Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files • Hacker News Board

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#281

Post by shirakawasuna » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

jonny383 wrote: post #167

There's nothing wrong with static HTML/CSS/JS. There's also nothing wrong with a rich SPA. And again, there's nothing wrong with using some kind of dynamic server-side HTML/CSS/JS presentation (like WordPress). Where there is a problem is the culture of software engineering, and the tendency to select the newest technology stack of the day for inappropriate applications. I think any seasoned software engineer has acq…

Have fun getting junior engineers interested in PHP, an objectively gross language. You'll get a stable system to begin with, but nobody younger than 45 who wants to touch it. It also has a large attack volume and curated security exploits that you buy into when you inevitably use plugins.

This article is about static HTML/CSS/JS. You can accomplish a good, modern CMS in halfway-decent languages using netlify and any static site generator framework you want without making your devs miserable.

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#282

Post by RileyJames » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

shirakawasuna wrote: post #281

jonny383 wrote: post #167

There's nothing wrong with static HTML/CSS/JS. There's also nothing wrong with a rich SPA. And again, there's nothing wrong with using some kind of dynamic server-side HTML/CSS/JS presentation (like WordPress). Where there is a problem is the culture of software engineering, and the tendency to select the newest technology stack of the day for inappropriate applications. I think any seasoned software engineer has acq…

Have fun getting junior engineers interested in PHP, an objectively gross language. You'll get a stable system to begin with, but nobody younger than 45 who wants to touch it. It also has a large attack volume and curated security exploits that you buy into when you inevitably use plugins. This article is about static HTML/CSS/JS. You can accomplish a good, modern CMS in halfway-decent languages using netlify and any…

See, the beauty of the solution suggested is that no one has to write any PHP (You could probably avoid even seeing any, if that's your goal).

Wordpress does what is required out of the box.

In fact, you don't even require a developer to do it. It's a point and click operation of selecting a theme, installing a cache add-on, add an SEO add-on, and hell, there's probably a "office hours" plugin as well.

If the receptionist isn't a technophobe s/he can probably do it themselves.

If you want to assign resources, get a designer in to make it look pretty. Wordpress has everything else covered.

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#283

Post by whatarethembits » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

ethanwillis wrote: post #153

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But all you for-profit types are runining it As someone who loves the internet largely due to all the cool things people have made for profit, I can’t imagine how they for profit people have hurt the internet more than they have helped it. You and I wouldn’t be talking right now if it weren’t for a company making hacker news for profit.

That's not true we would be talking on something else. In fact, the forums of yore were much better communities than places like Hacker News. And sadly Hacker News is probably one of the better communities on the internet today.

Ditto. Intrusion of for-profit entities into online communities have well and truly killed the spirit. I base that on the fact that being exposed on any online destination where people congregate these days such as, Twitter, Reddit, hacker news, Facebook, for even a few minutes a day results in me feeling tired, demotivated, sluggish, angry, confused and just generally down. This is in stark opposition to how hanging around in communities of yester year felt. Further, I'm 27 so it's not like I'm some old veteran that yearns for the 90s or something but the quality has palpably gone down year after year. Sure there are small enclaves within these behemoths that somewhat manage to preserve a pleasant community but they're increasingly hard to find and only a matter of time before they too lose that magic to effects of profit driven actions.

Welp, on we go to the next post to read opinions of a nauseatingly self-assured tech nerd, who makes an above average living, declare everyone beneath as failed experiments of nature based on supreme principles of the free market..

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#284

Post by mschuster91 » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 6:47 PM UTC

markmark wrote: post #112

mschuster91 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple: every machine has already installed the gateway to your program: a web browser. No need to deal with issues like antivirus going bonkers, weird MSVCRT versions installed leading to support requests, you save a ton of money when you need to support OS X or god forbid Linux, and last but not least, an SaaS business model has recurring revenues while it doesn't have to deal with rampant piracy at the same time.

There's a weird subset of HN that think people should still be building desktop apps. It's like they haven't paid any attention to the software market for the last 10 years.

I for one would love the return of the good old days, where I could pay once for $software, have it on a physical medium and could work with it as long as I managed to have a computer/VM that runs it.

So much culture, especially in gaming, will be inevitably lost with the SaaS and streaming trend. For media like video, music and books at least many national library laws require the deposit of two or more copies at the national archives, but interactive media? Games that require online activation? That's all gonna be lost forever.

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#285

Post by rchaud » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #128

superkuh wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Says who? Everyone who isn't only on the web to try to make money. That's who. But all you for-profit types are runining it. As the browser becomes more powerful it is more important to secure it. As security becomes more important features are removed and the browser begins telling the user what they can and cannot do. And on the webmaster side it becomes infeasible for browsers to display your site or search engi…

> But all you for-profit types are runining it As someone who loves the internet largely due to all the cool things people have made for profit, I can’t imagine how they for profit people have hurt the internet more than they have helped it. You and I wouldn’t be talking right now if it weren’t for a company making hacker news for profit.

> I can’t imagine how they for profit people have hurt the internet more than they have helped it.

By turning the Internet into what is first and foremost an ad delivery system. Everything else stems first from the need to show people ads, track their online movements and ensure they are spending as much time as possible "engaging" with your "brand".

Why is it slower than ever to load a page with text and images? It's because of the invisible fatberg of ad networks, A/B testing scripts, heatmaps and analytics trackers sending and receiving requests, all of which have zilch to do with actually sending a page from the server to the client.

"All the cool things made for profit" includes the real-time bid matching system without which websites like Youtube wouldn't exist, because it wouldn't be worth the expense to Google or to some other megacorp.

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#286

Post by airstrike » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 8:24 PM UTC

monkpit wrote: post #126

airstrike wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outlook 2010 is fantastic

Outlook’s search function is decidedly not fantastic.

The trick is to never sort e-mails into folders... just leave everything in your Inbox and let it index it. I know it sounds terrible, but I have 25k e-mails in my inbox (I've kept all since 2018-01-01) and I can search and sort in milliseconds

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#287

Post by acephal » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 8:29 PM UTC

boomlinde wrote: post #201

muglug wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think an SPA can be much more user-friendly than a traditional series of server-rendered pages. Email is a great example of this - GMail, at launch, had much better UX than existing server-rendered applications like Hotmail. You can find bad UX everywhere - in SPAs and server-rendered interfaces alike - but there’s nothing implicit to SPAs that reduces usability.

Gmail wasn't a single page at launch, so its UX advantage had nothing to do with that.

Wasn't long-polling the killer feature?

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#288

Post by eximius » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 8:46 PM UTC

I'm sure that https://svelte.dev/ is not the end goal of web development, but it is the next step.

What I want to see is more support for serving svelte and integration between front end components and backends. (I.e., the backend has a list of root components generated by the front end and a route can return one of those components in a statically typed way)

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#289

Post by jasonlhy » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 8:46 PM UTC

nn3 wrote: post #151

chrysoprace wrote: post #43

This is something that I see espoused by "web traditionalists" for lack of a better term. Sure, there are a lot of web developers who are not optimising for performance but I think the difference is that it has simply shifted to the frontend where it's more noticeable. The kinds of people who care about performance in the backend are exactly like the kinds of people who care about performance in the frontend. There's…

>You need experienced engineers to create performance no >matter what your domain is. Actually the funny thing with HTML is that the simplest things are fast. If you just write a old school HTML web page without a bazillion frame works and not going too heavy on graphics things are usually fast. And doing that is literally so much simpler and easier than learning all the super complicated frameworks of the day. So it…

Server side rendering is not really that slow, and SPA is not really that fast if your bundle size is huge.

More important is that most users will not able to distinguish the difference. I have asked my friends how they feel to compare Facebook to a traditional MVC web site in term of speed difference, none of them can feel the difference.

However, the transition from page to page do affect the user experience. As a user, when I want to do a task that involve many UIs and I need to click multiple pages, I will think it is a bad experience, but I do accept to switch to another page for another task. Therefore, It makes sense to have a SPA for some rich UI feature so that user can remain in the same page

Re: Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

#290

Post by ProZsolt » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 8:51 PM UTC

thrownaway954 wrote: post #259

jonny383 wrote: post #167

There's nothing wrong with static HTML/CSS/JS. There's also nothing wrong with a rich SPA. And again, there's nothing wrong with using some kind of dynamic server-side HTML/CSS/JS presentation (like WordPress). Where there is a problem is the culture of software engineering, and the tendency to select the newest technology stack of the day for inappropriate applications. I think any seasoned software engineer has acq…

the issue is that younger people want to do the use and learn the newest thing to advanced their careers, while us old timers just want to get shit done. you can't blame them, we we're all like that at one point, it's why we got into programming to begin with. this is one reason why i fully believe companies should have a give each developer a half-day or day to work on new thing for the company so that new developer…

My thought exactly.

Also, if companies stop requiring 4 years of experience in a technology that came out 3 years ago in their job description that would also help. Instead, let people transfer from similar technologies and let them learn it on the job.