No longer writing my own damn HTML • Hacker News Board

Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML

#21

Post by DangitBobby » Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 6:11 AM UTC

shkkmo wrote: post #18

b_e_n_t_o_n wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm - what is the actual cost incurred by the users here? Mostly battery right? Is that not virtually inconsequential to each individual? I mean you could sum it all up and compare it to human-hours or something but that's not a useful metric because it's distributed. Personally I think it's better to distribute the workload across clients. We'll probably see purely client driven UI's dominate the future. Imagine use…

Please, no. Don't use a SPA to render a blog, that's awful. Browers already give users near complete ability to customize how web pages are displayed and SPAs usually make this worse not better. The actual cost is forcing users to run javascript, with all its privacy leaks and security issues, to view what should be a static HTML document. Not to mention the issues you create for battery life, network traffic, cachin…

In this case, users with JS disabled would miss out on loading, what, a navbar and footers?

And fuck off with "too lazy to develop properly." I am so tired of HN users constantly talking shit about JS. There are times to fight for efficiency but this is just part of a tired crusade.

Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML

#22

Post by asynchronousx » Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 6:14 AM UTC

Hilarious post in that it mirrors my own experience. Starting writing a SFS site by hand in HTML, hated writing new things on it, decided to ditch it for a static site generator.

Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML

#23

Post by Evidlo » Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 6:24 AM UTC

A funky option for doing client-side includes and basic templating without JS is XSL.

Here's an small demo I threw together https://github.com/evidlo/xsl-website

A lot of people hate on XSL, but it has some interesting abilities!

Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML

#24

Post by defanor » Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 6:25 AM UTC

As an option that still uses HTML, with relatively minimal and common dependencies: the unified header and navigation insertion, as well as other aspects of website generation and syntax checks, can be handled with XSLT. Or one may employ a generic macro processor like M4, which should be fairly easy to set to convert LaTeX into MathML, as well as to include shared headers.

Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML

#25

Post by Evidlo » Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 6:27 AM UTC

geor9e wrote: post #15

What I did was store my Obsidian vault in my website server folder. Then I instructed Cursor to make all /whatever.md markdown files in there show up as HTML when you visit "/whatever" , and to get all the obsidian features like [[links]] and ![pics] and all rendering right. It used php and some apache settings. Works great. Now I just edit in Obsidian, and it all appears on my .com live as I type. Very low friction.…

Publish the PHP!

Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML

#26

Post by grandempire » Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 6:29 AM UTC

You actually skipped making an adhoc site generator of your own.

Make a 5 line shell script to do steps 1 and 2 for your entire site. Then the content is just a few paragraph and link tags. Throw in a call to markdown if you want to get fancy.

Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML

#27

Post by Sabinus » Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 6:41 AM UTC

I just want to say how funny it is that this is posted after the spirited discussion in the previous related thread about exactly what 'writing your own html' means.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996322

Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML

#28

Post by austin-cheney » Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 6:56 AM UTC

Sabinus wrote: post #27

I just want to say how funny it is that this is posted after the spirited discussion in the previous related thread about exactly what 'writing your own html' means. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996322

Yeah, people (primarily developers) have always claimed HTML is so hard to get wrong and yet failure is well above 90% after consideration for accessibility, SEO, security, and more.

Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML

#29

Post by austin-cheney » Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 7:07 AM UTC

Brajeshwar wrote: post #7

After many iterations of tools, systems, and processes, I have settled on writing in plain text, in Markdown, to identify headings, paragraphs, quotes, images, etc. My reasoning and approach is that I or someone should be able to read it as it is and then have a tool parse it to spit out HTML for browsers, helping others read it with a better experience. With thousands of posts, it would be complex for me to maintain…

I want to agree with this because I completely love markdown and it solves for so much of accessibility.

Markdown makes it challenging to write form controls (input. select, textarea, buttons) and non-visual identifiers (id, class). To solve for most of these concerns I still find I prefer to do it dynamically against the DOM as needed by user interaction.

Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML

#30

Post by dangus » Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 7:15 AM UTC

I mean, no shit dealing with raw HTML sucks. I really don’t understand why technical people get in their own way.

Even something like a squarespace site is worth the proprietary commercial money if you enjoy blogging.