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All you may need is HTML

fabiensanglard.net

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Re: All you may need is HTML

#191

Post by NoGravitas »

qup wrote: post #31
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.

As a good example, his site is very readable (because of the limited width of lines), and the sites he linked to that were largely unstyled were very useful, but not very readable. It would be worth it to me, as a user, to use a browser plugin to add a few lines of CSS to those sites before I dove in.

The "Stylus" extension does what you need. Turn on "100 bytes of CSS" or a classless stylesheet when you need it.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#192

Post by NoGravitas »

kerkeslager wrote: post #160
magicalist wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This...does not match history. There was never a golden era like you describe (it was a time of conflicting philosophies, people saying "eh, let's add this, that would be sweet", and browser vendors competing to add as much as possible to out "innovate" each other and the limited specs), semantic HTML helps in some cases but is never going to give you automatic accessibility, and a one size fits all browser style is…

> This...does not match history. I've been writing web code since 1997ish, so... > There was never a golden era like you describe (it was a time of conflicting philosophies, people saying "eh, let's add this, that would be sweet", and browser vendors competing to add as much as possible to out "innovate" each other and the limited specs) I did not describe a golden era of HTML, because a golden era of HTML never happ…

Well, there was a previous garbage area, when HTML was, rather than being semantic, laid out using tables and \ and \. I remember telling people to not do that, especially when the first version of CSS came out, and you could make websites look nice with semantic HTML that also worked in Lynx.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#193

Post by NoGravitas »

vlunkr wrote: post #142
kerkeslager wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that was what HTML was on track to give us. But once JS and CSS were introduced, semantic HTML that was actually semantic stopped developing, under the assumption that if someone needed, for example, a tab area or slide show, they could develop those themselves with CSS/JS. What we've gotten instead is extremely vague elements like "section" that don't communicate what the elements are . If HTML were truly sema…

It would be so great if there were more built-in interactive elements like tabs, modals, and tooltips. How many times have these incredibly basic things been re-created?

Yeah, all this time browser vendors should have been taking a "pave the cowpaths" approach to natively implementing stuff that everyone ends up reimplementing in CSS and JS. And HTML5 did a little of this, with e.g. date and color input fields. But they could have gone farther.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#194

Post by agumonkey »

NoGravitas wrote: post #188
agumonkey wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

personally I miss the vanilla html of the late 90s (unless advanced guis) same went for emacs I stopped using themes

The default Emacs theme is not great, but the current best practice is to stop messing with themes and just use modus (vivendi or operandi depending on your light/dark preference), especially since they are now included as part of Emacs.

what's missing from vanilla ? honest question

Re: All you may need is HTML

#196

Post by xigoi »

cmdialog wrote: post #165
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.

In my personal, obviously anecdotal, experience it's always the "technical" guys who think things like this. This is why we have UI/UX teams and we don't let programmers create visual interfaces.

If your idea of a good site is a 3MB monster full of useless whitespace, hero images, carousels, hamburger menus and other modern design trends, maybe that's a sign we shouldn't let designers create visual interfaces.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#197

Post by Julesman »

I'm all for web design brutalism. It has a place in all this mess. But when it gets preachy and over-general it often becomes condescending and dismissive of entire fields of study and practice, whole categories of use, and entire groups of users.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#198

Post by xigoi »

hbn wrote: post #186
kerkeslager wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what you get when you prioritize companies over users. There's no reason websites should even be able to set the font in my browser. If it was just about websites achieving an acceptable look, you'd see people emulating industry leaders, but that's not what you see. Google, for example, uses Arial on its main page on my browsers at least--that's a font that's available on every browser I know of. If it's acce…

If you bought a magazine you don't get to choose the fonts either.

That's a limitation of the physical medium, not something we should aspire to.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#199

Post by Kerrick »

calsy wrote: post #185
cmdialog wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my personal, obviously anecdotal, experience it's always the "technical" guys who think things like this. This is why we have UI/UX teams and we don't let programmers create visual interfaces.

Because reading words requires substantial styling enhancements over what the browser is already capable of? Has anyone picked up a book lately? You need a UI team to create a page of readable text? That sounds like an expensive waste. But it sounds like those 'UI' people think they know better and don't need suggestions from programmers about reading words, even though its what they do all day.

Fun fact: your text will look nothing like a book if you use HTML with no CSS and rely only on the user agent default style sheet.

Books are designed, too.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#200

Post by NeveHanter »

holoduke wrote: post #162
PaulHoule wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of devs are frustrated with the state of modern Javascript. As I speak I am waiting for "mvn install" to run for a system that has a Java back end and a Javascript front end which compiles both. I think the Java part would finish in about 20 seconds, the Javascript bit is more like 250 seconds. There would be 250 seconds of working instead of posting to HN if the system was "100% pure Java". (To be fair…

I never understood why you would need to compile frontend javascript code. Yea maybe a minimizer, obfuscator, some coping etc during a build process. But thats it. My frontend apps are running on the fly. Change in code requires a save and browser refresh. No ammoying compiling .

Well, there're things like React's JSX, CoffeeScript, TypeScript and all of the fricking Babel stuff, all require some kind of transpiling (or how babel names it, compiling), and probably that is what OP means.

PS: Luckily, I'm not a frontend dev :)

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