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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

#191

Post by wang_li »

rewgs wrote: post #168
Hard_Space wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I think this is a bit outdated.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.

I'm 55 and likely have been using computers longer than that poster has been alive. Regardless of the fact that I started young, by the time I was in college the PC revolution was in full swing and everyone had and worked with computers.

My mother, born in 1934, had no problem using computers. She didn't internalize how they work, but she learned the workflows she needed. How to launch applications and so on.

The situation described in that comment is just a broken app, it has nothing to do with the age or the understanding of the user.

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

#192

Post by 1-more »

pmontra wrote: post #149
iamacyborg wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PIN number

Town names too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montebello_della_Battaglia Not in the Wikipedia page (but check the Italian version): it started as "Mons Belli" (Mount of the Battle) because of a battle fought by the Romans a few years before the Hannibal campaign. Then the original meaning was lost and it gained another "of battle" in the 1800s. Mount of the Battle of the Battle. Hopefully there won't be another one t…

Lake Tahoe (Lake Big Lake). River Avon (River River). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tautological_place_nam...

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

#193

Post by rhelmer »

OskarS wrote: post #165

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,…

I suspect they are both more familiar with client-side rendering, and also thinking of things being able to share components, reuse existing libraries, and so on. So re-implementing everything with vanilla HTML and forms feels like reinventing the wheel to a team used to an SPA component library, it's not that it's intrinsically harder, it's that they don't have the existing building blocks they'd normally reach for.

Modern frameworks such as Astro allow for a similar development experience (and can optionally use JS, React and other client-side libraries) while still being able to generate a static site if desired.

I think server-side rendering and static site generation are less familiar to many web devs who came up in the React/Vue/Svelte era. The patterns and mental model are just different. In an ideal world we combine both: fast static HTML that works everywhere, with progressive enhancement for interactivity. Astro does this well; Next.js supports it too, though the SSR parts have a learning curve.

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

#195

Post by genewitch »

nunez wrote: post #173
genewitch wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I have to log into Chase on my computer, I do via Firefox, and it works fine. Maybe you flipped something on in about:config that's breaking it?

i love that i'm holding it wrong. thanks, HN.

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

#196

Post by LNSY »

dylan604 wrote: post #151
danudey wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. W…

Every language can say that bad developers write bad code with it while good developers write good code with it. I would like to say the early interweb was just a learning experience, but today's interweb hasn't learned any of the lessons. It's just changed which language the lesson is being relearned

A lot of these tools, like React, are designed to embrace, extend extinguish the web. Why Microslop and Zuckerberg spend millions of dollars of dark PR claiming anyone who doesn't like React doesn't know what's going on is because it makes the web worse and less useful, which means you spend more time talking to Co-Pilot or bots on Facebook.

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

#197

Post by celsoazevedo »

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…

And now also a lot of young people. They grew up with iPhones and many think that "Wi-Fi" = "internet".

Keep it simple and light. HTML+CSS first, JS to expand functionality. Don't re-invent the wheel.

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

#198

Post by chao- »

OskarS wrote: post #165

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,…

Starting a few years ago, I realized some junior and medior engineers never once considered the possibility of building a website (app, experience, etc.) in anything other than a heavy SPA framework. But they're not stupid people! If you directly asked "Can you build a website without React?" they know the answer is obviously "Yes." However, if you asked them to build a new website, they would unthinkingly start a new React project, mostly out of familiarity and a desire to get the job done.

A few of them would outright not know how to do anything else. No knowledge of how to stand up a boring HTTP server to send pure HTML. No experience building a form that validates or submits without JavaScript. These are not the people who post here on HN. They are not engaged in online discussions of new tools and skills (or old tools and skills!). These are people who learned just enough from a bootcamp, or their uni's single "web apps" course, to get a job. Since then, they have just-in-time learned whatever their employer required, or whatever particular tools someone else on their team chose for a project.

As an old, it took me a while to recognize/realize it, but I understand them now. Depending on their career path, someone will encounter the simplest aspects of HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript after they learn the complex, framework-specific aspects of each. It feels (to them) like more esoteric, advanced, or tertiary knowledge.

Tying it back to to the quote "that’s a lot more work for us", that's not necessarily an intentionally false claim. It probably does feel like a lot more work to perform a task using unfamiliar tools, even if they are less-complex tools.

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

#199

Post by seangrogg »

OskarS wrote: post #165

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,…

As a web dev a lot of this is simply ongoing maintenance of a largely unknown quantity. Most web devs know React and use it extensively; Astro is something they'll have to learn on the job or hire for specifically.

It's akin to writing a backend in Haskell. Chances are you could write something performant that leverages FP in a way that serves as a magic bullet for your domain. But now everyone after you needs to learn Haskell and how to model all future problems in a way that conforms with it - or rewrite things again.

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

#200

Post by bgarbiak »

genewitch wrote: post #156
Ruarl wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Rick Rubin could take a tape to his car to listen to his mixes, your product people can try their websites on £20 phones from Tesco. They can ask to sit in on user tests with minority groups. Extending your knowledge like this is trivial, but rarely done.

May i ask why, specifically, Rick Rubin? I don't know who that is, but whenever we finished mastering a new song, we had a series of "systems" we listened to it on. We went out to my dad's work van and listened there. We called up our friend with a street-comp sound system in his car, and listened in there (neighbors must have loved us!), and then a "cheap" boombox with large-ish speakers but cheap. if it sounded "cl…

Working in the music industry and not being aware who Rick Rubin is… is a bit weird.
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