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I'm betting on HTML

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Re: I'm betting on HTML

#301

Post by ethbr0 »

chickenfeed wrote: post #260

I don't want to totally neg on web dev. But it does suck donkey balls. I've been doing it for years. From writing raw html,to using scripting langs, frameworks and what not. And the amount of time it takes to do not a lot I figure is just a colossal brain drain. We just went on holiday, and all I wanted to do was look up places to go eat and drink, or visit for the day, and most of the sites sucked. Or were out of da…

> And those wanting to consume data, really just want the bare essentials: The data.

I don't think they do. The average HN reader, probably; but not the average person.

What they want is a well styled and usable webpage. Unfortunately, there aren't enough effective and talented UX designers (or stakeholders at companies with decent UX intuition).

This leads to the current situation where the average person would be better served by bare essential data, even if it's not their preference, because it's still better than the kludgy UX average design a company is able to afford.

{bad UX} The end run around this is what WordPress realized: create professional styles/themes and allow users to purchase and apply them. But that can't solve bad stakeholder taste.

Which brings me back to Facebook, which I would argue succeeded because it standardized and mandated a professional UX.

{data from people} + {professional, standardized UX} = {winning}

You can dislike the original Facebook UX, but I don't think anyone would claim it was amateur level work. Which is what everyone's perception of MySpace/Geocities et al. was.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#302

Post by dleeftink »

Animats wrote: post #103
andai wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed this helping an elderly neighbor with her banking. "No, you don't click there, but there... you can tell because..." then realized there's literally no way to tell. It's all flat.

then realized there's literally no way to tell. It's all flat. I hate that. I'm waiting for that fad to be over. I kind of liked material design, but it's too much of a pain to put into everything. Flat, borderless, and unidentified is so easy to do. The all flat approach encourages dark patterns. Lists of trackers you can opt out of, scrollable, with no scroll bar and no window border. There are important buttons hi…

> There are important buttons hidden which, if pressed, do things favorable to the user but unfavorable to the site operator.

Could you elaborate a bit? How is the flat look benefitting users over site owners? (Is this regarding lists of trackers?)

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#303

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

jklinger410 wrote: post #283
chickenfeed wrote: post #260

I don't want to totally neg on web dev. But it does suck donkey balls. I've been doing it for years. From writing raw html,to using scripting langs, frameworks and what not. And the amount of time it takes to do not a lot I figure is just a colossal brain drain. We just went on holiday, and all I wanted to do was look up places to go eat and drink, or visit for the day, and most of the sites sucked. Or were out of da…

It's funny how I hear that web platforms are the best and most consistent cross-platform GUI systems, but then building on that system is awful. So I'm wondering if maybe this is just the nature of GUI. Where you have to give every single instruction, eat up a bunch of cycles, or it simply won't function as cross-platform.

I don't think it's that funny, given that "best" and "most consistent" are both highly subjective.

I am a huge fan of the HTML/CSS/JS stack—it's far, far easier to knock up simple GUI-based apps using those technologies than, for example, the Visual Basic / Delphi tools that we were all using beforehand. And, remember, apps are not really what HTML was ever intended for, so any kind of 'app' support is a big bonus.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#304

Post by gbalduzzi »

merdaverse wrote: post #222

The problem I see with sematic web is that no matter how easy it gets, developers refuse to use it properly. I have been looking closely at the tag since a browser extension of mine uses it, and although it is extremely clear what it should do in the MDN documentation (the documentation itself is a good example usage of , etc.), very little sites use it properly. Even the fancy professional sites wrap all the page co…

There simply is no incentive whatsoever of using them correctly. I try to use them correctly but aside from the time spent in deciding what each element should be there were no differences at all

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#305

Post by gbalduzzi »

juancampa wrote: post #293
nzoschke wrote: post #5

Great read and interactive demo. After a few years of dabbling with Flutter I just came back to the same conclusion: bet on HTML. Astro / Tailwind / Daisy UI / Alpine.js makes it lovely to build an HTML site with a lot of simple SSR and a little bit of client side reactivity peppered about. The result is simple sane HTML files that look and work great on desktop web browser and and mobile wrapped web view. My app is…

Can you help me understand the utility of Daisy UI? Seems like it's the good old classes+stylesheet with extra steps (tailwind)

Well, instead of writing this for every button in your web app:

Button

You can write this:

Button

The utility is pretty clear to me

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#306

Post by zdimension »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #303
jklinger410 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how I hear that web platforms are the best and most consistent cross-platform GUI systems, but then building on that system is awful. So I'm wondering if maybe this is just the nature of GUI. Where you have to give every single instruction, eat up a bunch of cycles, or it simply won't function as cross-platform.

I don't think it's that funny, given that "best" and "most consistent" are both highly subjective. I am a huge fan of the HTML/CSS/JS stack—it's far, far easier to knock up simple GUI-based apps using those technologies than, for example, the Visual Basic / Delphi tools that we were all using beforehand. And, remember, apps are not really what HTML was ever intended for, so any kind of 'app' support is a big bonus.

Funny, I grew up making GUI apps on VB (and then VB.NET) using Windows Forms and I've always found it really easy compared to the web stack. You're not fighting against a flow algorithm that was designed for documents, trying to position your widgets in ways NCSA Mosaic wouldn't ever had dreamt of, it just works.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#307

Post by cassepipe »

flagrant_taco wrote: post #209
cassepipe wrote: post #206

I really want to believe in the semantic web, I really want to believe in the ability of the browser to provide me with good default modules with a good default styling, but for now I just have to accept this is not the case. The fact that I have to think about labeling a input (why is this not an attribute ?), not being sure if I should use it as a wrapper of as a sibling with the `for=` attribute... and this is jus…

(I don't know what tools you use so this isn't a comment directed at you specifically) If web developers spent a fraction of the time required to learn react, tailwind, etc on learning HTML the web would be in a much better spot. There are definitely quirks and rough edges, but if every web devs knew how to get the most out of semantic HTML we'd likely have a lot less JS in the browser, fewer accessibility bugs, and…

I am using svelte as it seems the best of both world, I can actually pretend I am just writing html and js where related pieces are colocated with a module system enough that it is actually readable while also harnessing my html and js/ts knowledge.

And since js has to be minified there's a "compilation" step anyways.

Didn't find a better solution so far. The web is almost nice to write code for.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#308

Post by trealira »

Animats wrote: post #103
andai wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed this helping an elderly neighbor with her banking. "No, you don't click there, but there... you can tell because..." then realized there's literally no way to tell. It's all flat.

then realized there's literally no way to tell. It's all flat. I hate that. I'm waiting for that fad to be over. I kind of liked material design, but it's too much of a pain to put into everything. Flat, borderless, and unidentified is so easy to do. The all flat approach encourages dark patterns. Lists of trackers you can opt out of, scrollable, with no scroll bar and no window border. There are important buttons hi…

The process pretty much started with Windows 8, which was released in 2012. I don't think the flat style will go away anytime soon. At most, skeuomorphic elements will be slowly phased in. Material design at least adds shadows, and "neumorphism" adds back some 3d popping out, although I haven't seen it much.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#309

Post by cassepipe »

treis wrote: post #244
berkes wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> on learning HTML Anecdote. Was recently freelancing at a web-agency. They build complex web-apps. Lot's of senior and experienced web-devs there: react, mui, typescript, tailwind, and a large host of backend frameworks under the belt. But when I built a quick PoC using ` ` a few lines of JS and some of the elements used in the article (meter, dialog, details) they were flabbergasted. This was a whole team of experi…

Covered is stretching it. Most raw HTML elements look terrible and wouldn't pass muster with pretty much anyone. IMHO, this is a big miss with browsers. Sites look awful without styling and you have to be pretty good with CSS to even make them look passable. Way easier to reach for a framework with prebuilt components

That was indeed my point:

Good defaults are the best but when you have bad defaults you might as well go for full-fledged well thought-out third party tools

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#310

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

mmahemoff wrote: post #149
jraph wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the main benefit of semantic markup still accessibility?

That’s one of the main benefits, but if the machine can make sense of the content, it can still present it however is clearest for the user.

But explicit, human-verified metadata is always going to beat inferred, fuzzily-extracted data, surely?
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