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Just use HTML

justfuckingusehtml.com

71–80 of 188 posts

Re: Just use HTML

#71

"AI's out here, a gift from the heavens (or at least from Sam Altman's nerd fortress) ready to write your shitty little to-do app in five seconds flat. It can churn out pixel-perfect HTML, debug your fuck-ups, and probably even wipe your ass if you ask nicely. But no, you're still humping your frameworks like they're the last lifeboat on the Titanic." Personal opinion is that AI will reduce the need for higher abstra…

LLMs reinforce what the majority is already doing, because that's what it's trained on. I'd like ORMs to go away but LLMs aren't going to do that.

Re: Just use HTML

#72
Unfortunately there is a lot of stuff that can’t match accessibility standards without javascript (e.g. combobox).

If you use a framework it’s much easier to implement these components.

Re: Just use HTML

#73
post #65

Wow, I had no idea elements with an id attribute are directly accessible in JS. Combine this with Pico CSS or one of those minimal stylesheets (Water.css) to get better typography and spacing and you‘re set. I guess htmx is the extreme version of this no-framework philosophy… kinda.

Wait, this actually says to use the implicit ID mapping on the global object? That hasn't been good advice since about 1999!

edit: I checked and wow, it really does. Good grief, did an AI write this? Use getElementById or querySelector or querySelectorAll or any other remotely modern web API method instead.

Re: Just use HTML

#74

The raw ugliness of their site is reasonable cause to do the exact opposite.

The site is beautiful in that it is fast, flexible across multiple screen shapes, readable, and accessible. If only more web sites would make these choices!

Re: Just use HTML

#75
post #68
post #9

You don't need to swear at me about it, thanks.

I think this style of writing tries to emulate what passed as "cool" in the early 2010s or so. Matthew Inman of "The Oatmeal" is to me a leading representative of it.

It's an extremely intentional and all but plagiaristic take on a Zed Shaw piece from the late oughts. Tastelessly slavish imitation, at absolute minimum. At least the original is linked in tiny print at the bottom, below the advertisement.

Re: Just use HTML

#76

"AI's out here, a gift from the heavens (or at least from Sam Altman's nerd fortress) ready to write your shitty little to-do app in five seconds flat. It can churn out pixel-perfect HTML, debug your fuck-ups, and probably even wipe your ass if you ask nicely. But no, you're still humping your frameworks like they're the last lifeboat on the Titanic." Personal opinion is that AI will reduce the need for higher abstra…

i'm not sure i agree. maybe if you're "vibe-coding", but not if you're using AI as an assistant. a good abstraction makes it hard to write bugs, so telling AI to use a certain library (which i know to be high quality) is a good way to constrain the types of bugs i have to look for when reviewing the code.

Re: Just use HTML

#77

"AI's out here, a gift from the heavens (or at least from Sam Altman's nerd fortress) ready to write your shitty little to-do app in five seconds flat. It can churn out pixel-perfect HTML, debug your fuck-ups, and probably even wipe your ass if you ask nicely. But no, you're still humping your frameworks like they're the last lifeboat on the Titanic." Personal opinion is that AI will reduce the need for higher abstra…

> Personal opinion is that AI will reduce the need for higher abstraction software libraries.

I'm not sure we should be excited by that. Instead of building more powerful high level abstractions we're giving up and hope to build better software by churning out tons of one-off spaghetti code.

Re: Just use HTML

#79
What if instead of just using html, instead we use 20 JavaScript frameworks that talk to an electron server to call a series of microservices to determine which sql lite docker instance to call.

Then, sql lite returns a connection string to aws to pull XML containers of html that are converted to JSON and sent back to the front end to convert to html and render the page.

Maybe we can use lazy loading and some sliding panels on the page that slide in with fully rendered bmp images that are 20MB each despite only appearing in a 16x16 icon.

Oh darn this is just the standard webdev JavaScript bro tech flow? Guess I need to keep memorizing leetcode until I get my next genius JavaScript main idea to add another layer to this.

Re: Just use HTML

#80
post #28

We made tirreno website [1] with only HTML 4.01 and 1 transparent pixel, no CSS or JS. Works well on any device. Easy to update. Highly recommended. [1] https://www.tirreno.com/

| Monitor and protect your web app from cyberfraud, account threats, bots and abuse with a single security platform. Sure but how is this better than setting up the font in CSS? There may be an advantage to not having an external CSS file, but setting up CSS rules inside the HTML file works perfectly well and is much more maintainable than this IMHO.

The short answer: Because anyone can do this using in-line or in-file CSS.

The long answer: Technologies are a blend of humans and machines. Typing HTML code by yourself, especially in 2025, gives another level of meaning and human touch. It's more like modern art in some way.

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