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Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

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Re: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

#131

Post by CoolCold »

verhovsky wrote: post #86
vore wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CF = Cloudflare. I would hope nobody is still writing things in ColdFusion these days :-)

Someone added a ColdFusion Markup Language generator to https://curlconverter.com/cfml/ last year and after a few months I decided to remove it since I've never heard of it so nobody could possibly be using it, and the next day the guy who added support for it and 3 other people complained about it, so it seems like they're out there. https://github.com/curlconverter/curlconverter.github.io/pul...

I wonder how much visitors you have, i.e. how much popular is it? If its not a secret of course.

I couldn't imagine any web developer need such kind of tool [knowing curl by heart], but obviously I'm in my own bubble and I'm wrong on my assumptions.

Re: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

#132

Post by seydor »

tracker1 wrote: post #99
noveltyaccount wrote: post #35

old man alert Back in my day, we wrote ASP.NET that was all server-side-rendered HTML. Once in a while we got REAL FANCY and used JQuery to make PARTIAL HTML requests and update only FRAGMENTS of the page. Hooboy I knew that fashion was cyclical but not tech!

Until the page gets complex and viewstate gets ugly too... Add in a dialup connection and you were in for worlds of pain. By today's standards of interactivity, I find the modern take (server rendered Blazor) as equally painfully slow to respond.

Equally is putting it midldly. Jquery sites are blazingly fast today. Anything that involves compiled javascript is impossible to load on bad connections.

Re: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

#134

Post by seydor »

eddsh1994 wrote: post #4
jerjerjer wrote: post #3

Is “HTML over the wire” a new buzzword for SSR or is there a difference I'm missing?

I think it's HTMX etc, so yes SSR. That was how I started building web apps in my first job as a dev, crazy how the loop of front-end technologies is only like 10 years.

Was it a loop? I thought it was stagnation due to the fact that everyoen was trying to copy mobile apps and bring them to the web. It was a bad decision because mobile apps are by definition constrained and not very versatile. In any case, people seem to be picking up where they left in 2011, not a loop.

Re: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

#135

Post by keizo »

JonathanBeuys wrote: post #21

You don't even need a fancy "send html fragments over the wire" approach to create a better user and developer experience. Just sending full pages, server side rendered, like Hacker News and Wikipedia do is fine: Going from the HN homepage to this topic we are on: 36 KB in 5 requests. Going from the Wikipedia Homepage to an article: 824 KB in 25 requests Going from the AirBnB homepage to an apartment listing: 11.4 MB…

I’ve been working on a note taking app exactly because of this.

https://grugnotes.com

I can load 3 years of notes on a single page 100kb.

Re: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

#136

Post by ptx »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #89
ptx wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Refreshes can be very fast, and often essentially invisible in modern browsers, when you don't bloat the page unnecessarily, but I think AJAX still has a use for things like the voting button on HN or "add to cart" buttons in a web shop. It would be annoying to lose the scroll position (and perhaps other state) for each item you want to add/upvote. (Although modern sites that try to sweep latency under the rug by imm…

Also browser refreshes should definitely not lose scroll position, though I can understand how with full ones the former position might not be the "correct" one any more with dynamic content like HN... or substack comments (and how did those manage to be so slow and buggy displaying what is almost exclusively text ?!)

Not a refresh of the same page, but if you perform some action (e.g. adding an item to a shopping card), that would imply a POST request which then (according to the common pattern) redirects to the original page... so then you do lose the original scroll position, I think?

Re: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

#137

Post by BizarreByte »

IncRnd wrote: post #126
nonethewiser wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look at how HN handles it when you upvote/unvote a comment. How?

For me, HN handles votes using deep links, since I have JS disabled.

I’ve never tried it, but my understanding is when JS is disabled HN fires off a GET request (via a link) and returns a 204 to prevent browser navigation, right?

Re: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

#138

Post by BizarreByte »

jibe wrote: post #105
basicallybones wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frontend frameworks developed in response to the need to develop/maintain very complex browser-based applications like Facebook across a large team of developers. AirBnB/Reddit have dramatically more complex user behavior and are much more input- and media-oriented. You cannot wait on round trips to the server for user interactions, and you cannot just do hybrid client/server the old jQuery way on big applications be…

You cannot wait on round trips to the server for user interactions Old Reddit still works fine, and I’d argue better than new front end heavy Reddit. You are right it may be for the benefit developers, but Reddit isn’t complicated enough that a heavy front end provides much benefit to the users.

Old Reddit is significantly faster than new Reddit and I found it far nicer to use, but people in general didn’t like the “old, clunky” UI. Old Reddit was much maligned for how how it looked compared to modern sites.

Re: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

#139

Post by hinkley »

replygirl wrote: post #82
hinkley wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time I saw the concept codified in a library was in a jquery function that allowed you to replace a part of the DOM. Either the method signature or the documentation pointed you to using it in pairing with AJAX requests. The first webapp framework I saw it in was Rails (turbolinks). I came to Rails late and didn't stay long so I was never clear how old or how broadly used that feature was. Mostly what I got…

i wouldn't call Element.replaceWith a codification of html-over-the-wire

Nor would I. I was talking about load(): http://api.jquery.com/load/

Re: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

#140

Post by _Donny »

JonathanBeuys wrote: post #21

You don't even need a fancy "send html fragments over the wire" approach to create a better user and developer experience. Just sending full pages, server side rendered, like Hacker News and Wikipedia do is fine: Going from the HN homepage to this topic we are on: 36 KB in 5 requests. Going from the Wikipedia Homepage to an article: 824 KB in 25 requests Going from the AirBnB homepage to an apartment listing: 11.4 MB…

I am incredibly annoyed by slow websites. I noticed that I have started using my browser in a very asynchronous way where I open multiple tabs, do a single action, and move to the next one. When I get to my last tab, the first is hopefully ready.

For instance, on GCP, I:

  0. Open 2 tabs for a 2 google cloud instance
  1. For each tab, I click on the action I want. E.g Logs, deployment, and networking. 
  2. Then, for each tab again, I click on the nested action I want
  3. Repeat step 2
It might sound like a lot, but each click easily takes 5-10 seconds, which is an excruciatingly long time if you spend a lot of day on that site -- and yes, it takes just as long doing it sequentially. Furthermore, I usually use fairly capable machines, so performance should not be an issue IMHO.

It does not happen on all sites, and I know GCP is a very complex site, but it happens often enough that it has become a habbit to me.

I love sites like Wikipedia or HN where everything is snappy.

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