

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Re: All you may need is HTML

#121

Post by agumonkey »

bombcar wrote: post #46
truculent wrote: post #18

I sympathise with the main thrust of the post but, to nitpick, this is just plain wrong: > But mostly css appeals to our vanity and ego. Design isn't just about aesthetics. Good information design, clear visual hierarchy, accessibility, etc. all help with communication. The author's effective use of spacing, bold, and code tags show us that they know this intuitively, despite what they write.

Reminds me of http://motherfuckingwebsite.com and http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com But the key, underlying point to ALL this stuff is that you do NOT NEED TO WORRY ABOUT PRESENTATION until you have the CONTENT. A huge temptation is to spend hours and hours tweaking the presentation as a way of avoiding actually creating the content; this is the real danger. (should mention https://thebestmotherfucking.website of…

personally I miss the vanilla html of the late 90s (unless advanced guis)

same went for emacs I stopped using themes

Re: All you may need is HTML

#122

Post by JohnFen »

bombcar wrote: post #46
truculent wrote: post #18

I sympathise with the main thrust of the post but, to nitpick, this is just plain wrong: > But mostly css appeals to our vanity and ego. Design isn't just about aesthetics. Good information design, clear visual hierarchy, accessibility, etc. all help with communication. The author's effective use of spacing, bold, and code tags show us that they know this intuitively, despite what they write.

Reminds me of http://motherfuckingwebsite.com and http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com But the key, underlying point to ALL this stuff is that you do NOT NEED TO WORRY ABOUT PRESENTATION until you have the CONTENT. A huge temptation is to spend hours and hours tweaking the presentation as a way of avoiding actually creating the content; this is the real danger. (should mention https://thebestmotherfucking.website of…

If you can't make it good, you make it pretty.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#123

Post by robertoandred »

PaulHoule wrote: post #114
kitsunesoba wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a bit odd that "monospace" in a mac browser gets you Courier/Courier New, because macOS has come standard with Menlo for ages and Monaco since the OS 9 days, both of which are excellent monospace fonts that are far and away better than either Courier. Even weirder, outside of browsers requesting a monospace font will get you Menlo. Newer releases also have San Francisco Mono that it could use instead, which is…

Apple is notorious for wanting to push people away from portable and easy-to-use web applications to non-portable, expensive to develop, and frequently worse mobile apps.

"Apple hates websites because I don't like Safari's default monospace font."

Re: All you may need is HTML

#124

Post by crabbone »

bob1029 wrote: post #99
crabbone wrote: post #87

Some years ago I was interviewing for head of automation position, and in the process was asked how'd I go about making sure a Web admin interface (to a product that by and large doesn't need a Web interface, think, in the same category as Kubernetes) is well-tested. To which I responded that I'd not use any JavaScript. Ideally, XML with stylesheets. Very light-weight, renders extremely fast, and is extremely friendl…

> if they don't put a fashionable JavaScript framework into job description, they will not be able to hire front-end programmers. This is exactly why we are vague with tech stack in our job reqs. Why would you want talent that is laser-focused on specific keywords? What is the average lifetime of a JS/CSS framework? The game isn't to come in knowing this crap. It's to grasp fundamentals such that you can quickly lear…

> Why would you want talent that is laser-focused on specific keywords?

I think it's a bit different: the head-hunter agencies screen for these keywords, so programmers are incentivized to put those keywords into their resumes. Since programming jobs are seen as short-term investments anyways, programmers are looking at the jobs as the stepping stones to their later jobs, and so they feel pressured to look for a job where they can learn / hone the skill that they believe will be valuable in the job after this, and so on.

I forgot the name of the statistician who claimed that no matter the performance metric, if it is made known to the (human) subjects being so measured will quickly become irrelevant since the measured will learn to game the system. This is the result of applying a metric that grades on the number of years of experience with technology X, where the subjects are trying to optimize for their years of experience with technology X instead of a more complex and open-ended metric of being more knowledgeable or more talented or more dedicated etc. which aren't immediately and objectively measurable.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#125

Post by manuelmoreale »

mapierce2 wrote: post #109
manuelmoreale wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely believe a site can be extremely minimal without sacrificing the visual component. But I also believe some people are pushing the visual part way too far to the point where sites are genuinely hard and frustrating to use.

I agree, it's a response to websites being over-designed to the point of being less usable/accessible, but this feels like a dramatic over-correction.

It probably is. The hope is that after a swing in each direction we can land in some sort of middle ground.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#126

Post by tannhaeuser »

Yeah, the question isn't whether styling per se is needed, but whether CSS as a language doubling HTML's old presentational attributes, yet in a thousand ad-hoc, unchecked syntaxes and layout models ever made sense at all.

The author criticizes generators, but apart from those terrible mysql CMSs there's also SGML, on which HTML (and XML) is based, lending HTML authoring affordances such as text macros, shared fragments, templating, custom shortform syntax a la markdown, stylesheets, pipelines, outline generators, link decorators, with full type checking etc. etc. HTML feels incomplete without.

The Thief reference, though, I don't get - is the point that mission briefs and picked up letters are using Times New Roman? It's a terrible screen font at small sizes, and also HN could do with a modest style upgrade to improve touchable areas/distances and support for prefers-color-scheme if only to hide you're browsing the orange site ;)

Re: All you may need is HTML

#127

Post by sublinear »

crabbone wrote: post #87

Some years ago I was interviewing for head of automation position, and in the process was asked how'd I go about making sure a Web admin interface (to a product that by and large doesn't need a Web interface, think, in the same category as Kubernetes) is well-tested. To which I responded that I'd not use any JavaScript. Ideally, XML with stylesheets. Very light-weight, renders extremely fast, and is extremely friendl…

> if they don't put a fashionable JavaScript framework into job description, they will not be able to hire front-end programmers.

This is not a "pretend answer" and it's perfectly valid for devs to be picky about it. Nobody wants to work on garbage that started out as XML+CSS and mutated into a nightmarish mess that some "backend dev" cobbled together when the product team and the rest of the real world came knocking.

It's ridiculous that there even is a distinction between backend and frontend in 2023. It's so much easier to maintain a project when the devs can't feign ignorance.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#128

Post by crabbone »

whstl wrote: post #111
bob1029 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if they don't put a fashionable JavaScript framework into job description, they will not be able to hire front-end programmers. This is exactly why we are vague with tech stack in our job reqs. Why would you want talent that is laser-focused on specific keywords? What is the average lifetime of a JS/CSS framework? The game isn't to come in knowing this crap. It's to grasp fundamentals such that you can quickly lear…

I agree, but here's the catch: if you're looking for this kind of employee, you won't be hiring "less skilled" people, you'll be hiring "more skilled, more expensive". What people mean by "I will not be able to hire front-end programmers" is actually "I won't be able to hire cheap devs" .

I wish it was that easy... this doesn't account for the dynamics of the job market, the particular niche of Web programming and the perverse incentives created by head-hunters.

Much in the same way how programmers (and many others) are scared of "gaps" in their resumes (and will thus accept a job even if their finances would otherwise allow them to extend the job search further, creating more leverage on the employers), Web-programmers, specifically, will be vary today of putting, say, Mootools on their resume (because, oh the horror, I think it's like a decade old tech!). In the very same way programmers, especially in popular fields, like the Web, are compelled to follow group trends more than in less popular ones (eg. HPC).

Specifically, in the case of Web programmers, this has an additional side of creating a lot of bloat for no reason other than following fashion. Similar dynamics exist (or used to?) in the world of Java, where you have to (had to?) know about EE and Spring (which are huge and bloated frameworks, most probably don't need to use to get the work done, but were made a staple of Java programming due to fashion).

Re: All you may need is HTML

#129

Post by unsupp0rted »

truculent wrote: post #18

I sympathise with the main thrust of the post but, to nitpick, this is just plain wrong: > But mostly css appeals to our vanity and ego. Design isn't just about aesthetics. Good information design, clear visual hierarchy, accessibility, etc. all help with communication. The author's effective use of spacing, bold, and code tags show us that they know this intuitively, despite what they write.

Good CSS makes my users use the system less wrong.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#130

Post by y3k »

superkuh wrote: post #59
y3k wrote: post #2

HTML + CSS for whitespacing & viewport width + SSI | Caddy's template That combo is more than enough for almost all the websites out there, I've 3 different sites like that and they are blazingly fast, everything served from a $4 VPS (serving about 20k views per week).

This is the way. It's great for templating with .html fragments, extremely easy to maintain and has almost no attack surface. I don't know what "Caddy's template" is but HTML/CSS + SSI for gluing the fragments together is what peak personal website performance looks like.

SSI is supported by "old battle tested" servers like Apache or Nginx, there's a "new guy on the block" that I find quite promissing: Caddy[0] however it doesn't support SSI, instead they have some built-in template engine that is a bit more powerful than old SSI but can achieve the same result.

[0]: caddyserver.com

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