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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

#491

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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…

They may not be stupid people, but they are bad at their jobs. One needs to be able to at least try other approaches to a problem, and not have a one size fits all approach. The latter isn't engineering, it's cargo culting.

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

#492

Post by bigstrat2003 »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #390
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,…

It is harder to do more with less. There is a reason React and other is used so much. Makes it easier to make interactive websites. It’s like asking why backend engineers think it’s harder to code an api using C instead of using Django.

> There is a reason React and other is used so much.

Yes, it's because many people are quite bad at their jobs and reach for the same tool regardless of whether it's the right one. Let's not make excuses for incompetence.

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

#493

Post by bigstrat2003 »

Telaneo wrote: post #303
Dwedit wrote: post #125

There is one hard wall that stops very old clients from connecting: Not supporting a new enough version of TLS. TLS 1.2 is from 2008, and TLS 1.3 is from 2018. Web browsers older than 2008 can't connect to modern websites since TLS 1.0 and 1.1 were deprecated from web servers in 2021.

I still think it's worth it to provide connections over plain HTTP for this reason. It probably doesn't apply to many people, and you shouldn't allow anything really important to happen over plain HTTP (logins, payment), but normal viewing should still be possible. Sadly, the internet as a whole seems to disagree. Even the most useful resource on the web one could use over plain HTTP, Wikipedia, only allows connectio…

The push to have everything be served over HTTPS is absolutely insane. Very few things actually need to be served securely. But sadly, browser makers don't give a damn about actual benefits for the users, but rather shove their out of touch ideas about what the Web should be down everyone's throats.

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

#495

Post by xp84 »

VincePlatt wrote: post #478
xp84 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the LLMs are trained on what we've made, and there's going to be a ton more React garbage[1] in the training set than there are carefully-crafted websites like the article describes, so I don't expect a decrease in overengineered, bloated junk. If anything, I predict that the fact that you can shit one out in less time than before will have a different effect: A modest increase in bloat since an LLM won…

It doesn't take that much effort to put guardrails around your prompt to solve problems in a certain way and with certain frameworks and excluding certain others.

Who will be doing that? Only a small minority of developers pre-ai cared to attempt using HTML, so I don’t see them urging Claude to create efficient and lean websites in the future either.

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

#496

Post by AWTom »

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…

> Cloudflare will not let you run an image heavy site on its own

Cloudflare R2 object storage is S3-compatible, offers free egress, and does not share their CDN product's fair use policy against image-heavy use. Storage is 65% the per-GB cost of S3.

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

#497

Post by mlsu »

concinds wrote: post #215
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…

You are far too empathetic to them. They should not hold the jobs they have. These are the people writing React monstrosities for government benefit websites, and testing them on fast iPhones and fast 4G, without realizing that every page load for actual users will take 30 seconds on their old $200 Android on 3G, and users won’t complete the form. It’s a culture of not giving a shit, that’s the deeper issue.

I mean there are web programmers that do not know C. C! The substrate of all computing! The bedrock, surely…

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

#498

Post by creesch »

iamjs wrote: post #364
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 experie…

I feel like there is some context missing in your story here. There is a lot of middleground between heavy SPA frameworks and creating everything from scratch. More importantly, I am left wondering what sort of functionality was your team trying to build that requires that much interactivity? At least that is what I assume with "rich user experience"?

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

#499

Post by shlewis »

graypegg wrote: post #81

I haven't heard much about in a while, but the HTML Triptych proposal [0] is still something I hope to eventually land in browsers. HTML forms speaking to REST endpoints are a good pattern. (meaning user-aiding validation is handled via the input attributes, real validation is handled on the far side of the request, and the flow is GET /form => POST /thing => GET /thing/1) It would be a great pattern with the triptyc…

In the mean time, HTMX is pretty much that with much more. Definitely recommend.

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

#500

Post by creesch »

em-bee wrote: post #488
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,…

my most recent website is fully static html and css. it contains several pages and a menu that is duplicated in all pages. that menu is maintained manually, and every time a page is added, all copies of the menu have to be updated. at some point that will get tedious. then i have a few options: i generate the menu using a backend framework. the downside: the website is no longer fully static. i now depend on a backen…

While purists will disagree, a little bit of javascript is fine. Having said that, you are talking about a personal website. Most companies will have a backend of some sort anyway.

Also, here is a little secret. If you want something that is future proof, try something that has been around for decades and still runs large parts of the internet. People will scoff at this, but PHP is actually really neat for personal websites and has been for decades.

A while ago I also found myself looking at static site generators, workflows from github to my host, etc. Eventually I realized I don't update things nearly enough, don't blog, etc.

For similar reasons as you I didn't want to go completely static as that is just too much hassle when doing multiple pages. So I decided to utilize that good old lamp stack to basically do something like this.
Slightly more, but the base principle is the same. Just 10 lines of php code, and now I can just add pages by uploading their contents and adding them to the json file for whitelisting. For your use case it would be trivial to add a menu based on the json file and I'd be confident that it will still work in 10 years with minimal adjustments.

As a bonus I also rediscovered PHP in itself works really well as a templating language (as you can see) so no need for extra stuff like handlebars. As an extra extra bonus, I can just go to any shared webhosting party and get it running with no issue at all.

I am not saying you'd need to go down this road. But I just want to illustrate how stupidly simple a website can be with "old" basic technologies even if you want some form of backend.

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