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Plain Vanilla Web

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Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#601

Post by bandoti »

jfengel wrote: post #562
bob1029 wrote: post #291

I've transcended the vanilla/framework arguments in favor of "do we even need a website for this?". I've discovered that when you start getting really cynical about the actual need for a web application - especially in B2B SaaS - you may become surprised at how far you can take the business without touching a browser. A vast majority of the hours I've spent building web sites & applications has been devoted to admini…

I've found that "send me a spreadsheet and I'll upload it" isn't a great user experience. It's just a big pile of cells, with no documentation (which they wouldn't read anyway).There are a billion things they can do wrong, and they get no feedback on it until I email it to them. They don't know what the options are for any field, and it's easy to enter a nonstandard value. A typo in a header row can lead to data loss…

It could work but there is still a bit of developer overhead: (1) Use iron-clad schema validation in the database; (2) Provide some forms over top the Excel data like old Access applications.

The benefit would be that you have a fixed set of UI components available in Excel and don’t need to worry about styling and whatnot.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#602

Post by lolinder »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #508
lolinder wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could, but it would be a distraction because my entire point is that there are an enormous variety of apps with a large variety of requirements being deployed on the web. If I give examples that's going to turn into an argument over whether these specific examples actually need a framework, which will turn into a whole bunch of other hypotheticals of situations that would justify it or situations that won't. Rather…

Holy moly, that's pretentious. I was genuinely curious because i never faced the kind of issue a web development team would have, it wasn't about counter argumenting. You could have just said "x and y".

I'm not trying to be pretentious, but wrangling an HN thread is hard and I don't have time to get into an argument about a bunch of different implementation details. Rather than just ignore your post I decided to respond explaining why I couldn't answer.

The only valid short answer is what I said: that it really depends on the details and how they all work together. I truly can't give you features in isolation that won't be questionable, because the decision hinges on the whole combination of factors. Had I said "x and y" someone would have come along and argued that X and Y didn't call for a framework because Z. Me identifying the two points would have accomplished nothing and would actually have undermined my primary point of "it depends".

Edit: btw, I just corrected the downvote on your original post with an upvote. Whoever did that probably assumed you were being belligerent, but that's not fair.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#603

Post by briandear »

Aurornis wrote: post #403
bob1029 wrote: post #291

I've transcended the vanilla/framework arguments in favor of "do we even need a website for this?". I've discovered that when you start getting really cynical about the actual need for a web application - especially in B2B SaaS - you may become surprised at how far you can take the business without touching a browser. A vast majority of the hours I've spent building web sites & applications has been devoted to admini…

> In many situations, it is clearly 100x faster/easier/less bullshit to send the business a template of the configuration (Excel files) and then load+merge their results directly into the same SQL tables. > Email and flat files are far more flexible than any web solution. Some times I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I read HN lately. Suggesting that we e-mail requests around and have a person on the other end m…

For real. The UX matters. Reducing the surface area for errors is also valuable. If “overbuilt” means “putting a clear UX around an important business process” then I love overbuilt.

It was like that one dude on HN that criticized Dropbox back in day saying he could have built it in a weekend using rsync and a bunch other nerd nonsense that the average person doesn’t have the time or the expertise to mess with.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#604

Post by accrual »

dragontamer wrote: post #593
jfengel wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that "send me a spreadsheet and I'll upload it" isn't a great user experience. It's just a big pile of cells, with no documentation (which they wouldn't read anyway).There are a billion things they can do wrong, and they get no feedback on it until I email it to them. They don't know what the options are for any field, and it's easy to enter a nonstandard value. A typo in a header row can lead to data loss…

Excel is more than cells? If you have certain options, use Excels forms to place buttons, menus and selections.

Fixed drop-down fields are very helpful for shared/inter-company spreadsheets too. Highlight them in red until they're changed, then enforce the value via dropdown.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#605

Post by bradly »

cortesoft wrote: post #445
bradly wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sell urns online and my website just has an email link. No shopping cart. A brick-and-mortor urn shop would never have a shopping cart, so why would a virtual one? I've purchased specialized woodworking tools online that simply involved filling out a form. I later received the parts with an invoice to send payment. You can simply not pay if you choose not to. There are so many way to do commerce both on and offline…

> There are so many way to do commerce both on and offline and if you squint and look closely you'll find interesting people doing interesting things all around you. Why do I want "interesting" ways to buy things? I want to be able to buy what I want quickly and reliably. I don't get the benefit of making me try to figure out how to buy something I want

> Why do I want "interesting" ways to buy things? I want to be able to buy what I want quickly and reliably. I don't get the benefit of making me try to figure out how to buy something I want

Understandable view, but try thinking it from the producers point of view. They want to create an sell in the way that makes sense for themselves and their goals. There are all different types of people with all different types of goals, so it is really awesome when there is all different types of commerce going on. It isn't about eliminating something, but the freedom to make something and sell it on your terms.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#606

Post by [deleted] »

bradly wrote: post #433
Aurornis wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've purchased specialized woodworking tools online that simply involved filling out a form. I later received the parts with an invoice to send payment. You can simply not pay if you choose not to. People romanticize businesses like this but there’s a reason you’re not posting the link. It only works when it’s for a small group of people who are in the know and refer trusted buyers. It’s also trivial to set up any…

> People romanticize businesses like this but there’s a reason you’re not posting the link You are correct that I was a worried about an HN hug of orders for brass tacks. > I guess I’ve spent enough time dealing with things like non-payment or doing work for trades that never arrive that I just don’t romanticize this stuff any more. In this case there isn't much of a choice. When the last manufacture of brass tacks c…

[deleted]

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#607

Post by briandear »

hliyan wrote: post #451
patrickmcnamara wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a live location of the delivery person makes total sense here though.

Why? What I would prefer is a "Notify me when the rider is [X] minutes away. Use ringtone [R]" feature. X is the time I need to go downstairs and open the gate. The customer need not have their brains cluttered with logistics details.

Is that what the average user thinks? HN has nerd bias — I bet many people here would prefer a TUI for Uber. My 65 year old aunt who doesn’t speak English very well might well prefer a graphical display of where her driver is. Plus it’s fun and adds to the experience of using the app. Not everything should have the succinctness or sparseness of an aviation METAR.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#608

Post by Swizec »

leptons wrote: post #501
Swizec wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on a site that was built without frameworks with just a sprinkle of jQuery on top of a traditional MVC framework. It worked great but then the business grew and the software became bigger than what fits in 1 engineer’s head. We now have lots of issues that need fixing. A good example are pages that take 5 seconds to load because they have to do so much, then you submit a form, and the page reload takes 5 secon…

>A good example are pages that take 5 seconds to load because they have to do so much, then you submit a form, and the page reload takes 5 seconds to go through but there is no UI feedback so you press the button a few more times because maybe it didn’t work? Then you get an error because the first action worked but the subsequent actions failed due to uniqueness constraints. It's been standard practice for at least…

Lots of people build stuff and don’t have 25 years of experience. Or it seemed like “unnecessary complexity” when the app had 5 users and interactions took 100ms.

A lot of standard things feel like “wow people are way overthinking this, it’s so easy” when you have 5 users :)

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#609

Post by lmm »

_heimdall wrote: post #550
lmm wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you don't have to learn "framework after framework". Realistically, at a well-organised organisation you learn React and that's it. You don't worry about the compilation and minification and what have you, because you have a working build system that does the build and does the source maps, and you have a culture that fixes these things if they break or become flaky. As someone who stepped away from web for a whi…

Why would a language meant to focus only on styling need to be Turing complete?

It doesn't necessarily need to be Turing complete, but CSS in its current form is harder to understand, debug or make sense of than most Turing-complete languages.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#610

Post by astura »

panstromek wrote: post #54
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen more broken SPAs than MPAs, by far. Ironic, considering SPAs are supposed to improve conversion rates and user experience. Even from big companies with no excuse - Reddit is almost unusable on phones, X was straight up broken for a month straight with image loading on mobile. If you’re writing an SPA, and it isn’t Twitter or a content consumption platform, and it isn’t necessary to be API-driven, seriousl…

Might be a bit of a selection bias though. I certainly remember a lot of crappy MPAs before SPAs got big. The crappines just moved to SPAs as they became mainstream. Overall I agree that MPAs are better default, though, good SPAs are hard to build.

Issues with old school websites before SPAs were usually "kinda clunky/hard to navigate/find stuff" and "ugly/inconsistent UI."

Issues with SPAs are "core features straight up don't work " and "page is now just an endless spinner."

I know which I prefer.

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