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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

#361

Post by mpweiher »

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…

> Most of my apps are now simply HTMX + Go + SQLite.

Very cool!

> But yes, lately I’ve been building mobile apps. ... What can I do?

I am currently building HTMXNative.

Together with Objective-Smalltalk, which has linguistic support for REST built-in.

The idea is that you create your model in a natural way and then thinly wrap it to deliver wherever.

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

#362

Post by sethops1 »

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…

Are you me? I've been on a tear building stuff with HTMX + Go + SQLite. It's like the trifecta of boring technology that jives with me. Stuff gets deployed to a colo server using a generic bash script.

I created a couple libraries to abstract the SQL and HTMX/web/OAuth bits; my apps are now very similar and easy to copy features between.

https://github.com/cattlecloud/webtools

https://github.com/cattlecloud/litesql

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

#363

Post by 8note »

whstl wrote: post #154
swiftcoder wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is patently untrue, give a craftsman terrible tools, and they'll still produce a decent end result. That said, defaults matter, and astro is going to be significantly more friendly out-of-the-box to low-end clients

> give a craftsman terrible tools, and they'll still produce a decent end result This is an absurd statement. Just because something is a proverb, doesn't mean it's automatically true for all cases.

i dont think thats a proverb though? the actual idiom is more like

> A poor workman blames his tools

which is towards the opposite meaning

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

#364

Post by iamjs »

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,…

Two years ago, I started a new company, and decided at the outset to avoid using any heavy JavaScript SPA framework. We stuck to simple server-rendered html and only use progressive-enhancement style JavaScript.

Our app was fast, and simple, but it also came at a cost: we were limited in our ability to take rich UI elements off the shelf with an npm package. We had to do a lot more work to provide a rich user experience. Everything took longer, and the user experience was worse as a result. We cared, but sometimes you don't have time to carry through.

The company failed, and I don't think react would have saved it. But I can tell you first hand that righteous adherence to "simplicity" didn't help either. It's always a trade-off.

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

#366

Post by PebblesRox »

lucumo wrote: post #204
onion2k wrote: post #138

This isn't "We replaced a React app with an HTML form and performance improved." It's "We replaced a bad web page with a good web page and performance improved." Attributing this to the technology driving the browser experience is silly. You can make a brilliant user experience with React. You can make a terrible website with plain HTML. The improvement comes from the change design, not tech.

The standard answer to that is that some technologies make one harder than the other. That's kind of true from first principles, but it requires making the case that e.g. React is actually harder to make good than a plain HTML page. Fun thing, TFA describes a kind of multi-page wizard style form that I haven't seen a lot anymore in the last decade or so. But when I did see it, it's always some dogshit enterprise syst…

I don’t like multi-page forms when I’m not able to see at a glance all the info needed to fill out the form. Though I guess if my progress is durably saved that makes it not so bad. The worst is when I fill out a bunch of stuff and then realize it’s asking for info I don’t have, and after I get the info I have to fill everything out again from scratch!

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

#367

Post by radiator »

8note wrote: post #351
atoav wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By this point people don't appear to have any real clue how to write HTML anymore. Writing semantic HTML isn't significantly harder than say writing Markdown. You copy some HTMl skeleton and you literally just stack your elements into the body. I managed to do that as a 13 year old on MySpace without any deep instruction. Sure you have to close elements as well so the syntax is slightly harder than markdown, but that…

> writing straight html and css sucked. building reddit css themes sucked

But I believe the point is: if you were writing HTML by hand, you would never have written the above.

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

#368

Post by jfaliwejrliawj »

chao- wrote: post #198
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 ne…

Absolutely

I'm not a web developer. I built a few websites in high school, but these days I write safety-critical real-time code for robots.

A few years ago I was back in grad school and I took a class with undergrad senior CS students. We had to write a fairly simple web service, and I was blown away by how complicated they were making it. Based on the requirements we easily could have written 90% of it in plain HTML, but everyone else insisted it should be 100% react. Part of that is honors students wanting to do everything the most complex way possible to impress teacher, and part of it is them simply not knowing that other options exist.

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

#369

Post by cgh »

chao- wrote: post #198
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 ne…

I’ve long thought frontend web developers are the ones most threatened by LLM-assisted programming for a bunch of reasons and now I can add “many don’t understand web fundamentals” to the list.

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

#370

Post by replwoacause »

yawaramin wrote: post #270
regnull wrote: post #150

> When we launched, the number of people completing the form doubled. I don't want to be that guy, but the title is misleading. The number of users completing the form doubled.

No, it's actually people. FTA: 'My client was a utility company, and they had a big problem. To apply for their services, customers could either use an old ASP form on the website...' Ie customers of the utility company were completing the form, not random users from the internet.

FTA? Free Trade Agreement?
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