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Plain Vanilla Web

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Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#521

Post by jaza »

a4isms wrote: post #198
lolinder wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that this comment is a great example of the total disconnect these conversations always have. On the one hand we have lots of people on here who are building full-featured web apps, not websites, on teams of 30+. These people look at frameworkless options and immediately have a dozen different questions about how your frameworkless design handles a dozen different features that their use case absolutely requi…

Many years ago—2002!—Joel Spolsky wrote this: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/05/06/five-worlds/ His thesis was that before arguing about software development tools, practices, anything really, it's vital to establish what kind of development you're doing, because each "world" has its own requirements that in turn motivate different practices and tools. The worlds he quoted were Shrink-wrap; Internal; Embedded; G…

Thanks for the JoS link, a thought-provoking read as always! (And it doesn't feel like a 23-year-old blog post - love your work Joel).

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#522

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

I’m using HTMX and Hyperscript exclusively for interactivity and I’m loving the simplicity of it.

Problems of FAANG are not our problems, yet they've somehow convinced majority of software architects that complexity is good.

My only concern is when I use HTMX/Hyperscript in my FOSS projects will others be comfortable contributing to it even though it has very little learning curve but they have to empty their React cup.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#524

Post by montag »

There are caveats and warnings already by the time we've added an ``, and the attribute boilerplate seems onerous right from the start. It pains me to say that almost a decade on, I'm still not a fan of web components.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#525

Post by montag »

Spend five minutes on webcomponents.org for a depressing ride. Broken links, broken demos, ghost town community and shuttered chat servers. Sponsored and abandoned by the Google Polymer team, or so it appears. Just sad.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#526

Post by tzebco »

myfonj wrote: post #512

Am I the only one who (still) does not feel comfortable seeing JavaScript being intertwined into the so-called "vanilla" web in a way that seems more like a hard dependency and not the progressive enhancement we were taught should be the approach for serious public websites? The page https://plainvanillaweb.com/pages/sites.html uses custom components for all code examples and embedded content. Without JavaScript, it…

You're not the only one. I block most subresources by default and was disappointed to see empty figures peppered throughout their articles. I'm learning to not automatically equate advocacy of "vanilla" with advocacy of robustness.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#527

Post by larodi »

astrobe_ wrote: post #499
larodi wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets first not forget: 1) people been doing business with these "ugly" green textmode screens, long before web; 2) the web existed in a very reasonable form pre-www as FIDO, GOPHER, and of course IRC & EMAIL. The fact that this all got hyperlinked is a superb. convenient, but also a challenge from tech perspective, and what FAANG did in the 30 years to come (after 1992) led to this horror of entangled and super-compl…

> The fact that this all got hyperlinked is a superb. convenient, but also a challenge from tech perspective, and what FAANG did in the 30 years to come (after 1992) led to this horror of entangled and super-complex technologies we have today. Even vanilla web is quite complex if you take into consideration all the W3 standardization. With that title I didn't expect Javascript to be part of the equation. To me "vanil…

> The thing that happened is that FAANG redesigned the web for their own needs, then other companies used that to fulfill their own needs too. That's how we ended up with a lot of available content, but also user info mining, browser monopoly, and remote code execution (JS) as a daily normalization of deviance.

and most importantly - we lost our right to search the content that the community generates. it is now walled off behind FAANG services, that threw us directly in the dark ages of internet, when even your own content is out of reach.

here's as simple example - a group of friends been throwing parties for 20 years, like raves. all these are announced on the FB and now-and then on some other services. more than 400+ events for 20 years. trying to find these again is impossible. google won't index them, fb won't allow you to scrape then, insta also. perhaps some obscure snapshot lives of it in internet archive, perhaps not. so one reason to own the content you publish is to be able to actually use it yourself after a while.

Even with JavaScript in the equation, the vanilla web is a good option to reclaim all that, and honestly bringing a personal site up in 2025 takes... less than a day to setup with all the VMs, DNS, CF tunnel, DB, FE/BE hassle that stands in the way. It's more available than ever, people just need to brave and embrace this... but something tells me the majority will not do it.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#528

Post by Y_Y »

Aurornis wrote: post #438
bradly wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People romanticize businesses like this but there’s a reason you’re not posting the link You are correct that I was a worried about an HN hug of orders for brass tacks. > I guess I’ve spent enough time dealing with things like non-payment or doing work for trades that never arrive that I just don’t romanticize this stuff any more. In this case there isn't much of a choice. When the last manufacture of brass tacks c…

> I understand your sentiment but it was perfectly normal to pump gas before paying in the U.S. for a very long time and still is in many places. I had a friend who worked at a gas station in high school. Filing police reports for people who filled up and left without paying was a standard part of operations. This was in a nice area, too. Often people just forgot and drove away. They had recourse because they had sec…

> You can’t have a pay-later business without an amount of non-payment, which has to be compensated by higher prices (which other customers shoulder).

The business can just make less money than they would if everyone paid (which is, as you say, impossible). Costs and prices are linked in some markets, but it's not a natural law.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#529

Post by DrScientist »

deergomoo wrote: post #276
crystal_revenge wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also from the before times, and still think one of the major issues with all of this is that we've decided to build a global application ecosystem by hacking stuff on top of a document format . HTML was supposed to just a slight markup layer to make it easier to transit and render text documents, likewise that's all HTTP was designed for. The ratio of text-to-markup should be fairly high (I'm sure today it's less…

Yup, the web is a thoroughly mediocre application platform†, but the world’s best application distribution platform. †I know this claim will rub some people the wrong way, but if you compare the capabilities of web tooling to build rich application UIs against desktop app tooling of even 20-30 years ago, there’s no comparison. The web is still primitive, and while JS and CSS are improving at a good pace, HTML is almo…

> HTML is almost frozen in carbonite.

Not really - there are pretty big escape hatches - you can do pretty much anything in canvas, custom elements allows you to define your own elements with their own behaviour.

I'd say the problem is the opposite - one of the reasons desktop apps from 20-30 years ago ( say MacOS 7 ) where great from a user perspective is pretty much all apps looked and worked in the same way, using the same UI toolkit and the same UI principals. And from a developer perspective - a lot of the key decisions had already been made for you.

The web of today is a zoo of UI styles and interaction modes.

The problem isn't so much a lack of innovation or possibilities, but perhaps rather the opposite.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#530

Post by [deleted] »

bob1029 wrote: post #291

I've transcended the vanilla/framework arguments in favor of "do we even need a website for this?". I've discovered that when you start getting really cynical about the actual need for a web application - especially in B2B SaaS - you may become surprised at how far you can take the business without touching a browser. A vast majority of the hours I've spent building web sites & applications has been devoted to admini…

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