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Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

mohkohn.co.uk

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Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#421

Post by arcanemachiner »

inigyou wrote: post #388
Joeri wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New cheap android phones are just as slow as old cheap android phones. The bottom of the market has been stuck in performance limbo for years, and modern web dev frameworks are ill designed to meet them where they are at.

My cheap phone has 6 cores and 8GB I think. My first cheap phone had 1 core and 256MB. Both ran Android. I think you're mistaken.

old != oldest

They are referring to this:

https://us-east-1-shared-usea1-02.graphassets.com/cluuijofv0...

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#422

Post by Eric_WVGG »

chao- wrote: post #198
OskarS wrote: post #165

As 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,…

Starting a few years ago, I realized some junior and medior engineers never once considered the possibility of building a website (app, experience, etc.) in anything other than a heavy SPA framework. But they're not stupid people! If you directly asked "Can you build a website without React?" they know the answer is obviously "Yes." However, if you asked them to build a new website, they would unthinkingly start a ne…

Yup. It’s exactly like the dismal state of CSS frameworks we're mired in.

All these new kids walk in and learn the CSS framework du jour first, then find themselves stranded when things move on. If they had just learned CSS the first time, they'd be set for life.

Nobody should learn React before learning HTML and vanilla javascript.

HN last week: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48347483

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#423

Post by mike_ivanov »

wmanley wrote: post #83
entropichorse wrote: post #3

People who built a crappy website using React are just as likely to build a crappy website using Astro, HTML-first approach or any other technology

I disagree. An HTML website which uses links, forms, buttons and inputs will by default: * Have working back/forward buttons * Have working progress indicator as provided by the browser * Show errors to the user - even if they are ugly * Be accessible to keyboard navigation With SPAs these are all things the developer has to get right. So often when using a SPA I'll click a button, you get a spinner and then nothing…

"What one man built, another will always find a way to break"

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#424

Post by gbacon »

yawaramin wrote: post #252
bastawhiz wrote: post #120

I'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.

1a. They may have thought they knew what they were doing, but their work product shows otherwise.

1b. They may have thought they knew what they were doing and spoke confidently enough to convince whoever was doing the acquisition, likely non-technical, of the same, but the bad hire and the bad hire’s work product shows that neither was the case.

2. Ideas merely exist. To be constraints, they must be enforced.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#425

Post by Traubenfuchs »

OskarS wrote: post #165

As 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,…

Modern web/frontend devs do NOT understand whole page navigating form POST calls from a pre JS era.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#426

Post by alok-g »

shooly wrote: post #411
alok-g wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. I have been asked by someone in late 40s why uploading a video takes a lot longer than uploading a photo. They are not dumb people. They just do not know. The onus is on the engineers to design for them.

"Does it take longer to upload 10,000 photos than to upload 1 photo?" If a 40-year-old can not answer that question, then they are in fact - dumb.

This is a matter of perspectives here. Some of my friends are absolutely brilliant lawyers and they trump me in their reasoning abilities (while I am a typ. HN member, high-tech engineer). Yet, they would not know some tech basics. I see lawyers struggle with formatting in Microsoft Word all the time :-), for one.

A brilliant physicist friend likewise once told me he is clueless how real numbers are handled in computers (not talking about floating point encoding specifics but conceptually itself). Yes, I can say that feels dumb, but I cannot deny that he is a brilliant physicist.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#427

Post by abraxas »

We have the "social media" companies to thank for this innovation. They introduced these stupid patterns primarily to keep users locked into their walled gardens and the rest of the industry followed them to the bad place like lemmings. Software is a fashion industry.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#429

Post by nobleach »

Natfan wrote: post #86
nobleach wrote: post #52

Recently I had to migrate an old SpringBoot app that had a React front-end to a new cluster. Not wanting to mess with super-old dependencies, I opted to rewrite it on a new version of Java/SpringBoot. When it came to the frontend, I paused. I couldn't come up with a single good reason why this app needed React. I rewrote the frontend in straight HTML with a little bit of JavaScript for DOM manipulation. I literally u…

esm.ah let's you include "complicated" JS that isn't usually found in CDNs. it doesn't work for everything and imo is worse for (p)react due to the lack of native JSX, but it does allow for bringing in stuff that usually takes an `npm install && npm build`

Yeah in this case, I needed to pop up a and take some form info, persist it via POST and then show the result of a "used" card/token. So there just wasn't a lot of need for libraries. I'm from the VERY old school so I do recall the fresh hell of including many deps via script tags (pre-Bower!)

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#430

Post by josephg »

igsomething wrote: post #356
concinds wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are far too empathetic to them. They should not hold the jobs they have. These are the people writing React monstrosities for government benefit websites, and testing them on fast iPhones and fast 4G, without realizing that every page load for actual users will take 30 seconds on their old $200 Android on 3G, and users won’t complete the form. It’s a culture of not giving a shit, that’s the deeper issue.

I had a contract once to save a government website that had serious performance issues, it was so unusable that people preferred to go in-person and wait 4h in a queue rather than try to fill the forms online. The frontend was in React because the company that got the contract initially used React for everything. The frontend was a 5MB SPA, but it could've been (mostly static) HTML files with some interactivity for f…

I’m curious if - and when - LLMs change this. They’re very good at web apps. And they’re great at rewriting existing stuff. Just give them a well scoped /goal and go get coffee.

Theres lots of open questions about the future of our profession in the age of AI. But, playing with opus and fable, I think the future will be bright for our users. There is no reason any more for teams to put out junk that’s worse than what an LLM can do.

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