> form submissions and redirects took a while to explain to my colleagues
This is so sad
Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
441–450 of 605 posts
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#442As 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,…
As someone who has built both react based frontends and html based ones (with htmx), there is a law of diminishing returns at play.
To start off, writing a basic crud website with forms is much easier with htmx.
But when you start building more complex components, and integrate with other systems (OAuth for e.g.) there are tons of libraries and SDKs for the react ecosystem, but not many for pure html components.
At this point, it's much easier to use off the shelf components than it is to manually write html to handle all the bizarre UI edge cases.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am always baffled by people who blame developers. Like some mid dev or junior would calling shots what stack should be used for project.
When you give the project to a bunch of junior devs the stack is necessarily decided by one or more of them since there's nobody else to decide it...
The tech stack is almost always decided by someone in leadership that has no developer experience. Or by the consultant company that will chose the most complicated and difficult to maintain stack because then they can invoice more and will win all future contracts. The trick is to hire someone that is not corrupted by money, someone like the author of this post, who cares more for the users then how much he gets paid.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#444That this article even has to be written proves how stupid web development as a whole has become.
I loathe this area of software development, loads of unnecessary frameworks and spinning gears that add complexity while making less and less functional applications
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
> give a craftsman terrible tools, and they'll still produce a decent end result This is an absurd statement. Just because something is a proverb, doesn't mean it's automatically true for all cases.
> Just because something is a proverb, doesn't mean it's automatically true for all cases. A professional woodcarver armed with only a metal spoon will still make a nicer woodcarving than I can given a full wood shop. Similarly, if you only give me notepad.exe, I can still make a pretty nice website. Does using the right tools make our lives easier? For sure. Using mildly-wrong tools (react, in this case) isn't going…
How good are you at hammering nails with a screwdriver? Tools are important. We have a more apropos saying in our industry: use the right tool for the job. Don't let your brain get fried by the 'poor workman' adage, it's talking about the difference between an expensive tool and a cheap tool of the same kind, not two tools of different kinds entirely.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
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've used many a government website in the Navy, and they were almost invariably bad, but it had nothing to do with React per se. A very slow website I can think of had something like 200 GET requests required to load the landing page, and it used Liferay with Material Design Bootstrap. That was closer to the "style at the time". React is the style of this time, but you can write very slow websites in anything, I'm c…
> That was closer to the "style at the time".
So I tied an onion to my belt.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#447What do people like for form validation? In this article he recommends the “validation-enhancer” library: https://www.npmjs.com/package/validation-enhancer I’ve also seen one called “formisch” that the author of valibot is working on: https://github.com/open-circle/formisch They’re both pretty new. Has anyone tried them?
I actually like the built-in stuff and the Constraint Validation API. I wrote about using it with htmx: https://dev.to/yawaramin/handling-form-errors-in-htmx-3ncg
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 comput…
It's not about perspectives, basically every human has the same baseline reasoning capabilities. Understanding that "more work = more time needed" is part of that baseline.
The only "excuse" would be if someone didn't know what a film is at all, because they can't be expected to reason about something they don't have any knowledge about.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#449Excellent article but I am always torn when I read inspirational articles like this - it makes perfect sense to me and I love the idea of simple, non-nonsense sites that work well, load quickly and don't rely on the latest browsers to function. Then I start to wonder if that's just because I'm not smart enough to understand React or whatever the fancy technology of the day is. Feels like I have a hard understanding t…
If it makes you feel any better, the people using the fancy frameworks and whatnot usually aren't smart enough to understand them either.
I am a tough guy, I only cried for twenty minutes after reading this.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#450[flagged]