Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There's never been a better time to build websites

simeongriggs.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 337 posts

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

#301

Post by shuntress »

rambambram wrote: post #99
lemonberry wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest concern is for the people relying on the big platforms you mentioned but not using them to build their own lists and lines of communication with their clients.

Agree. The big platforms make it all way too comfortable for everybody. And I get it completely. Over the course of years, Google and the likes probably have more phone numbers of my contacts than I have. Only three weeks ago I made a text file with every name and number in it, so I have a safe copy for myself.

This is the type of thing people mean when they bring up regulations for big tech companies.

You shouldn't have to worry about suddenly losing your list of contacts. Google should be required by law to provide your data to you in cases such as account termination.

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

#302

Post by aetherspawn »

There’s has never been a better time NOT to build websites.. and just use something like Notion/Super or Squarespace.

The learning aspect aside, building a website from a framework is for big corps with insane budgets or those who don’t have enough chargeable work to fill their day.

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

#303

Post by notriddle »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #260
post-it wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is fantastic on mobile. Much better than Reddit, even old.reddit and i.reddit.

Yeah it's easily one of THE best mobile sites I use.

The touch targets are way too small, and I don’t even have fat fingers.

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

#304

Post by duderific »

danShumway wrote: post #230
ajlburke wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News still uses tables - for layout ! But it always loads super fast, and it just works. We figured out how to display text on a web page decades ago. It's a shame more people aren't just doing it the direct way anymore. (Applications are a different matter obviously)

> it just works. Going to push back on this line specifically, HN has a number of issues. They're not dealbreakers, but they're also not particularly hard to fix with modern HTML. HN has generally kind of bad accessibility/semantics, it's pretty frustrating to use on mobile, and it degrades kind of poorly without Javascript (collapsing thread buttons still appear even though they don't work, also, collapsing thread b…

> Ever really dug into how HN threading works? Everything is a top-level comment, and it inserts transparent images to create the illusion of indentation. It's a wildly out-of-left-field solution...

Having worked on an implementation of comment indentation before, I think it's a technical design choice rather than wildly out of left field. From the backend perspective, it's more performant (and simpler from as far as code maintainability) to have a flat db table with a number representing indentation level, rather than have each comment point to its parent, and then have to recursively build the html.

When you're getting as much traffic as HN, such design tradeoffs can make a huge difference in site responsiveness.

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

#305

Post by wonderwonder »

There are so many technologies to do things now that just getting started is a task. There are a 1000 front end tools, and a 1000 backend ones. Every job description lists 15 technologies. For someone who has been developing for a while, keeping up with new tech can be a 15 hour a week unpaid side job. I built an saas as a solo dev for a fortune 1000 company that managed processes for a good portion of their advertising and built it with css, js, php, and html. No frameworks at all and it ran without issue for 8? years. I feel like sometimes all these new way of doing things just make things more complicated. Of course I am probably just be an old man shaking my fist at the sky :) Node packages are pretty neat though.

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

#306

Post by saulpw »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #185
thomasahle wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is you can still do all of this. But we have since built tools and frameworks to let you still do this, while giving you superpowers. I think Svelte is the best example of this. You can create a dead simple site with it and have the result you are talking about I don't know. I just tried to use Netlify to upload a simple static Html/Javascript page I made. Now I'm trying to figure out CORS errors. Pretty…

If you're trying to figure out CORS errors, it means you're either loading fonts or making XMLHttpRequests across domains. Neither of those were available in the 90s era OP is rhapsodizing about. You don't have to use the additional features/complexity of the past 15–20 years… but if you do , it's not surprising that things get a little more complex!

You actually do have to use HTTPS nowadays, and that's a non-trivial amount of complexity compared to just serving up a static page over HTTP.

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

#307

Post by inkeddeveloper »

saulpw wrote: post #306
jakelazaroff wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're trying to figure out CORS errors, it means you're either loading fonts or making XMLHttpRequests across domains. Neither of those were available in the 90s era OP is rhapsodizing about. You don't have to use the additional features/complexity of the past 15–20 years… but if you do , it's not surprising that things get a little more complex!

You actually do have to use HTTPS nowadays, and that's a non-trivial amount of complexity compared to just serving up a static page over HTTP.

No it’s not. Certs are pretty dumbed down. So much so that there is a thing called certbot that just does it for you.

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

#308

Post by inkeddeveloper »

888666 wrote: post #192
thomasahle wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is you can still do all of this. But we have since built tools and frameworks to let you still do this, while giving you superpowers. I think Svelte is the best example of this. You can create a dead simple site with it and have the result you are talking about I don't know. I just tried to use Netlify to upload a simple static Html/Javascript page I made. Now I'm trying to figure out CORS errors. Pretty…

I used https://neocities.org/ recently to make a simple static html website with no issues and no configuration. And I'm someone who usually uses the more "advanced" stuff. It's nice having the freedom to chase a little nostalgia sometimes.

Is that like modern geocities?

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

#309

Post by inkeddeveloper »

hluska wrote: post #231
thomasahle wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is you can still do all of this. But we have since built tools and frameworks to let you still do this, while giving you superpowers. I think Svelte is the best example of this. You can create a dead simple site with it and have the result you are talking about I don't know. I just tried to use Netlify to upload a simple static Html/Javascript page I made. Now I'm trying to figure out CORS errors. Pretty…

Welcome to CORS errors, so sorry you made the trip. :) CORS will eventually click for you and then it will always make sense. Until then, sorry you’re going through the muck.

I honestly feel like CORS was invented just to get people to use reverse proxies more.

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

#310

Post by inkeddeveloper »

atoav wrote: post #278
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…

I am positively confident that I could teach a bunch of art students (so definitively non tech people) how to create their basic website only using html and css (without any framework/library etc) in 2 to 3 days including the domain and hosting part.

Weird flex, but okay.
Post reply on HN