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All you may need is HTML

fabiensanglard.net

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Re: All you may need is HTML

#231

Post by Dalewyn »

guiraldelli wrote: post #137
bombcar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of http://motherfuckingwebsite.com and http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com But the key, underlying point to ALL this stuff is that you do NOT NEED TO WORRY ABOUT PRESENTATION until you have the CONTENT. A huge temptation is to spend hours and hours tweaking the presentation as a way of avoiding actually creating the content; this is the real danger. (should mention https://thebestmotherfucking.website of…

I was happy to see someone finally referred to the motherfucking websites. On the other hand, I was disappointed to see the unique one of those I think it is worth to follow the advice [1] was not cited. For curiosity reasons, I found out about [1] on a well-known website [2] that definitely puts content in front of presentation, even though I like their website's design. [1]: https://bestmotherfucking.website/ [2]:…

I know whitespace is "wasted" file size for transport purposes, but god damn that HTML on Better and Best are unreadable without proper indentations.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#233

Post by apatheticonion »

kim0 wrote: post #229
apatheticonion wrote: post #221

For blog sites I tend to use a hand written site generator that converts markdown to html, typescript to js and scss to css at compile time. This allows me to ship a static html site (S3 website) where the javascript functionality is limited to basic things, like toggling dark mode. To build an "API", I crawl the files at compile time and generate json files in an /api folder, allowing me to fetch blog post metadata…

Sounds very nice. Is this available for others to use?

I have only just started building it out, I built the first prototype for my personal blog site.

(Not a plug, it's a WIP and I have only put a few toy articles up) You can see it in action here: https://davidalsh.com/posts/the-case-for-a-sandboxed-script-...

I'm making a few too many requests in the first iteration, no cache control headers, asset minification, etc

Since then, I have been refining it for a contract that I am working on (introducing the SW) and I am keen to release it as an open source project - including a terraform script to deploy it to S3, setup Cloudfront and all that good stuff.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#234

Post by graycat »

Two points in support of the KISS principle for UI (user interface) programming -- keep it simple ...:

(1) With defaults, 3+ billion people already understand very well.

(2) For anything not a default, on the first day, the programmer understands and maybe no one else.

As I understand the history of UI programming, the HTML controls were built on, borrowed from, the controls in the IBM 3270 terminals heavily used in IBM's CICS (customer information control system) and originally designed for the user interface of airline reservation computing.

I don't know much about UI programming because my most important background in computing was for applied math computing for US national security where didn't use check boxes, radio buttons, single line text boxes, multi-line text boxes, links, etc. But as a user of the Internet and for the UI programming for my startup, I followed KISS, i.e., used HTML defaults.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#235

Post by pxc »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #7
kevincox wrote: post #4

> Originally this website's font-family simply requested monospace. This approach resulted in varying reading experience depending on the OS. Windows browsers got Consolas, Linux users got DejaVu Sans Mono, and macOS people got Courier. I find it so sad that our browsers have such bad default fonts that all websites feel the need to override them to get an acceptable look. It would be great if browsers had decent def…

In my experience the default fonts on Apple devices are far and away the best fonts, period. They're better than almost every custom font, especially for readability.

The Apple Color Emoji Font, the one you can't opt out of on Apple operating systems, is awful for readability. Pretty much inscrutable at small sizes.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#236

Post by Dalewyn »

NoGravitas wrote: post #192
kerkeslager wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This...does not match history. I've been writing web code since 1997ish, so... > There was never a golden era like you describe (it was a time of conflicting philosophies, people saying "eh, let's add this, that would be sweet", and browser vendors competing to add as much as possible to out "innovate" each other and the limited specs) I did not describe a golden era of HTML, because a golden era of HTML never happ…

Well, there was a previous garbage area, when HTML was, rather than being semantic, laid out using tables and \ and \ . I remember telling people to not do that, especially when the first version of CSS came out, and you could make websites look nice with semantic HTML that also worked in Lynx.

Table layouts are still superior to CSS in that they achieve the Holy Grail layout. As far as I'm aware, CSS still fails to achieve the Holy Grail within any reasonable realm of effort.

Hell, the entire reason the internet moved from Holy Grail layouts to singular sidebar and vertically integrated layouts was because CSS can't into Holy Grail.

With how wide most users' monitors are ever since 16:9 became commonplace, Holy Grail should be the ideal content presentation layout because it uses all that free space on the sides for non-content (eg: navigation) so precious vertical real estate can be dedicated to content.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#237

Post by schwartzworld »

kerkeslager wrote: post #139
kevincox wrote: post #4

> Originally this website's font-family simply requested monospace. This approach resulted in varying reading experience depending on the OS. Windows browsers got Consolas, Linux users got DejaVu Sans Mono, and macOS people got Courier. I find it so sad that our browsers have such bad default fonts that all websites feel the need to override them to get an acceptable look. It would be great if browsers had decent def…

This is what you get when you prioritize companies over users. There's no reason websites should even be able to set the font in my browser. If it was just about websites achieving an acceptable look, you'd see people emulating industry leaders, but that's not what you see. Google, for example, uses Arial on its main page on my browsers at least--that's a font that's available on every browser I know of. If it's acce…

User defined styles trump those defined in a website stylesheet. You can absolutely insist that all websites use whatever font you want.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#238

Post by Dalewyn »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #23
kevincox wrote: post #4

> Originally this website's font-family simply requested monospace. This approach resulted in varying reading experience depending on the OS. Windows browsers got Consolas, Linux users got DejaVu Sans Mono, and macOS people got Courier. I find it so sad that our browsers have such bad default fonts that all websites feel the need to override them to get an acceptable look. It would be great if browsers had decent def…

Consolas is not bad. DejaVu is not bad. Only Courier/Courier New are so bad as to be unusable, it seems Apple wants to push web developers to use font overrides.

As a Windows wizard, the first thing I do in any browser or text editor is change Consolas to Courier New.

I fucking can't stand Consolas, give me Courier New because that font is readable literally anywhere.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#240

Post by calsy »

cmdialog wrote: post #211
calsy wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because reading words requires substantial styling enhancements over what the browser is already capable of? Has anyone picked up a book lately? You need a UI team to create a page of readable text? That sounds like an expensive waste. But it sounds like those 'UI' people think they know better and don't need suggestions from programmers about reading words, even though its what they do all day.

It's very funny that you seem to think reading code and reading a website are the exact same type of activities, and the same type of reading. They are not. And I don't know where you've been for the last 30 some years, but the web is not a text only format, and the reason HTML was invented was specifically to be able to create a designed space where text can actually make sense and is not a gigantic wall of impossib…

Whats even more funny is HTML looks like a 'gigantic wall of impossibly small black and white text' when its rendered without a stylesheet.
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