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All you may need is HTML

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Re: All you may need is HTML

#251

Post by crabbone »

ozim wrote: post #201
crabbone wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I work in a company where user-facing documentation is written in LaTeX! I even contributed few commits to it. I'm not sure though why sales people would need to edit it. My discontent with LaTeX for documentation is that searching it sucks. I mean, you do get literal search for words, but if you want something smarter... PDFs don't interact well with searching tools we have. Another problem: interactive scroll.…

It is also a bit of a point of my post. "Why sales people would need to edit it?" Because there were no dedicated people writing documentation, there were developers and sales people - that was it. Non technical documentation so "how to use the system" was going to be written by sales people. Lots of times in a company you work with what you have and finding and hiring "technical writer who has experience or wants to…

I used to be on good terms with a technical writer from a company I worked for some time ago. He later became one of the very few people who were let go as a result of a merger. Also, from what I can tell, technical writer isn't a cushy job, not anywhere near even entry-level programming jobs. Also, it's usually at companies with existing and large user-base, relatively large companies... there's not a lot of jobs on the market.

I mean, I have a feeling that if a company asked a technical writer to learn LaTeX, they would probably do it, even on their own time. It's a tough market, and learning LaTeX enough to produce something isn't a huge effort (also, there are a bunch of tools that prepare the boilerplate code for documents). But I can see how sales people might not have been impressed by such prospects.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#252

Post by qudat »

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…

The beauty of bringing html into js (eg react) is because now we have type support for the entire FE stack. Not to mention the extremely useful view is a function of state paradigm.

What you are suggesting sounds something like golang templates and css. That works fine but you can’t easily get types in your templates. It’s a game changer when you have typescript at your disposal for your templates.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#253

Post by eyelidlessness »

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…

I’d never seen thebestmotherfucking.website! I appreciate the nuance it adds. I don’t have any nuance of my own to add right now but I do have to share my amusement at the empty list item under contributors. I figured there would be something in the source referencing someone (similar to how some folks on Twitter make special acknowledgments for people not on Twitter), but if this was that it’s a very Inside Baseball reference:
Or it could be a joke about copypasta in hand-authored HTML. Or just actual copypasta. Who knows! But I enjoyed it.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#254

Post by momentoftop »

blowski wrote: post #205
calsy wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

almost gasp like a book.

I have quite a few books with a pretty cover, pictures, charts, pullquotes, etc.

LaTeX predates HTML by a decade and supports pictures, charts, quotes and far more, and doesn't force me as an author to make finicky decisions about presentation. I just write the content, and then set the document class to whatever the publisher wants.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#255

Post by kerkeslager »

NoGravitas wrote: post #192
kerkeslager wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure, but there were a lot of ways that could have been solved with HTML standards.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#256

Post by crabbone »

hoechst wrote: post #144
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…

So you'd write (presumably a big) admin web interface in straight XML + CSS by hand? I don't know the details, but that sounds like a very long and painful process which will end up being hellish to maintain, plus a huge amount of training time for new devs to get familiar with the system. If you even find new devs who'd want to work on this. Who wants to acquire very niche domain knowledge that you can't apply anywh…

> So you'd write (presumably a big) admin web interface in straight XML + CSS by hand?

That's not what I said. I think, that what you mean when you say "by hand" is the opposite of generating XML (and in case of XML, it's not CSS, the stylesheets are XSL that transform XML into HTML).

Before JavaScript frameworks were a thing, technologies like ColdFusion, JSP, ASP Classic proliferated. You can even find remains of this approach in relatively modern frameworks like Django. The idea was to generate XML or directly HTML on the server and send it to the client ready to be displayed rather than sending JavaScript that will request more data as it interacts with the user to build the interface. The former would be called "thin client", while the later is the "thick client". The former used to be more popular because programmers didn't see JavaScript or HTML as a worthwhile to learn language, not enough to build programs in it. It was seen as a target for transpilers.

This was before single page applications, or AJAX... The perceived downside of this approach was that for sites with many very similar pages the application server would have to generate a ton of HTMLs, which would be hard to cache server-side, so, allegedly, it would work slowly (compared to AJAX, where a basic HTML page with JavaScript framework would sit in cache and communicate using XML or JSON with the server to build missing parts).

XML + stylesheets is one of the ways to address this problem: essentially it does the same thing, but without JavaScript in the middle. The function of the XML part of the equation is to transfer the data that needs to be displayed, and the stylesheet transforms the XML into HTML that the browser knows how to display. Stylesheet can be generic and reused between different XMLs. It's not as flexible as using JavaScript but a lot easier on resources, and will probably beat AJAX solution in terms of speed.

Another benefit of XML + stylesheets is good integration with the browser testing tools. With tools like Selenium, you will always struggle to catch page state changes, and will not be able to respond to change as it happens, instead needing to poll for expected condition (that might never materialize). Stylesheets take this aspect completely away because there's nothing in them that happens asynchronously or in chunks. Unlike in single page application, where "page loaded" is undefined, there's an obvious way to tell when "page loaded happens".

The problem of XML + XSL(T) is that people have some preconceived notions about it. Very few people know the tool well, and for no particular reason, most people who know anything about the tool know very little about it, but are also very angry about it. Lots of polls for the "worst programming language" would mention XSL(T)... While the truth is that it's just very different from C, and that's what irks programmers. From engineering perspective, sites like, eg. this one, or Reddit or GMail would land themselves well to XML + XSL(T), but the reality is that modern day Web programmers, well, a lot of them, don't even know they have such a tool.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#257

Post by eyelidlessness »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #156
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.

use css, just enough with the animations! > scroll the mousewheel: giant footer section slides up taking half the viewport > move the mouse cursor up: giant ass header slide menu drops down covering half the viewport should be absolutely no motion on a page unless i specifically click on something, like play button or slide out button. and that includes parallax bullshit. prefers-reduced-motion should be the DEFAULT…

> prefers-reduced-motion should be the DEFAULT not an override

I don’t personally feel nearly as strongly about the subject, but I wholeheartedly agree with this.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#258

Post by crabbone »

bandie91 wrote: post #101
crabbone wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are OK with just having an IPv6 IP, you can live in a country like the Netherlands and simply use your home connection to serve your Web page. Almost like it was intended by forefathers...

do they get DNS names as well?

If only...

But, really, in my dream world, ISPs would also act as registrars for their clients, so, once you pay them you get some automatic domain name, or maybe can pay a bit extra for a permanent one that you can take to the next ISP you sing with.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#259

Post by calsy »

cmdialog wrote: post #250
calsy wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats even more funny is HTML looks like a 'gigantic wall of impossibly small black and white text' when its rendered without a stylesheet.

Sounds like you ought to be doing the Richard Stallman approach to reading webpages and not commenting on whether or not CSS and design is needed. Back to the terminal with ye

Sounds like you should do less stereotyping of roles. You’re assumption that programmers don’t understand UI and need to stay away is exactly what the blog refers to when talking about ego. You think programmers output all their work in a terminal?

Re: All you may need is HTML

#260

Post by chrismorgan »

kerkeslager wrote: post #139
kevincox wrote: post #4

> Originally this website's font-family simply requested monospace. This approach resulted in varying reading experience depending on the OS. Windows browsers got Consolas, Linux users got DejaVu Sans Mono, and macOS people got Courier. I find it so sad that our browsers have such bad default fonts that all websites feel the need to override them to get an acceptable look. It would be great if browsers had decent def…

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…

Firefox: Settings → Fonts → Advanced → untick Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above. It’ll still load web fonts for Private Use Area code points (icon fonts) and Google’s misbegotten Material Icons with its awful ASCII + ligation technique (see the browser.display.use_document_fonts.icon_font_allowlist pref in about:config), but other than that will stick with your preferred fonts.

I tried this as a two-week experiment a year ago. I’ve never gone back, it improves the web so much.

(Well, actually I also block web font downloading altogether, for no particularly good reason, at the cost of icon fonts and Material Icons breakage, but it doesn’t often matter.)

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