Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Chai" means "tea", so "Chai Tea" is "Tea Tea". "ATM" means "Automatic Teller Machine", so "ATM Machine" is "Automatic Teller Machine Machine". Both are mentioned in the animated movie "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse".
Actually, in English, Chai does not mean tea, it means a specific flavor of tea. If you don't believe me, try ordering some Earl Grey Chai, see what happens.
Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
251–260 of 605 posts
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#252I'm not convinced from the article that HTML-first was the thing that fixed the problem. What fixed the problem was 1) the person building it knew what they were doing and 2) it had design constraints from the get-go to be user-friendly. You can do that with React. It's arguable whether it's easier or better, but you can get there regardless of the approach you use.
1. Presumably the team that made the previous app also thought they knew what they were doing. Presumably they were not hired on the assumption that they couldn't make a good app.
2. The design constraints had always existed, the previous app just failed to meet them.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#253As a non-web dev, I have a question about this part: > There was a sad coda; as is the way of contract work, I moved on. I explained what I had built to my replacement, that it always worked even without javascript. He was appalled and said, “but that’s a lot more work for us.” Why is it more work? The approach described in the article seems honestly reasonably simple: just write the standard components for the form,…
By this point people don't appear to have any real clue how to write HTML anymore. Writing semantic HTML isn't significantly harder than say writing Markdown. You copy some HTMl skeleton and you literally just stack your elements into the body. I managed to do that as a 13 year old on MySpace without any deep instruction. Sure you have to close elements as well so the syntax is slightly harder than markdown, but that…
I think it was... SHTML? that allowed for server includes. My recollection from... 25ish years ago was that it was generally quite well supported and worked quite well (and was dead simple to implement). Not sure why, if that was the issue, the fix didn't quite catch on (but it's totally possible I'm mis-remembering the state of browser support).
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#254Old people. They exist. Not even that old. 60 year people can't user your fancy site because then don't have an internal model of how a computer works. You know that when pressing a button a hidden engine runs in the backend (or something runs in the backend). You expect an answer and if the expectation do not match the result, the model in your mind creates an hypothesis about what maybe happened and iterate from th…
> Old people don't have that because they Aren't insane . When did the industry put the onus on the user to understand how the computer works? What happened to the old days of Xerox PARC's HCI studies putting the user first? The computer is in service of the user, not the other way around! If I need to build a mental turing machine to understand your application, it is a bad application . It is rather the engineer's…
Usability was thrown to the wolves in favor of more readily available designers from non-UI backgrounds, brand identity (“UI as branding”), and pretty screenshots for slideshows and marketing.
The pendulum is overdue for swinging back the other way, but I don’t know who or what has both the capability and will to give it the push needed to send it on its way back.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#255I like JavaScript-light websites just as much as anyone (my own website works on the same principle). However, I do wonder how much of the increased traffic has to do with AI agents that now have an easier time working with the more standard web forms. My own contact form had a bunch of bots quoting Scorpion lyrics before I added a rate limiter.
None of the increased traffic was from AI agents. FTA: 'The results? When we launched, the number of people completing the form doubled.'
All completions were real people. It's a government website.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#256Old people. They exist. Not even that old. 60 year people can't user your fancy site because then don't have an internal model of how a computer works. You know that when pressing a button a hidden engine runs in the backend (or something runs in the backend). You expect an answer and if the expectation do not match the result, the model in your mind creates an hypothesis about what maybe happened and iterate from th…
> Old people don't have that because they didn't grow up with computers.
You realize that someone who was 18 when the Mac was first released would be 60 now?
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
By this point people don't appear to have any real clue how to write HTML anymore. Writing semantic HTML isn't significantly harder than say writing Markdown. You copy some HTMl skeleton and you literally just stack your elements into the body. I managed to do that as a 13 year old on MySpace without any deep instruction. Sure you have to close elements as well so the syntax is slightly harder than markdown, but that…
I think it was... SHTML? that allowed for server includes. My recollection from... 25ish years ago was that it was generally quite well supported and worked quite well (and was dead simple to implement). Not sure why, if that was the issue, the fix didn't quite catch on (but it's totally possible I'm mis-remembering the state of browser support).
Server-side includes worked fine but weren't enabled by default in any of the mainstream web servers. I think the lack of default-enabled status hampered their adoption. Joe User couldn't just FTP a bunch of ".shtml" files up to their shared web space and expect it to work right.
I certainly used the heck out of them in the late 90s, though.
It would have been very cool if HTML had been created with the ability to do client-side includes without having to resort to using a Turing-complete VM in the client to do it.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#258All the text is invisible for me in Firefox on Linux when the `--font-body` is set to `"Atkinson", sans-serif`. Setting it to `"Atkinson Hyperlegible", sans-serif` fixed it.
I read the article in the source code mode and thought it was intentional until I came back to the comments P.S. your solution seems to have disabled the custom font instead of fixing it
You're right. Seems like it fails when the font is correctly selected. Another machine running Firefox on Linux didn't have a problem.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#259Empathy and respect for users is what product managers should be doing. Shipping tens of megabytes per web page is impolite, if not outright disrespectful to users.
They don't know what a megabyte is
The consequences of MBs of JavaScript can be perceived by anyone in terms of performance and mobile data consumption.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#260What do people like for form validation? In this article he recommends the “validation-enhancer” library: https://www.npmjs.com/package/validation-enhancer I’ve also seen one called “formisch” that the author of valibot is working on: https://github.com/open-circle/formisch They’re both pretty new. Has anyone tried them?
My biggest tip to reduce complexity of data validation if you are using React is to stop using React controlled components and switch to React uncontrolled components. They are an underused part of React. You usually don’t need React to handle every single keypress and every single character being entered by the user. In fact before React popularized it, it was unusual for form components to update on each key press;…
Also allows user scripts to interact with the forms, eg I can run a bookmarklet to fill out certain forms. With React controlled components all these changes are wiped out and reset with the state that React has in its app memory.