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Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
551–560 of 605 posts
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
my most recent website is fully static html and css. it contains several pages and a menu that is duplicated in all pages. that menu is maintained manually, and every time a page is added, all copies of the menu have to be updated. at some point that will get tedious. then i have a few options: i generate the menu using a backend framework. the downside: the website is no longer fully static. i now depend on a backen…
This seems like a very complicated way to maintain a menu on a static website. Have you considered using old school server side includes? It’s what they were designed for.
server side includes are just a variant of the backend framework. they have the same problem. i'd still be locked in. and i'd depend on and have to maintain a backend for the lifetime of the site.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of developers have made or just perceive very strong silos between frontend and backend today. Any coordination that needs to happen between frontend and backend is potentially a communication challenge. It seems like a lot more work because you have to keep the backend and frontend in closer sync. The backend has to be aware of and able to store every sub-form in the full process (which sounds like a "wizard f…
I have had issues where the Frontend team is unable to explain how to communicate with their SPA, they say "just use this package/just run node" and are unable to explain the workflow in primitives. Then they just validate on the front end, and we validate on the backend.
> they say "just use this package/just run node" and are unable to explain the workflow in primitives
Now it's worse. It's "just run "
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#555Earlier 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 just had one of these people, a contractor working for a state government, argue vocally with me in a meeting stating that "500 JavaScript requests is not a problem" for a single page. Un-cached, of course, despite there being a CDN in front of the site. You can't win against cargo-cult coders because they just assume you're from a different, competing cult. They have no concept of engineering or science, they have…
> argue vocally with me in a meeting stating that "500 JavaScript requests is not a problem" for a single page
Where's the benchmark or at least the numbers? If not, that's not proof of anything. Nothing to argue about. I'd just laugh.
> You can't win against cargo-cult coders
You don't need to. Unless you're not in control or don't have influence then whatever. It shouldn't be about "winning". It's either some vote (hence influence) or there's a process e.g. PoC with backed numbers.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#556This isn't "We replaced a React app with an HTML form and performance improved." It's "We replaced a bad web page with a good web page and performance improved." Attributing this to the technology driving the browser experience is silly. You can make a brilliant user experience with React. You can make a terrible website with plain HTML. The improvement comes from the change design, not tech.
Totally wrong, re-read the article. React requires JavaScript, which the new page doesn’t. That’s a strict accessibility improvement. (And I’m not a React hater!)
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You also need to ask Claude not to make any mistakes /s
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#558nooo
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to think that was true but I now think it’s only true for very interaction-heavy apps: if you have hundreds of interactions on a page over many minutes, using an SPA is amortized across a lot of time, but if it’s something you could do with e.g. a simple Django app you’ll not only be done faster but will spend an order of magnitude less time on maintenance and accessibility work.
Alright but Django isn’t a pure HTML file only solution. If you have a site with no interactivity it seems like Django is the wrong choice if everything is static.
Who said it was? My point was simply that if you’re doing something like getting data in and out of a SQL database using web forms, you can avoid a ton of overhead and deliver a better user experience without using an SPA, and of course there’s a lot to be said for not needing to install security patches weekly due to having fewer, simpler moving parts.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#560I 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…
Great work. The gov.uk site is a beacon of light on the web.