Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Website Specification

specification.website

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 236 posts

Re: The Website Specification

#171

Post by joquarky »

qup wrote: post #112
blks wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE6 was the most popular browser still during like 2006-2010. There was a point when Opera, Firefox, Chrome were already a thing, and they supported proper standard CSS and HTML, but 90%+ of users still used IE6 and you had to use tricks to support both standard and IE6 fuckery. I do miss those times.

I was still supporting ie6 in at least 2014 for a couple of clients. I miss those times, too, but not the IE6 bullshit.

There is a company that makes a plurality of government software that still used VBScript-based HTML pages that required IE7 compatibility mode for their court management software when I left a few years ago.

Re: The Website Specification

#172

Post by rsolva »

Thanks for making this!

I planed to make something like this as a skill for my self, but pasting this into any agent chat works like a charm. I just had my local model (Qwen3.6 27B / pi) make a list of all the required standards an older hugo site of mine was missing, make a todo list and then run through the whole thing one by one, giving me chance to review each change.

It even made the missing favicon by cropping out the symbol from the logo, and it looks good!

Re: The Website Specification

#173

Post by InsideOutSanta »

neya wrote: post #46
Latty wrote: post #11

"Agent Readiness" will likely age as well as "Web 4.0 Blockchain Integration" has. (To be entirely clear, not because agents won't be a relevant thing, although certainly I have my doubts, but because I believe even if they are a relevant thing, requiring special allowances from sites undermines the whole point, and such things will only end up used by bad actors to mismatch what agents see to what humans see, and so…

I swear to God. I just want to go back to the 2000s where everything was just plain HTML and some basic CSS, if at all any, by default you got responsive design out of the box, readable text and super user friendly GUI from the browser's own default stylesheet. Today you open any website. Everything is a fucking component. A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no rea…

The 2000s, the golden age of web design, when people built inaccessible IE6-only mystery-meat navigation websites with Flash and HTML tables that dynamically loaded JS using iframes.

Re: The Website Specification

#174

Post by SpaceNoodled »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #152
neya wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear to God. I just want to go back to the 2000s where everything was just plain HTML and some basic CSS, if at all any, by default you got responsive design out of the box, readable text and super user friendly GUI from the browser's own default stylesheet. Today you open any website. Everything is a fucking component. A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no rea…

> just plain HTML and some basic CSS, if at all any I built my own website like this and I love it. Highly recommended.

I built a website the other month with just pure HTML. It seems even easier to maintain.

Re: The Website Specification

#175

Post by wwweston »

neya wrote: post #141
Kudos wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 2000s wasn't everything just misused/abused table layouts? Maybe we frequented different places, but that's how I remember it.

That's funny because the argument against tables was always that they added extra markup a.k.a lines of code, only to replace them with dozens of nested divs, half assed CSS layout ideologies (floats and clear's, for example) and barely functional JS that all somehow needed to work in sync which was almost never. That's how NPM was born. Tables worked with 100% of the browsers. The alternatives needed polyfills and s…

Did front-end dev (among other things) for half of the 2000s (and beyond) and heard plenty of arguments about semantic markup, flexible restyling, accessibility, separation of concerns, and more.

But not one about extra lines of code when it came to table layout.

And claiming non-table alternatives always needed polyfills and more code doesn’t sound like an accurate reflection of the time either. It sounds more like resentment of people who actually did invest in understanding of the domain because they might not just let you use the small toolset you knew without thinking about anything else.

And I say that as a person who did a lot of table-layout markup too.

Re: The Website Specification

#176

Post by pibaker »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #173
neya wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear to God. I just want to go back to the 2000s where everything was just plain HTML and some basic CSS, if at all any, by default you got responsive design out of the box, readable text and super user friendly GUI from the browser's own default stylesheet. Today you open any website. Everything is a fucking component. A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no rea…

The 2000s, the golden age of web design, when people built inaccessible IE6-only mystery-meat navigation websites with Flash and HTML tables that dynamically loaded JS using iframes.

Can't upvote this enough. People have very selective memory of how the 2000s web worked. Every other website requires Flash just to show you a carousel of images. "Serious" business websites implemented in slow, buggy Java applets. iframes everywhere. Incredibly fucked up tables with no semantic meanings in your HTML just to do what modern flexbox now does in two lines. No one cared about accessibility of anything. Clicking on anything can get you pwned because you never updated your Flash player which has an RCE vulnerability. And yes, so many websites will tell you to use Internet Explorer for best experience.

I get being frustrated with some aspects of the modern web. But a lot of people are reminding of that Naomi Wolf tweet about how Belfast was calm and peaceful in the 1970s.

Re: The Website Specification

#177

Post by culi »

Latty wrote: post #11

"Agent Readiness" will likely age as well as "Web 4.0 Blockchain Integration" has. (To be entirely clear, not because agents won't be a relevant thing, although certainly I have my doubts, but because I believe even if they are a relevant thing, requiring special allowances from sites undermines the whole point, and such things will only end up used by bad actors to mismatch what agents see to what humans see, and so…

If anyone thinks the site is overall a good idea but doesn't want the ai/blockchain nonsense, you should know checklists like these are fairly common. My favorite for a few years now has been this

https://frontendchecklist.io/rules

Re: The Website Specification

#178

Post by culi »

fmajid wrote: post #44

I'd love best practices around, say, login forms, e.g.: - use standard input field names password managers recognize - disable autocompletion and autocapitalization on the login field - if it's an email, use the correct HTML5 input type - don't have a form with just a login email and force the user to click to enter the password - follow NIST SP 800-53, e.g. no SMS 2FA and no arbitrary password rotation and compositi…

I've used frontendchecklist for a few years now and it has a collection of rules and best practices kinda like this. Unforunately it seems the website has recently been updated to embrace "ai-readiness". But the rules are still there

https://frontendchecklist.io/rules/html/input-types

When I build UI components from scratch I really like this site:

https://component.gallery/

It links to components across many different design systems. Many of these design systems include in-depth accessibility, i18n, etc guidelines. Some standouts in terms of documentation are Salesforce's Lightning Designs System and StackOverflow's Stacks

https://www.lightningdesignsystem.com/2e1ef8501/p/99642e-car...

https://stackoverflow.design/system/forms/checkbox

Re: The Website Specification

#179

Post by culi »

fmajid wrote: post #42
_ache_ wrote: post #36

https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fspecification... I don't get the goal of the website. It's averted as a specification, but to spec what ?! Everything is sourced to another "source of truth".

It's a compilation of best practices, and valuable as a one-stop-shop and checklist.

Sites like these have existed for a long time. I've used this one for years:

https://frontendchecklist.io/rules

I think what sets this specific one apart is its focus on "AI-readiness"

Re: The Website Specification

#180

Post by neya »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #173
neya wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear to God. I just want to go back to the 2000s where everything was just plain HTML and some basic CSS, if at all any, by default you got responsive design out of the box, readable text and super user friendly GUI from the browser's own default stylesheet. Today you open any website. Everything is a fucking component. A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no rea…

The 2000s, the golden age of web design, when people built inaccessible IE6-only mystery-meat navigation websites with Flash and HTML tables that dynamically loaded JS using iframes.

You're referring to the mid-late 2000s. I'm talking about the early 2000s. You can hate Flash all you want, but for all the HTML5 hype we had back then, there isn't a single authoring tool today that's not even equivalent to the original Flash Studio (by Macromedia). It was the only tool in internet's entire history where both artists and programmers could work on together. Or sometimes even without each other.

What do you have now with all your fancy React and JS libraries that's pulled off something that Flash did?

Flash died because of the carcinogen that Adobe is. It could have been the future of HTML5 had they actually invested in it.

Look at the pathetic state of HTML5 today. What tool should a non-coder use to output something you could do with keyframes on Flash studio in 5 minutes in the 2000s? There's absolutely nothing quite the equivalent of Flash. You need to write 100+ lines of code to get something decent out of HTML5 that involves animation. There are paid niche tools, but nothing at the scale of what Flash pulled off.

Post reply on HN