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There's never been a better time to build websites

simeongriggs.dev

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Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#281

Post by z3t4 »

This weekend I tough people that had never coded how to write HTML. I had already prepared the CSS for the basic elements, so everything would look OK. They where scared by the "code"/editor at first, but once I explained = elements

for paragraph
for a line break, they quickly grasped it, so after a few more minutes I had also introduced the img element/tag and lists...

Building a web site is still quite hard, eg. setting up a server, writing the CSS, setting up the site generator, etc. But editing a website has always been easy. It's just that people are too scared when they see code. And screw all those frameworks. You do not need a web framework in order to put text (and maybe some media elements) on the web!

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#282

Post by stef25 »

mattlondon wrote: post #145
hooby wrote: post #92

It's definitely a great time to build websites, but saying they _NEVER_ have been easier to make... I'm not 100% sure about that. Yes, tailwind might make css a lot easier, and github copilot might make coding a lot faster... but is this really easier than in the early 90ies, when you could just type into notepad and make a website that didn't require any CSS or images or JS or even more than just the most basic html…

In the 90s we didn't have the developer console or sophisticated debugging tools. The only way to debug was "alert("foo")" placed in strategic locations! We also had to handle significantly varied browser differences. You can do a 90s style site today and vastly benefit from modern tech.

I remember putting border: 1px solid red around my layout "blocks" to help me build layouts (of course the extra pixels could mess with the layout). Then dev console came and you could inspect and mouse over those blocks and those red lines would appear and it was just amazing.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#283

Post by oliwarner »

hooby wrote: post #92

It's definitely a great time to build websites, but saying they _NEVER_ have been easier to make... I'm not 100% sure about that. Yes, tailwind might make css a lot easier, and github copilot might make coding a lot faster... but is this really easier than in the early 90ies, when you could just type into notepad and make a website that didn't require any CSS or images or JS or even more than just the most basic html…

You can still hack in HTML (and CSS) in a basic editor. I do occasionally. No design or js frameworks, no elaborate build systems, just me and my editor.

I don't think I'd have been so cocky five or ten years ago. Bootstrap solved real problems with cross browser layouts, jQuery fixed serious holes in some browsers' standard libraries. But the things they did then are things I'd happily freehand now.

In short, it's easier because 99% of browsers in use aren't awful and flex and grid make the float mess of the mid-Naughties irrelevant.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#284

Post by rchaud »

freeflight wrote: post #101

As somebody who's only dabbled in creating a personal website in the late 90s, using FrontPage and hosting on a free hoster, the current web seems like a completely, and way more complex beast to build websites for. Back then all I needed was get a bit familiar with FrontPage and html scripting, some Photoshop to create/edit image elements, and I already had a functional website. I knew if I wanted to "really" do it,…

> Is it still viable to just learn plain html and do something with that? Have WYSIWYG editors matured so much that they can be used at least semi-professionally, or is that still "looked down upon"?

Are you trying to make a website, or a web application? That really is the biggest question. For a static website that's read-only (meaning no user login, or user-submitted data, no online store), the old ways work fine.

With modern CMSes, you can create ecommerce stores and other dynamic functionality, but it comes at the cost of flexibility. On Squarespace for example, you can only use the pre-build templates to create the site.

And even if you are building a website by hand where you have full visual control, you can you can add a lot of interactivity by embedding iframes for things like JotForm or a PayPal button.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#285

Post by rchaud »

cblconfederate wrote: post #6

No it's not, because your website will not get traction unless you SEO the hell out of it, pay google ads, pay for FB ads, pay some blogger to write about it etc. It's impossible for a website to be found when the top spots in every search are capped by a few known players. It's easy to make a private web page, but that's not a website. In fact the best time was about 2005, when most current day's media sites started…

> Jesus, we 've had that thing since 1995. What happened?

I thought the same thing. I have built several custom WordPress sites, and changing the PHP code and hitting F5 shows me the changes immediately. What world is this where a site needs to re-compile each time a change is made?

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#286

Post by rchaud »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #254

There may never have been a better time to build websites, but there's been a better time to design them. All this over-engineered, developer-centric stuff while powerful and handy in some regards has destroyed the art of web design.

Preach! I long to read more about the substance of web design, rather than the tooling. Art direction, style guide, content strategy, information architecture, usability testing.

If I wanted to read another paean to JS-first development, I'd go to dev.to.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#287

Post by jakelazaroff »

criddell wrote: post #235
oblio wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you try it on mobile, it's mostly crap. Let's not treat HTML tables as being some super special ability. If HN were implemented exactly the same but with flexbox or grid for layout, it would be objectively better with no drawbacks I can think of.

What problems on mobile (small screens) do you see? > no drawbacks Would it be slower or use more CPU or memory to render?

Are we really worried about the CPU/memory impact of flexbox vs HTML tables?

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#288

Post by stef25 »

denton-scratch wrote: post #70

Pardon me, but I seem to be suffering from terminological confusion. I'm puzzled by this business of "building" static sites being a process that takes minutes. Perhaps my understanding of the term "static site" is awry; I parse it as a site consisting of HTML markup, JS and CSS, all that code being handmade, rather than generated. If that's right, then a "static" site doesn't need to be built. I presume it's suppose…

> Perhaps my understanding of the term "static site" is awry;

My understanding of it is that it's a site that serves simple HTML pages, so it's quick since the server doesn't need to build it at each pageload (most pages basically don't change, yet there's something running on the server that builds it every single time a visitor comes to look at it, which is a massive waste)

But those HTML pages absolutely are "built" (once!) by some process.

A static site could also be serving HTML pages that someone crafted by hand but then there wouldn't be anything dynamic like data from a DB involved (because that requires a server and a layer that queries the DB and prepares it for display).

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#289

Post by rchaud »

shaan7 wrote: post #42

I used to be excited about building websites ~10 years ago when it was about building web pages (you know, the thing HTML and friends were designed for). I "rage quit" after people started (ab)using web development to build approximations of apps. The reality that in the end the majority of people don't care about "use the right tool for the job" hit me hard. I would have never imagined that big companies with good e…

Without people shoehorning applications into the Web, the web itself would be dead. Nobody would have a need for an electronic document system that only supported static text and images.

Apple and Google would be celebrating because the world would self-corral into their walled gardens because they alone would control the runtime environments for mobile applications.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#290

Post by anonymoushn »

danShumway wrote: post #269
oblio wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you try it on mobile, it's mostly crap. Let's not treat HTML tables as being some super special ability. If HN were implemented exactly the same but with flexbox or grid for layout, it would be objectively better with no drawbacks I can think of.

(Semi) honest question to the commenters below parent, do you all use styluses, or do you just have small fingers, or is there some predictive touch system in the default browser for your devices that isn't present in Firefox? How big are your screens, are you running phablets? Trying to understand how so many people are reaching the conclusion that HN works well on mobile. Maybe 25% of the time I try to upvote or do…

This button clicking issue certainly exists in Android Chrome. It's just that almost every designed-for-mobile website is missing functionality or behaves in unpredictable and terrible ways. Browsing not-designed-for-mobile web sites on mobile and zooming whenever I need to click on something is a big upgrade.
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