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There's never been a better time to build websites

simeongriggs.dev

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Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#141

Post by _fat_santa »

hooby wrote: post #92

It's definitely a great time to build websites, but saying they _NEVER_ have been easier to make... I'm not 100% sure about that. Yes, tailwind might make css a lot easier, and github copilot might make coding a lot faster... but is this really easier than in the early 90ies, when you could just type into notepad and make a website that didn't require any CSS or images or JS or even more than just the most basic html…

> Yes, tailwind might make css a lot easier, and github copilot might make coding a lot faster... but is this really easier than in the early 90ies, when you could just type into notepad and make a website that didn't require any CSS or images or JS or even more than just the most basic html tags?

The thing is you can still do all of this. But we have since built tools and frameworks to let you still do this, while giving you superpowers. I think Svelte is the best example of this. You can create a dead simple site with it and have the result you are talking about, but the real power is now you can employ many of those advanced techniques that were reserved for large web apps in the same dead simple site.

> Is tailwind really easier to work with something like - let's say - pico.css? Of course if you want to do super-elaborate layouts, then probably yes - but if you embraced a more minimalist approach?

I've used tailwind quite a bit, it's killer feature is the fact that it's just intuitive. With most CSS frameworks, even minimal ones, I always refer back to the docs to see how they do a specific thing. With Tailwind you refer to the guide a few times but very quickly pick up how it does things. I think that's why it's so popular, I've typed out classes thinking "is this a thing", and almost every single time, it was.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#142

Post by superkuh »

Well, this guy's site needs a lot more work. I tried to view it and every time I attempted to scroll down a giant black bar obscured the text. Bad CSS. And with CSS disabled, between every single paragraph this guy has GIANT "comment" buttons that fill the screen. It's unusable as styled and unreadable unstyled. That's quite an accomplishment.

The best time to build websites is now. Everyone has the upload that enables them to host from home. Every computer has the resources the host a website without breaking a sweat. You can still just my siteMy site and throw some images in a directory and your site will be unhackable, last forever, and extremely fast rendering.

All you have to do is ignore everything this guy says. He seems to mostly be talking about commercial jobs for corporate persons and not human people.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#143

Post by auggierose »

auggierose wrote: post #134
0x0nyandesu wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will take a few months just to bring yourself up to speed on mouse/keyboard event bindings and how they interact in one specific browser and one operating system let alone all browsers and operating systems and mobile and that's without even thinking about rendering, templating, network operation wrappers, local storage, camera and sound APIs. The list goes on. I've been doing this since literally IE 5.5 and I'm s…

I already learnt most of what I need in one week. I was being pessimistic with 3 months. If I need to know a particular event, I look it up in the documentation. The stuff you cite is just APIs, I can look that up too. I've used APIs before, you know. Right now I am piping data from Swift to Apple Metal and back, and write GPU code to estimate measurements from the FaceID camera in realtime. Real programmers are comi…

Furthermore, from what I see, a lot has changed in JS land. You can basically assume ES2018, with a few exceptions in the library, module systems are part of the standard now, and package managers seem to catch up with that. A lot of what you learnt what is older than 5 years about JS and accompanying APIs, you can basically forget now. Arguably, it might even be better if you had never learnt it in the first place. Because, let's face it, what was going on then was a hot mess of steaming shit.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#144

Post by handrous »

hooby wrote: post #92

It's definitely a great time to build websites, but saying they _NEVER_ have been easier to make... I'm not 100% sure about that. Yes, tailwind might make css a lot easier, and github copilot might make coding a lot faster... but is this really easier than in the early 90ies, when you could just type into notepad and make a website that didn't require any CSS or images or JS or even more than just the most basic html…

C. 2000 I was able to match state-of-the-art web designs, solo, without much difficulty, writing raw HTML & JS. And get paid for it.

I was in high school.

That was the best time to build websites.

(Though at least "flat" trends and terrible UX out of several major companies mean my shitty designs are back to looking about as good and working about as well as "pro" designers, so that's, kind of, an improvement over ~2005-2014)

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#145

Post by mattlondon »

hooby wrote: post #92

It's definitely a great time to build websites, but saying they _NEVER_ have been easier to make... I'm not 100% sure about that. Yes, tailwind might make css a lot easier, and github copilot might make coding a lot faster... but is this really easier than in the early 90ies, when you could just type into notepad and make a website that didn't require any CSS or images or JS or even more than just the most basic html…

In the 90s we didn't have the developer console or sophisticated debugging tools.

The only way to debug was "alert("foo")" placed in strategic locations!

We also had to handle significantly varied browser differences.

You can do a 90s style site today and vastly benefit from modern tech.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#146

Post by _fat_santa »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #3

I have a feeling that this is the next religious war in dev. I read this article and shudder in horror at, well, all of it. I like static sites (that wouldn't take minutes to build if they were written in a decent language). Adding lots and lots of JS dependencies and frameworks gives me the screaming ab-dabs - it's just adding complexity and dependency. I like writing code, not plumbing together bits of other people…

> I object to CodePilot for all sorts of reasons

I've been testing copilot for about a month now, one thing I realized very quickly is it's not as useful as you might think it is. Copilot is great for writing repetitive code, so if you just wrote a function to select an item, copilot will correctly guess what the deselect function implementation should be.

Outside of that though I find that it gets in the way far more often that it helps, by far the most annoying part is that it interferes with intellisense sometimes, picking values from an enum in Typescript is now a PIA if you have Copilot enabled.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#147

Post by allknowingfrog »

samhw wrote: post #60
rambambram wrote: post #15

I'm also developing for 25 years, I also really really like websites and coding, but not for the reasons the OP sums up. For me, it's not about all kinds of solved or unsolved technical questions. Today is a very good time to build websites, because a good website is the only way to push back to Big Tech and it's practices. Your website can be build on techniques invented in a time where the dream of the internet was…

> Oh, and RSS is not dead. Not at all (thanks WordPress, for putting a feed on every instance). RSS is the only workable way to make the web social again. What we need, IMO, is more experimental protocols to enrich the web, which maverick developers can use to good effect, the same way we did originally with RSS. More browsers forking Chromium or Servo to add support for these new features. Hell, maybe even something…

If you're not already aware of it, Gemini is an interesting project that aims to do exactly that. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#148

Post by handrous »

samhw wrote: post #60
rambambram wrote: post #15

I'm also developing for 25 years, I also really really like websites and coding, but not for the reasons the OP sums up. For me, it's not about all kinds of solved or unsolved technical questions. Today is a very good time to build websites, because a good website is the only way to push back to Big Tech and it's practices. Your website can be build on techniques invented in a time where the dream of the internet was…

> Oh, and RSS is not dead. Not at all (thanks WordPress, for putting a feed on every instance). RSS is the only workable way to make the web social again. What we need, IMO, is more experimental protocols to enrich the web, which maverick developers can use to good effect, the same way we did originally with RSS. More browsers forking Chromium or Servo to add support for these new features. Hell, maybe even something…

> is more experimental protocols to enrich the web,

New protocols are DOA until we significantly nerf the incentives to "own" the user.

IOW it's not gonna happen until we outlaw anything that resembles spying on users. And maybe also ads generally.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#149

Post by denton-scratch »

n4bz0r wrote: post #77
denton-scratch wrote: post #70

Pardon me, but I seem to be suffering from terminological confusion. I'm puzzled by this business of "building" static sites being a process that takes minutes. Perhaps my understanding of the term "static site" is awry; I parse it as a site consisting of HTML markup, JS and CSS, all that code being handmade, rather than generated. If that's right, then a "static" site doesn't need to be built. I presume it's suppose…

> Or are we talking about writing sites in meta-languages, that have to be subjected to a translation process to yield code suitable for browsers? It's too laborous to handcraft each page, so people would use template engines and things like Markdown -> HTML converters so they would only edit the meaningful part of the page manually. Some also choose to compile a dynamic site into a static site. WordPress plugins all…

Thanks for the reply.

> all the advantages of a dynamic CMS

I spent ten years making websites using Drupal, which I take it from your context counts as a "dynamic" CMS. FTR, my work was coding; I never got into the trade of making sites by glueing other people's modules together.

Well, that kind of site development didn't involve a build step. You could modify the PHP code for a module, load the page in a browser, and immediately see the result of the change. The only things I can think of that required a build step were:

* SASS

* Some weird Google technology that I avoided like the plague (and that I believe is now considered obsolete)

SASS was quite good for making it easier to understand CSS. The need for a build step was annoying, though. My colleagues were also working with some technology with a name beginning with 'R', that generated HTML on the fly, in the browser, using Javascript- not just using templates. I never engaged with it, and I couldn't read the generated code, because you couldn't view the page source.

If "dynamic" means "the content comes from a database", as in Drupal or Wordpress, then I think my ignorance is excusable; a Drupal site would behave exactly the same if it consisted entirely of static HTML, JS and CSS.

I once worked with a CMS that used a database to hold the content; but which required a "generate" step to turn the database content into static pages, which is what the site actually served. But that wasn't a "build" step, because it ran on the server in the background, every ten minutes or so. The submission page was a Java servlet, but the Java code only ran when you were submitting new content. The generated static pages could be dropped into the document-root of any HTTP server, including ones with no JRE.

Of course, the "generate" step here was a convenience, but inessential; the servlet could have converted new content to static markup at the time of submission, rather than on a timer. It was just more efficient to do the whole site at once, rather than rendering each page at the time of submission. This was a large site, with tens of thousands of pages, and many, many comments per page. We considered it a static site.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#150

Post by henning »

> So at some point we all accepted that if every time we need to fix a typo, it's okay to wait ~10 minutes to completely destroy and rebuild the website again as static files on cheap hosting, it'd be worth it.

This is the stupidest strawman argument I've read all year.

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