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Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

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Re: Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

#131

Post by ianai »

brilliantcode wrote: post #104
aantix wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if they just wrote an SPA and overrode the back button behavior and displayed a little spinner icon while html was loaded via json, your experience would be so much better.

Founder: The paradigm has shifted. 5kb HTML pages are no longer disruptive enough, we need more javascript for a- VC: Shut up and light this bag of cash on fire. Focus on number of non-paying users and make sure it's big enough so I can introduce you to more people with bigger pile of cash to light on fire. Craigslist Post: We are hiring front-end React.js developers with 10+ year experience.

Is the VC culture really like that? Their incentives leading away from profitable simplicity?

Re: Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

#132

Post by 8note »

marssaxman wrote: post #56
smallgovt wrote: post #8

I find it interesting that there's a general undertone that CL is being "honorable" by choosing to not make more profit. I have no doubt Craig's intentions were honorable, but in reality, his refusal to make money to fund the site's innovation is hurting society. His users are screaming "TAKE MY MONEY AND MAKE THE SITE (MY LIFE) BETTER", but he refuses to do so and everyone is worse off because of it! In a way, it's…

I'm really glad they're not making the site "better", because it works fine the way it is. Making it "better" these days would clutter it up with a ton of unnecessary graphics and scripty whooshy hover widgets that pop up over whatever it is you're actually trying to do after wasting a whole bunch of load time pulling in 10+ MB of Javascript from god knows where. It works, and I'm really glad they're leaving it that…

They've added one good feature, not too long ago: a map view for housing

Re: Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

#133

Post by MiddleEndian »

flukus wrote: post #128
MiddleEndian wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I visit Craigslist, it loads almost instantaneously, similar to how Hacker News does now, or Gmail used to years ago. This is not the case for sites that use JavaScript to position everything.

> or Gmail used to years ago Sure you weren't using the basic html version? Because I've been using gmail since it was invite only and it always had a loading spinner.

Perhaps I was. I used to use NoScript around the time I started using Gmail, but gave up at some point because I started having to disable it on almost every site I visited.

Re: Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

#135

Post by GoodbyeEarl »

dzonga wrote: post #122
tsm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vanilla forms just GET or POST to some server endpoint with all of the s passed in as query parameters. Frameworks (e.g., Rails) put some syntactic sugar on it, but that's really all that's happening. If the form submission contains invalid input, it's customary to return to the form page (with all the values already filled out) and show a server-generated message about what went wrong. JS is absolutely not required…

I would really want to know more about this too, built a simple site without all that JS bloat

I'm glad for not being alone here :) I wish things were simpler...

Re: Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

#136

Post by gspetr »

CaptSpify wrote: post #118
teddyh wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don’t ever link to w3schools. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Forms https://www.w3.org/TR/html51/sec-forms.html#sec-forms http://caniuse.com/#feat=forms

Sorry, but why not?

http://www.w3fools.com/

Re: Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

#137

Post by GoodbyeEarl »

flukus wrote: post #129
GoodbyeEarl wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! it is actually enlightening :) I think it's a little bit awkward to not use put, patch, delete... I wonder however if my server must follow the same technique, if not how to wire a delete endpoint to handle a form post and so on. I'll try to handle a form using only get and post sometime just to see how it works. Thank you!

Well you just made me feel old. For put/patch/delete you can just as easily wire different options to different URL's. We had URL's like /Foo/Delete?43. It may be awkward in a particular framework but it's about as simple as things get. I've always hated put/patch/delete because it tends to result in data centric UI's instead of workflow centric ones.

Hmm now that you mentioned I realized I've seen this pattern before but I've never given it a thought. I'll definitely try it sometime, it seems to work pretty well. BTW sorry for make you feel old, it was not my intention haha

Re: Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

#138

Post by intended »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #68
Arizhel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Facebook is trying to move in on their territory for sure. Unfortunately, I don't think they will. Why "unfortunately"? This is a good thing. Facebook is horrible, in many different ways, and the last thing we need is to hand even more power over the internet to them. CL is "ugly", but it's fast and works great, and isn't filled with ads and tracking, something I definitely can't say about Facebook.

Real competition in general is good, it'd force both products to improve.

Theres loads of competition for CL. Internationally many people have cut in on that space.

I'd be more concerned that someone is going to use the likely roll back of NN in america to dethrone CL.

Re: Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

#139

Post by GoodbyeEarl »

dzonga wrote: post #122
tsm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vanilla forms just GET or POST to some server endpoint with all of the s passed in as query parameters. Frameworks (e.g., Rails) put some syntactic sugar on it, but that's really all that's happening. If the form submission contains invalid input, it's customary to return to the form page (with all the values already filled out) and show a server-generated message about what went wrong. JS is absolutely not required…

I would really want to know more about this too, built a simple site without all that JS bloat

I'm thinking about push some code to github this afternoon using these techniques with nodejs, if you want to I can send you a link to the repo ;)

Re: Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

#140

Post by GoodbyeEarl »

teddyh wrote: post #98
CaptSpify wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this what you mean: https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_forms.asp ?

Please don’t ever link to w3schools. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Forms https://www.w3.org/TR/html51/sec-forms.html#sec-forms http://caniuse.com/#feat=forms

Hmm I've been using w3schools for quite some time now but I ALWAYS double check it with a third source, often MDN. I really like their straight to the point approach and I think they've been fixing some of the odd stuff lately. I don't really think it's really that bad if you already have some previous experience, it can work OK as a quick reference.
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