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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

#331

Post by saulpw »

inkeddeveloper wrote: post #307
saulpw wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, we run certbot. It fails for some reason at least once a year and we have to do something to fix it. At the very least you have to find a way to run it on the regular and you can't forget about it or else your simple static website starts looking like malware. Tell me again how trivial it is for a 15-year-old kid using their parents' Windows 10 machine to get certbot running reliably.

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

#332

Post by saulpw »

hrisng wrote: post #315
saulpw wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eh, most static site hosting provider offer it out of the box nowadays

What if I want to run a simple but non-static website? It was a lot easier to just do CGI with a small perl script in the 2000s.

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

#333

Post by Shikadi »

oblio wrote: post #326
Shikadi wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely works fine on mobile for me

You never miss the upvote/downvote buttons? Quotes don't sidescroll to infinity for you? I could go on and on... It's okish, but it's no pinnacle for usability, that's for sure.

Eh, yeah I guess that happens, I guess I'm so used to the rest of the internet being so awful on mobile that it doesn't phase me. Which is funny, because I'm always super irritated by the rest of the internet.

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

#334

Post by pipe01 »

saulpw wrote: post #332
hrisng wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, most static site hosting provider offer it out of the box nowadays

What if I want to run a simple but non-static website? It was a lot easier to just do CGI with a small perl script in the 2000s.

Pretty much every web provider supports PHP, so it would be as simple as changing the extension from .html to .php

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

#335

Post by rewq4321 »

NikhilVerma wrote: post #170
logicalmonster wrote: post #165

The technology is far more advanced and bordering on magical in some cases, but most front-end web-development is far more painful and less fun to me than it once was. Say about 15 years ago or so, if you had a creative inspiration for a personal site, you could whip out a text editor and start building top-notch stuff very easily. About the most complicated thing you had to do to start building something was adding…

I am not sure why you say that, nothing stops a developer from opening notepad and building a website. One of the wonderful things about the web is it's backwards compatibility. It's just that there's better tooling available for you to build it faster/featureful now.

Exactly. So many comments here are acting as if they're forced to use npm+react+tailwind+etc. but you're absolutely not. Web standards (querySelector, fetch, display:flex, ...) are so far along compared to a decade ago that you could use zero libraries/frameworks and be significantly more produtive than we were back then.

Web standards still have a long way to go, but it's comical to claim that things have gotten harder.

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

#336

Post by EricE »

hooby wrote: post #118
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)

I don't think any of this is "good" web-design. But my argument never was about the layout or design of Hacker News being "better". What I meant to argue was, that content is king, and that everything else should serve the actual content - not distract from it.

"What I meant to argue was, that content is king, and that everything else should serve the actual content - not distract from it."

Thank you! So many sites have utterly garbage contrast, making content unreadable - it's so annoying.

I spam this excellent discussion of color and usability as often as I can: https://designsystem.digital.gov/design-tokens/color/overvie...

but getting stupid 20 something designers with perfect vision to pay attention is almost impossible :p

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

#337

Post by egeozcan »

inkeddeveloper wrote: post #308
888666 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Exactly. Same in the spirit.
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