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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

#341

Post by 8note »

indigodaddy wrote: post #307
chao- wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

Kinda sorta analogous to the cloud engineers who can standup complex monstrosities in AWS-land, but don’t know the first thing about how to troubleshoot say a connectivity or simple problem where they have to ssh to an ec2 box and do the needful

or the materials engineers who are great at making mems tools, but couldnt for the life of them design an aircraft prop

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

#344

Post by 8note »

brightball wrote: post #295
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,…

This was the jQuery way. It was called Graceful Degradation. The entire approach went out of style with the advent of single page apps, React, Angular, VueJS, etc.

the shockwave and flash way was simpler.

download the whole app and run it in browser. you can even run it off line!

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

#345

Post by bsammon »

tomgp wrote: post #182
rewgs wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

60 year olds have been using computers most of their working life. Word processors and spreadsheets having been ubiquitous for office workers from at least the early 90s.

That would be "60 year olds who have been office workers most of their working life"

60-year-olds who worked blue-collar for a significant part of their life, this is not so obviously true for.

Also probably not true for 60-year-olds who worked in other non-office jobs, like acting or sports.

There have been a variety of well-paid jobs that didn't use computers that a 60-year-old might have done over their life, meaning that this can't even be broken up along class/income lines.

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

#346

Post by pragma_x »

pphysch wrote: post #169
pragma_x wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-rou…

This is huge, thank you.

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

#347

Post by bachmeier »

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,…

> Why is it more work?

As someone that reads a lot of code written by others, I'm confident that "learning a new way to do something" is perceived by many as the hardest thing in the world.

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

#348

Post by literalAardvark »

EGreg wrote: post #203
LNSY wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because before there was AI Slop, there was React.

I think Facebook with their money and Vercel with their VC funding tried hard to push the React and then the Next.js everywhere. So it arrived in time for AIs to all train on it. And now it’s the one true way :) But do we really need all that stuff? Build steps, bundling, tree shaking, all for what? And is it really simpler… hmm

There are some advantages, but the main one is probably that it stops everyone from using NoScript and breaking tracking.

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

#349

Post by motoboi »

Telaneo wrote: post #272
pmontra wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wish I could convince my grandmother of this. "Why did the bank change the layout? I want the old one back!" - Don't like it? Change bank then. That's what I did. I get that changing to another bank is a big unknown, but it's probably still worth it to show your displeasure. Plus her bank are morons when it comes to several other things.

Yeah. We grown being trained to solve those small puzzles that are websites and apps, so we learned _how they are projected_, not how they work.

I mean, we learn that a enroll is normally a flow. Flows have steps. So if you came to the end of the flow and the finish button is gray, you think.

Hum… I'm used to flows. This is a multistep flow. Flows normally need me to fulfill some small checks and won't let me proceed between steps if something is missing. But some won't. Maybe this is one of those? Some flows have warnings in the end, some have next to the thing missing. I don't see any warn in the last screen, so I'll go back every step and check field by field for errors. That'll probably do.

This is the model you have in your mind, of how a website or an app works.

People that came to computers, apps and websites later in life didn't learned the puzzles.

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

#350

Post by antasvara »

reaperducer wrote: post #299
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…

Old people. They exist. It's not about age. It's about ability. A lot of the people I build web pages for are poorly educated. The text we use for web is written for people with an eighth-grade education. Print material is fifth-grade. People in the SV bubble can't imagine that there are tens of millions of people in America who cannot understand how an SPA works. These people are invisible, even as they ladle out th…

I'm going to link my favorite survey [0] to illustrate this point. Its called the PIAAC, and it's a internationally standardized assessment of adult skills in literacy, numeracy, and problem solving.

28% of the US is at Level 1 or below. That level roughly corresponds to reading a simple text and being able to answer a question about it that requires limited inference (i.e. if the question is "what color are pigs," the answer would be in the text as "pigs are pink in color.")

[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp

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