Live data from Hacker News

Just use HTML

justfuckingusehtml.com

81–90 of 188 posts

Re: Just use HTML

#81

"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…

> We will see wildly different software paradigms as the need for human understanding drops

Isn't an LLM basically another abstraction layer? Unlike React or EF Core, it can talk back

Re: Just use HTML

#82

"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 don’t think it’s quite that simple. Taken to the logical extreme, everything above pure machine code is “abstraction”, but I don’t expect AIs to produce good machine code any time soon.

Even if you consider trainability (amount of code etc), Python is a higher abstraction than C and I don’t see that going away either.

A more nuanced view is that libraries that exist to reduce boilerplate will likely see less use, whereas libraries that exist to simplify a problem domain or similar (automatic memory management language, crypto libraries, parallelisation abstractions) will stay, at least whilst we are relying on humans to review AI generated code.

Re: Just use HTML

#83
post #6

Somehow this site is both plain HTML yet also blocks the Firefox reader button, rendering it unreadable. ( Edit: Browsing to https://justfuckingusehtml.com/index.html shows the reader button, I guess Firefox has a really dumb heuristic for when it shows. )

Readability's heuristic is intentionally opaque as a defense against targeting by advertisers and others who abuse the web.

I can understand making it difficult for a webpage to "opt out" of reader mode, but why make it hard for willing developers to "opt in"?

Re: Just use HTML

#84
post #27

While there are some valid points hiding deep in the sewage flowing across the page, it also misses a core point: The web (HTML/CSS/JS) is by now good enough to make actually decent UI that doesn't look like it's escaped from the 90s and is holding Geocities hostage. As is, the page mostly screams "I don't want to learn anything new".

Yeah, if the point they're making is that you can make modern websites with just HTML, the website looking as it does really undermines that. Show off some flair if you want to convince me! I think the site this one is based off [0] argues for simplicity in a much less muddled way.

[0] https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Re: Just use HTML

#85

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/

I have no idea if this is satire, or if you're a younger developer who "found" the techniques we ran away from screaming 20 years ago.

    

    
        
    
I feel like CSS is unfairly coupled to JS frameworks. It may be reasonable to say that CSS 3 is unnecessarily complex, but clean "semantic" HTML and a basic presentational style sheet is an amazing combination that isn't related to the ball of mud that modern development has become.

Re: Just use HTML

#86
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Readability's heuristic is intentionally opaque as a defense against targeting by advertisers and others who abuse the web.

I can understand making it difficult for a webpage to "opt out" of reader mode, but why make it hard for willing developers to "opt in"?

That would require exposing Readability in the web API.

Re: Just use HTML

#88

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!

Back when monitors were 4:3 at 640x480, these plain HTML sites were readable and scrollable. It is 2025. Our ultrawide, ultrasmall, ultraresoultion screens make this a chore to read without playing with zoom levels.

Re: Just use HTML

#89
post #42

TIL (from "Choose a week to question all your life choices") about: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... Weird that it's supported by mobile Safari but not desktop Safari (according to the support table). And not in Firefox yet.

Note that these are ISO 8601 weeks, which may not match the expectations of users everywhere. E.g. the US has a different system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week#Other_week_numbering_syst...

Post reply on HN