had an interview yesterday where the guy was trying to justify using jsx over html. i hung up on him
The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
151–160 of 387 posts
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
#152I am not a front-end developer but looking at it from a distance I really don't get modern web design. Sure some sites might need fancy javascript single page features, like if your webpage is an interactive map or realtime game, but most sites are just text and some pictures. Whats with all the javascript? Your site looks just like the next one anyway! It feels like an "Emperor's New Clothes" situation or maybe more…
Yes, the Emperor is bare-ass naked, now hush before you get someone fired.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
For YouTube I kind of still see a point, if only to not make scraping videos dead simple by not just having the plain URL of the video file in the html (yes there are still tools out there). But twitter is so ducking ridiculous in that regard. At its core it is a web site to share 280 character long strings, but as of recently you cannot do this anymore without JavaScript! They shut down the legacy page at the end of…
I would argue that the fact that video content is often so frustrating to scrape is symptomatic of the massive cultural shift the web has seen over the past decade or two. In the "old" web you could basically right-click -> save anything you want (ignoring plugin blobs for the sake of making my point more compelling). Meanwhile I tried manually scrapping a video from reddit the other day, I succeeded but it was quite…
What's most ironic is that HTML5 added a element specifically to make videos as easy and convenient to manipulate as images.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
> worse in almost all ways How so? I dislike the text color choice, but other than that it seems perfectly fine to me.
Admittedly most is just personal preference but the line width thing is the cardinal sin. Forcing huge blocks of whitespace on either side of the text for nebulous "readability" reasons is just wasteful. Too many web sites ape this pattern too. Look at John Gruber's website [1] on a nice wide 27" monitor for an extreme example. The content takes up less than 1/5 of the width of the screen. 1: https://daringfireball.n…
If only it was simple to configure my user agent to act as my agent and format things readably. I prefer moderate line widths. Even at half-screen on my 29" widescreen monitor, unformatted text is too wide.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
#155The simple HTML of Hacker News is one of the reasons I love it so much. What a breath of fresh hair compared to modern Reddit.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
#156Warren Buffett said one of his greatest assets is the ability to "no" without fear of social pressure and retribution.
Too many bosses and customers want fancy eye-candy without knowing and/or caring about the carrying cost of this bloat. Staff feels obliged to make them happy. All primates love "shiny red things", even humans, even if it's not rational.
K.I.S.S. is dead in IT. Fads and toys won.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guess is that some learn react et al without ever really learning HTML first.
That's entirely possible. I've seen a React tutorial that shows a simple example HTML snippet, and comments on it with "We’ll get to the funny XML-like tags soon."
And then there's jsx, which is different from html in some important ways, and generally a little closer to xml.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite example of this was when I worked on a B2B product with a daily email report. We noticed the most common usage of this email report came from native iOS email clients first thing in the morning. As a test, my team all went home and practiced being the user. We had a test email sent to our email addresses we would open first thing in the morning and attempt to make sense of it while laying in bed. The resu…
I love examples like this, I hope you don't mind me tagging on my own. Our team was doing in home interviews for a TV product. One of the customers subscribed to an expensive sports service and yet barely ever watched it. When we probed it was because her two sons had left home in the last year and she knew they would come home when a game was on if she had the service. She said that she wish she knew when big/popula…
Very poignant example!
In terms of dispassionate product analysis, nice job using emails to reengage users at risk of churning out.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> worse in almost all ways How so? I dislike the text color choice, but other than that it seems perfectly fine to me.
Admittedly most is just personal preference but the line width thing is the cardinal sin. Forcing huge blocks of whitespace on either side of the text for nebulous "readability" reasons is just wasteful. Too many web sites ape this pattern too. Look at John Gruber's website [1] on a nice wide 27" monitor for an extreme example. The content takes up less than 1/5 of the width of the screen. 1: https://daringfireball.n…
There's two ways of reading - scrolling your eyes from side to side, then down, or just scrolling down with your eyes (no side-to-side).
Smaller widths make it easier for the "read the whole line in one glance" readers and is I think the main reason for this confusion.
Sometimes I like just glancing down a page and getting the gist of the screen. Other times I prefer to let my eyes do extra work and read denser text.