I loved this post. Awesome commitment to users. Breath of fresh air.
Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
501–510 of 605 posts
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
The standard answer to that is that some technologies make one harder than the other. That's kind of true from first principles, but it requires making the case that e.g. React is actually harder to make good than a plain HTML page. Fun thing, TFA describes a kind of multi-page wizard style form that I haven't seen a lot anymore in the last decade or so. But when I did see it, it's always some dogshit enterprise syst…
Is it slow though? Like in practice? This demo [1] using Datastar (a streaming HTML framework) every action including scrolling roundtrips to the server. Even the checkboxes changing colour is a roundtrip. https://checkboxes.andersmurphy.com
every action including scrolling roundtrips to the server
As soon as you include a network roundtrip in anything you're opening up a Pandora's box of slow connections, slow DNS queries, network outages, what-if-the-user-is-on-a-train problems, what-if-their-IP-changes-mid-flow problems, etc.
Reducing the network calls in any app has upsides and downsides. It isn't really true that SPAs are faster to render (as your example proves) but rendering speed isn't the only thing that matters.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Old people don't have that because they Aren't insane . When did the industry put the onus on the user to understand how the computer works? What happened to the old days of Xerox PARC's HCI studies putting the user first? The computer is in service of the user, not the other way around! If I need to build a mental turing machine to understand your application, it is a bad application . It is rather the engineer's…
As a firmware engineer, my philosophy is this: if I'm doing my job properly, the user should never even know I exist. Maybe this isn't applicable to all software devs. If you make web apps, users actually see your UI, they click an icon or type in a URL and hit enter with the intent of using the thing you made. With firmware, that's not how it works. When you hit the "mute" button on your laptop keyboard, it should j…
I have this quote from Wag the Dog burned into my brain.
It's like being a plumber.
Yeah, it's like a plumber: do your job right and nobody should notice. But when you fuck it up, everything gets full of shit.Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#504[flagged]
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#505Can anyone confirm if Web Components work in the old psp web browser?
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Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#506As 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,…
I think the problem is hearing just one side. Someone is saying that they delivered a very reasonable solution that's simpler than most would come up. Person taking over was not happy. Do we know if the code being handed over was high quality? Were they reacting to the fact that it was "not React"? Maybe they have a template they enforce in the company about how apps are built? We don't know.
The author open sourced the validation library: https://gitlab.com/alistairldavidson/validation-enhancer
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't take that much effort to put guardrails around your prompt to solve problems in a certain way and with certain frameworks and excluding certain others.
Who will be doing that? Only a small minority of developers pre-ai cared to attempt using HTML, so I don’t see them urging Claude to create efficient and lean websites in the future either.
Claude is remarkably good at performance engineering and ports. It only takes one person on your team to ask claude to do a round of performance profiling and tuning. Or ask claude to take your react site and set up a server to render parts of your site as static, cache friendly HTML.
You barely need domain expertise any more. Just ask claude to make it go faster and it will.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#508I built apps like these on GOV.UK over 10 years ago for the Ministry of Justice. We built our own form wizard library that let us validate long forms in steps and break them out into multiple pages because Ruby on Rails didn't support doing that out of the box. It was a very important principle back then that everyone should be able to make use of these digital services regardless of whatever users were using to acce…
It's still happening.
I built some libraries that ease the process, and they power the new MOJ Forms and GOV.UK Forms.
Rails still has a decent foothold across departments, but it's being nibbled away at by Python and.NET.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> 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.
I have trouble seeing how React vs Astro is two tools of different kind entirely?
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Unfortunately the LLMs are trained on what we've made, and there's going to be a ton more React garbage[1] in the training set than there are carefully-crafted websites like the article describes, so I don't expect a decrease in overengineered, bloated junk. If anything, I predict that the fact that you can shit one out in less time than before will have a different effect: A modest increase in bloat since an LLM won…
You can order LLMs to use other patterns. I had an LLM recreate an app in a different stack with reasonable success