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Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

vijayp.dev

111–120 of 218 posts

Re: Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

#111
post #30

I started a portfolio website with Netlify (iirc), then I moved to Vue + Gridsome (on GitHub pages), then Next.js with Tailwind CSS, and was about to move to Vite.js over winter break. That's 4 stacks over the course of 5-6 years. Not worth it. Decided to do the sensible thing and use GitHub's README functionality. I prefer this approach and wish more folks in the tech community adopted it: https://github.com/Subopti…

I hate the UI layer, for this reason. Nothing is ever stable. I'm looking for "Boring" and "Googleable in the age of AI slop". The other alternative are frameworks small enough to easily comprehend. The UI is often tangential to the heavy lifting done by the back end. It often needs to be "just good enough".

Don’t hate the layer, hate the player.

How can UI be stable if you’re the one changing it all the time even if all you need is a readme page that can be done in the same UI with no change for decades?

Re: Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

#112

There's a lot you can do with just plain html these days if you just need a clean site. Here's an example from my recipe site ( https://xilic.com/recipia/sauces/pesto_traditional.html ), mostly for my personal use or sharing with friends, with only html/css. It has expandable boxes, a menu system, etc. A simple script converts a directory structure of .csv files to these recipe cards with a template, and this way you…

Really appreciate that you're doing mass-based recipes, and in metric too. I'm tired of all the American recipes with quantities like "2 1/3 cups"; the proliferation of units and fractions makes work needlessly hard compared to just grams and millilitres.

Re: Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

httpd, nginx, a number of other servers support SSI https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_ssi_module.html Caddy chose not to, I guess? https://caddy.community/t/caddy-update-on-ssi-server-side-in...

You generally can’t use SSI on many popular platforms for static websites like Netlify, etc.

However, you could generate the static HTML easily and then publish it on those platforms, which is what many people do today (probably not often using SSI).

Re: Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

#115

I have found someone who uses the anchor suffix to solve the problem: https://john-doe.neocities.org/ I am not html expert, so I have no idea how complicate or what implications would that have.

I love this site and concept and have been thinking about moving to this method for my own site

Re: Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

#116

I've been maintaining my personal website as plain HTML for five years now. I must say, I quite like this method. There's no substitute for practice when it comes to maintaining your skills at editing HTML and CSS. Yes, you must copy and paste content and not having layout page is annoying at times. But the overhead of just doing it yourself is surprisingly small in terms of the time commitment. Typically, I'll draft…

> Yes, you must copy and paste content and not having layout page is annoying at times. But the overhead of just doing it yourself is surprisingly small in terms of the time commitment.

This calls out for server side includes[0]. I so loved server side includes back in the late 90s. You still work in plain HTML and CSS, boilerplate can be centralized and not repeated, and clients receive the entire page in a single request.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes

Re: Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

#117

I've been maintaining my personal website as plain HTML for five years now. I must say, I quite like this method. There's no substitute for practice when it comes to maintaining your skills at editing HTML and CSS. Yes, you must copy and paste content and not having layout page is annoying at times. But the overhead of just doing it yourself is surprisingly small in terms of the time commitment. Typically, I'll draft…

> copy and paste content and not having layout page is annoying at times HTML was envisioned as an SGML application/vocabulary, and SGML has those power features, such as type-checked shared fragments/text macros (entities, possibly with parameters), safe third-party content transclusion, markup stream processing and filtering for generating a table of content for page or site navigation, content screening for remova…

I didn't expect this to be serious and am surprised on that the tutorial actually delivers. Way back when I was learning HTML and it was said that it was built with SGML, then this relation remained a total mystery to me.

Re: Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

#118
Hey, Query [1] creator here. The article raised some exciting challenges. With Query, we solve booth downsides mentioned in it. To keep things simple, we use EventSource for live reloading [2] and JSX Server-Side Rendering [3] for those who want component reuse in the server. It's just JSX with some helpful extras. I'm happy to elaborate on the technical decisions if anyone's curious.

A couple of days ago, I wrote an article about it: https://dev.to/gc-victor/building-static-html-pages-with-jsx...

[1] https://qery.io

[2] https://github.com/gc-victor/query/tree/main/examples/minima...

[3] https://qery.io/docs/modules/function.html#jsx-server-side

Re: Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

#119
What resource is good for gaining a deep and comprehensive knowledge of html for someone already familiar with html, like, having-written-Angular/JavaScript/jQuery-level familiar? Consider CSS to be out of scope of this question as it is a different beast on its own.

Re: Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

#120
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, you must copy and paste content Many people who maintain their own sites in vanilla web technologies tend to create reusable functions to handle this for them. It can generate headers and the like dynamically so you don't have to change it on every single page. Though that does kill the "no javascript required" aspect a lot of people like Of course you could simply add a build step to your pure HTML site inste…

Isn't using React with a static site generator framework basically the same thing but better?

Yes, it is. Unfortunately HN has a crazy bias against JavaScript (the least crazy part of the web stack) and in favour of HTML and CSS, even though the latter are worse in every meaningful way.
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