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Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

mohkohn.co.uk

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Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#161

Post by dghlsakjg »

pmontra wrote: post #137
motoboi wrote: post #132

Old people. They exist. Not even that old. 60 year people can't user your fancy site because then don't have an internal model of how a computer works. You know that when pressing a button a hidden engine runs in the backend (or something runs in the backend). You expect an answer and if the expectation do not match the result, the model in your mind creates an hypothesis about what maybe happened and iterate from th…

Giving up is a wise choice: there are so many other sites to interact with. On the other side they have only one refrigerator.

Next time I have trouble checking in on an airline site I’ll remember that there are so many other sites to interact with that whatever I was trying to do probably doesn’t matter.

I wouldn’t sweat the broken fridge either though, there’s so many other electrical appliances in the house to use.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#162

Post by Hard_Space »

motoboi wrote: post #132

Old people. They exist. Not even that old. 60 year people can't user your fancy site because then don't have an internal model of how a computer works. You know that when pressing a button a hidden engine runs in the backend (or something runs in the backend). You expect an answer and if the expectation do not match the result, the model in your mind creates an hypothesis about what maybe happened and iterate from th…

> 60 year people can't user your fancy site because then don't have an internal model of how a computer works.

I think this is a bit outdated. I'll be 60 in a month, and have been practicing and writing about machine learning, for money, for a straight 10 years now; and I was a young man (and a full stack developer) during the digital revolution.

If anything, GenX had to work harder to get into these brittle emerging technologies and paradigms. There's no-one of my age group, at least that I know of, who is remotely as tech-illiterate as your comment depicts.

Truth is that it took so long for smartphones to dumb down everyone's tech acumen that those of my generation had already learned to do it the hard way.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#163

Post by genewitch »

nunez wrote: post #158
genewitch wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just use firefox with an adblocker like adnauseam and a fairly decent chunk of the internet stops working, including chase.com and several other massive corp sites. I can't imagine trying to use links/lynx or a browser with less market share than FF that isn't based on chromium.

Chase works with ad blockers, though. It doesn't work if you disable JavaScript...but it wasn't always this way! They had a mobile version of their online banking service at https://m.chase.com that was EXTREMELY FAST and did 85% of what you need to do in an online banking portal (check balances, transfer funds). They scrapped it when they moved to their current bloated monstrosity of the portal that they have today.…

i am unclear on if it's because of the adblocker (specifically i use ad nauseam which does block some JS. some.) or because of firefox. I can load it on edge every time it fails on firefox. last week, chase.com worked fine on firefox. the previous 15 months where i needed to log in, it did not.

Someone at chase isn't checking their work on firefox.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#164

Post by aziaziazi »

afavour wrote: post #31
alex_suzuki wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not on their iPhones operating over 5G or the corporate WiFi.

It's still present. JSON/JS parsing still has a delay. And in either case (as the author states) not everyone is using an iPhone over 5G. Heavy React apps are a miserable experience on low end Android phones, even when the connection is fast. I've seen JS/JSON parsing times in the multiple seconds.

My old iPhone handles well react apps, but frequently freeze/crash on heavy advertised pages and pages with huge images/auto loading videos.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#165

Post by OskarS »

As a non-web dev, I have a question about this part:

> There was a sad coda; as is the way of contract work, I moved on. I explained what I had built to my replacement, that it always worked even without javascript. He was appalled and said, “but that’s a lot more work for us.”

Why is it more work? The approach described in the article seems honestly reasonably simple: just write the standard components for the form, have a submit button at the bottom. When I was making my own websites many years ago now, that's how it worked, and it wasn't that hard. Maybe it's reflecting my ignorance in this field, but doing fancy front-ends seems much harder to me.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#167

Post by natbobc »

pmontra wrote: post #137
motoboi wrote: post #132

Old people. They exist. Not even that old. 60 year people can't user your fancy site because then don't have an internal model of how a computer works. You know that when pressing a button a hidden engine runs in the backend (or something runs in the backend). You expect an answer and if the expectation do not match the result, the model in your mind creates an hypothesis about what maybe happened and iterate from th…

Giving up is a wise choice: there are so many other sites to interact with. On the other side they have only one refrigerator.

Is entirely context dependent. I can agree in some scenarios but when it’s a utility or gov site that I can’t really avoid it’s less straightforward.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#168

Post by rewgs »

Hard_Space wrote: post #162
motoboi wrote: post #132

Old people. They exist. Not even that old. 60 year people can't user your fancy site because then don't have an internal model of how a computer works. You know that when pressing a button a hidden engine runs in the backend (or something runs in the backend). You expect an answer and if the expectation do not match the result, the model in your mind creates an hypothesis about what maybe happened and iterate from th…

> 60 year people can't user your fancy site because then don't have an internal model of how a computer works. I think this is a bit outdated. I'll be 60 in a month, and have been practicing and writing about machine learning, for money, for a straight 10 years now; and I was a young man (and a full stack developer) during the digital revolution. If anything, GenX had to work harder to get into these brittle emerging…

GP clearly isn’t talking about 60 year olds who were full stack devs and get on Hacker News.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#169

Post by pphysch »

pragma_x wrote: post #124
faangguyindia wrote: post #50

Most of my apps are now simply HTMX + Go + SQLite. I've found it's enough for most projects. One of my sites is image heavy and serves 10 TB of traffic per month. For this, I use the following setup: 1. S3 (I wanted reliable data storage) 2. In front of it, I have Cloudflare (with Tiered Cache enabled, which makes POPs prefer pulling from Cloudflare rather than the origin). I've set rules to cache everything on both…

Since you're using HTMX, I have to ask: do you have any tips or idioms for composing complex forms and UI without things getting out of hand? I love the approach, but I'm having a bad time figuring out where the ideal balance is between too few or too many HTMX-replaced areas in a page. Thanks.

My #1 advice is not creating separate server endpoints for every HTMX fragment, unless you are 1000% sure that endpoint will be used in multiple different pages.

Working on a "simple html page" that is actually 5 different independent "subpages" (routes, views, templates) in the backend is awful. The UX was improved, but the DX was sacrificed.

I recommend having a single view function for each page/SPA and do sub-routing within that function to handle page fragments. In other words, use a GET/path/Header parameter that indicates which fragment is currently needed, defaulting to the full document as normal. Just make sure you are considering request logging and client-side caching in your solution.

This makes it very easy to add/remove async content from the page, since you are just editing the one view function/template and you can easily reason about the entire page as one logical unit.

It also means you don't need to duplicate security logic or other middlewares for the page, since it can be implemented once at the start of your multi-faceted view function.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#170

Post by dirkc »

kcrwfrd_ wrote: post #90
dirkc wrote: post #61

My go-to for spinning up a site has been Jekyll + Bootstrap with the occasional bit of React for well over 10 years now. While it still does the job, I'm a little curious to explore more modern options, if for nothing else to understand the choices a more junior dev would face/make today. I'm seriously considering giving Atro a go. Is it worth it?

Yes

Guess I should have stated the questions as "what makes Astro worth while to try out?" :)
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