Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

> When we launched, the number of people completing the form doubled. The analytics people didn’t even know where these users were coming from. Of course, your javascript-based analytics package doesn’t see the users you are bouncing because of javascript failures.

Yeah, reminds me of the b52 story re holes in wings on the planes that made it back from missions, leading them down the wrong path of strengthening wings. They weren't looking at the planes that never came back with holes in the fuel silages.

Salesforce and SAP are not fast, even on that. But ubiquitous for building corporate platforms for their customers.

I am not familiar with this astro framework they used. But having built some sites using Pure HTML/JS back in the day, React, Angular, Vue, Rails ERB, Rails Hotwire, and HTMX. I think HTML first websites are absolutely the way to go. Rails Hotwire with View Components makes rails sites super fast, faster to develop and easy to re-use components. HTMX more generally, but Ive used it with Spring boot and Thymeleaf. I really don't want to go back to SPAs. Development time is less and the website performance is better, and I haven't really seen any regressions in capability. With HTMX and some url parameters, I can make a pure HTML site that seems like a Single Page Application but without the excessive loading times.

As a teenager I remember going to a website for... a city, I think? And their 'sidebar' was a Java applet that did nothing but provide links for you to click with on-hover effects. The page used frames; the applet was in the left-side frame and the content was in the main frame on the right.

The applet took 30 seconds to load. Once it loaded, it showed five buttons to click to get to different sections of the site. When you clicked on one, instead of changing the content frame, it sent you to an entirely new frameset. This, of course, caused the sidebar to take another 30 seconds to load. Hitting the back button did the same thing.

Meanwhile, I knew someone whose friend made a little applet that he showed me; it was a Java applet that you could provide an image URL for and it would load the image and then, below the image, show a rippling effect as though you were looking at something on the shore of a rippling lake. This applet took less than a second to load and ran incredibly smoothly.

Java was a curse, not because Java was bad but because Java applets were written badly and used badly simply because they were neat.

I'm not convinced from the article that HTML-first was the thing that fixed the problem. What fixed the problem was 1) the person building it knew what they were doing and 2) it had design constraints from the get-go to be user-friendly. You can do that with React. It's arguable whether it's easier or better, but you can get there regardless of the approach you use.