[HN Gopher] HTML is all you need to make a website
___________________________________________________________________
HTML is all you need to make a website
Author : edent
Score : 123 points
Date : 2022-11-17 17:35 UTC (5 hours ago)
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| > Some people claimed that websites *without* CSS and JavaScript
| are "bland". _Who cares?_
|
| The people that I want to read my content?
|
| And yeah, lots of sites are far too bloated with CSS and JS and
| whoosiwhatsits. But a couple of kb of CSS will make a website
| _much_ nicer to consume, and won 't impact loading speed to any
| noticeable degree.
| bombcar wrote:
| Basically http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com in response to
| the obvious link elsewhere.
| [deleted]
| z9znz wrote:
| > couple of kb of CSS
|
| Assuming an average line of CSS is 30 bytes, that's 66 lines of
| CSS. That definitely should be enough.
|
| I would argue that if on a diet, 20 lines of CSS should be
| enough to provide a very readable, aesthetically inoffenseive
| website.
|
| If browsers had consistent, sane defaults which were designed
| for readability, then CSS wouldn't even be necessary for most
| information sites. The symantics of HTML tags were observed
| uniformly, sane defaults could be assumed.
| newhotelowner wrote:
| Well, First the auther shouldn't use "Light" font for the main
| body text. It makes the site unreadable/unusable. The text very
| light/thin, underline is very thick and dark.
|
| The wholse site uses a lot of unnecessary css/design.
| kneebonian wrote:
| Obligatory link to: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
| Minor49er wrote:
| It's so obligatory that it's already linked in the article :P
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| Also 'Words' at
|
| https://justinjackson.ca/words.html
| unsafecast wrote:
| This one has pretty bad mobile UX. The horizontal padding is
| humongous.
| smm11 wrote:
| It's amazing how snappy computers from the mid-90s actually are.
|
| https://plaintextsports.com/
| nickstinemates wrote:
| One of the few cases where light mode is more readable than
| dark mode for me :)
|
| On the other hand, 15s pageload times seems poorly optimized.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| And assembly language is all you need to make computer software,
| but that's also so reductive that it's basically a useless
| statement.
| unsafecast wrote:
| Simple blogs should need nothing but HTML to look decent.
| Better browser defaults would go a _long_ way.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Better HTML would go a long way, for that matter. It's pretty
| dumb that there are millions of independent implementations
| of payment forms for the Web, for one thing, and that most
| depend heavily on javascript to function well. Simple table
| sorting--should be built-in, probably since 15+ years ago.
| Proper memory-efficient list elements, like native toolkits
| often feature, should be available in pure HTML. So much
| wasted effort because the Web took over but no-one ever
| bothered to make it, you know, _good_ for all these things we
| 're now using it for.
| k__ wrote:
| Yes.
|
| People vastly underestimate DX, unintentionally gatekeeping
| technology while feeling like they "sticking it to those pesky
| Devs who overengineer everything!!!"
| zzo38computer wrote:
| My web page for my "Free Hero Mesh" software project is purely
| HTML, no CSS and no JavaScripts. (The Fossil repository uses CSS,
| but I made a separate web page which does not have CSS. Because,
| I think that it is much better) I do not specify fonts, colours,
| etc; those must be specified by the end user's preferences
| instead. I do not add excessive pictures/decorations/etc.
| pphysch wrote:
| There's clearly at least two camps of HTML advocates:
|
| a) Conservatives: "HTML is just fine as it is"
|
| b) Progressives: "HTML is a great idea but needs a little more
| work to be a great implementation"
| giantrobot wrote:
| There's a problematic "c" option whose domain could be served
| entirely with HTML and CSS but insist that some multi-megabyte
| JavaScript monstrosity is the only possible solution. So they
| weigh down every news article, blog post, and effectively
| static document with said JavaScript.
|
| It's not a little more work, it's reimplementing things
| browsers and servers _already do_ with JavaScript replacements.
| They deliver a naked script tag and then do everything in heavy
| JavaScript.
| vehemenz wrote:
| This type of article pops up every year, but the argument always
| presents a false dichotomy.
|
| Yes, most things don't need to be SPAs or implement cutting-edge
| CSS features. That doesn't mean you have to build your website in
| pure HTML.
|
| PHP is incredibly easy to learn and provides immediate benefits
| without negatively influencing your page's performance.
|
| For CSS, there are many prebuilt stylesheets out there that are
| easy to implement.
| napolux wrote:
| > what I am sure about, is that websites don't need to be
| complicated to be effective
|
| While I agree somehow, we live in 2022 with high broadband and
| powerful browsers/CPU.
|
| Let's not limit ourselves for the sake of it. We can do simple
| javascript, lightweight images, etc...
| aussiesnack wrote:
| > we live in 2022 with high broadband and powerful browsers/CPU
|
| That's a bit smug. I live in one of the richest nations in the
| world, and still much of the country has only slow connections
| available. Even those have often become intermittent since
| waves of climate-change enhanced disasters have started
| regularly sweeping away much of our infrastructure. Those
| disasters have also further impoverished much of the
| population, making it hard enough for many to keep a roof over
| their heads (thousands living in tents and caravans), let alone
| 'powerful CPU's.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I burned 3 billion tons of coal and all I got was this lousy
| javascript.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| I have a 2017 MacBook. Simple sites that should just f**ng work
| (e.g. JIRA) are completely sluggish.
|
| Yes, let's limit ourselves _a lot_ , I shouldn't require a
| modern M1 to use the web. In fact, Javascript shouldn't exist,
| because the industry apparently can't use a super optimised
| runtime correctly.
| frollo wrote:
| I have an M1 Pro and Jira is barely usable every other day. I
| don't think it's a matter of processing power.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| Jira was just an example, 2 out of 3 sites nowadays are
| pure CSS/JS-induced waste of energy.
| JCWasmx86 wrote:
| What if my highspeed internet flatrate is used up? After that I
| only have a slower speed (64 kbit/s)
|
| This should be enough to render text-based sites. E.g. HN or
| news sites. But the reality is, that basically no side is able
| besides HN is usable at that internet speed. Soo much content
| out there could be accessible at that speed. Sure no videos or
| images. But everything text based should still work.
|
| There are probably a lot of tools in the webdev-toolbelt that
| would allow to allow even e.g. image heavy news-sites to be
| usable during images and scripts load.
| everdrive wrote:
| Let's not though, unless there's some benefit to the user.
| blowski wrote:
| If I run a website, to some degree, I'm running it for my
| benefit. If I want to put fancy schmancy JavaScript on there
| to show how clever I am, or because I think it will make me a
| billionaire, I'm gonna do it. Tech-Puritanism is not going to
| stop me.
|
| Now if you tell me I shouldn't because it's less likely to
| make me a billionaire, I might want to listen.
| Tomis02 wrote:
| > we live in 2022 with high broadband and powerful browsers/CPU
|
| It would be nice if this were true but we're far from it. High
| broadband is not a given, browsers are slow (yes), CPUs stopped
| scaling vertically and don't compensate for bad programming
| anymore.
|
| It seems to me that the choice of not using HTML-only has more
| to do with the inability to do so, rather than the desire to
| not limit oneself.
| napolux wrote:
| > It seems to me that the choice of not using HTML-only has
| more to do with the inability to do so, rather than the
| desire to not limit oneself.
|
| That's why I write
|
| > Let's not limit ourselves for the sake of it. We can do
| simple javascript, lightweight images, etc...
| lancesells wrote:
| I'm not neccessarily sure of this analogy but I want web
| browsing to be like a book. I "open" a web page and it's there
| in it's entirety. Waiting and ready for wherever I want my
| eyeballs to go.
|
| I'm not averse to javascript or to images(my site is almost all
| images) but the slowness of so many sites these days says the
| high broadband and cpus can't keep up.
|
| And maybe someone can explain this to me but why does going
| back in the browser seem slower or more intensive than loading
| a new page? Is that because the broswer itself is trying to
| load the previous state?
| giantrobot wrote:
| > While I agree somehow, we live in 2022 with high broadband
| and powerful browsers/CPU.
|
| There's plenty of situations where one or both of those
| statements are _temporarily_ untrue and plenty more where they
| 're permanently untrue.
|
| Most users don't have flagship phones or brand new MacBooks.
| They don't have ultra fast WiFi or 5G. Even if they have more
| powerful devices they might be on shitty
| school/Starbucks/public/office WiFi.
|
| You don't need to build everything like it's 1996 but it's
| absurd to simply assume every user is on a MacBook with gigabit
| Ethernet. The web is full of terribly built web pages
| pretending they're "apps" and using megabytes of JavaScript to
| show some text and images.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _While I agree somehow, we live in 2022 with high broadband and
| powerful browsers /CPU._
|
| There are millions of Americans who do not have this luxury.
| And let's not pretend it's not a luxury.
|
| Just a couple of weeks ago there was an item in the news that
| _a million_ people in _New York City_ who do not even have cell
| service in their homes.
|
| I think it was in the Times article about the 5G towers popping
| up everywhere.
| wwweston wrote:
| A fair portion of the time people are on phones where they have
| no idea how fast/reliable their connection is going to be from
| moment to moment.
|
| Whether that (among other cases) creates an obligation in
| _everyone_ to account for semi-failure and full failure (let
| alone retreat to pure markup) is another thing, of course, but
| the industry would be better and its practitioners more
| deserving of the term "engineer" if we did.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > we live in 2022 with high broadband and powerful
| browsers/CPU.
|
| _Some_ of us do. I think it 's important to keep in mind that
| especially those of us living in tech hubs are in a highly
| distorted bubble when it comes to tech -- for us, things like
| gigabit internet and 1-3 year old top of the line phones and
| laptops are the norm.
|
| Beyond that bubble however are a lot of slow internet
| connections (sub 1mbps DSL is still a reality for many North
| Americans) as are computers that are either pushing between 5
| and 10 years of age or are of similar power to computers that
| old (think bargain bin x86 laptops and Chromebooks).
|
| Occasionally I'll pull out my circa-2008 Dell laptop (which can
| still run modern operating systems fine) and use it for a few
| hours to remind myself of this. It mostly does fine until I
| have to use some unnecessarily heavy website.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| > Some of us do.
|
| I live in a suburb outside of a large metro area. Not at all
| considered rural. The only internet provider we had when I
| moved from my old house to this new suburb was Xfinity
| (Comcast). The ISP I had previously did not have service in
| my area and after an exhaustive search, the best I company I
| could find that WAS NOT Xfinity was a commercial DSL line
| with a dedicated 5Mbps up and down line for the same cost as
| and Xfinity line with a 400Mbps up and 15Mbps down. It wasn't
| even close. I also had to have this company install the line
| which would've been even more money.
|
| In the end, it was pretty surprising how many areas still
| only have a single choice for their internet service.
| danjoredd wrote:
| This, tbh.
|
| In my area the ATT only provides internet that runs 18 mbps
| maximum. Its infuriating when I am browsing a javascript-
| heavy website at peak hours and it takes forever to load. I
| don't think HTML-only is necessarily a good idea, but less
| javascript for basic things that HTML does well anyway is
| certainly welcome.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| That's the one that kills me. When I am on a barely
| functional internet connection, and I need to download
| megabytes of js so that it can then do a fetch for three
| paragraphs of text.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| To add to this, something occurred to me recently, during a
| train ride:
|
| I don't know how many high speed connections a moving train
| has, but when I cannot load a simple mostly text website,
| then some people on board apparently are doing other things
| than I am doing on that shared connection. One hunch I have
| is, that they are downloading many megabytes of bloat JS
| libraries, while I am trying to just read some text on a
| website and have mostly JS blocked. Some more might even be
| watching movies or running big downloads or windows updates
| or whatever.
|
| Anyway, one result of bloated websites, even if we have high
| speed connections in our homes, is that we struggle with the
| shared connection, like on a train. If every Billy needs to
| load Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and whatnot, it surely is
| not going to improve the situation for other people on the
| train. Of course another reason might be, that the train's
| connection is bad in the first place.
| napolux wrote:
| > Occasionally I'll pull out my circa-2008 Dell laptop (which
| can still run modern operating systems fine) and use it for a
| few hours to remind myself of this. It mostly does fine until
| I have to use some unnecessarily heavy website.
|
| But this doesn't have to limit you to html only websites.
| 2008 (or 2006) js was perfectly fine for most tasks.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Yeah I'm never going to make the argument that HTML alone
| is adequate in most cases. Light JS, like as you said was
| featured on most sites of that era, is perfectly fine since
| the utility added is significant and the drawbacks very
| minimal. Same goes for images... highly optimized small PNG
| glyphs and small JPEGs are fine, you only start getting
| into trouble when loading multiple megabytes of images for
| purely ornamental purposes. My single core G5 and P4
| machines handled such sites with ease, even with the
| (relative to now) badly optimized web engines of the 00s.
|
| Problem is, light JS and small/optimized images are
| becoming more the exception than the rule. When devs have
| ample bandwidth and powerful machines they're much less
| likely to carefully weigh every dependency and
| unnecessarily large image.
| martyalain wrote:
| It's said that the father of LISP, John McCarthy, the father of
| LISP, lamented the W3C's choice of SGML as the basis for HTML :
| << An environment where the markup, styling and scripting is all
| s-expression based would be nice. >>
|
| Following John McCarthy, this HTML Hello
| World could have been written {b {i {u Hello World}}}
| and {* 1 2 3 4 5 6} could have been evaluated to 720. For
| instance: http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks
| onion2k wrote:
| _< b>Hello World could have been written {b
| {i {u Hello World}}}_
|
| I think that would be awesome _now_ using a modern IDE with
| great syntax highlighting and block editing. Back in 1997 when
| I was writing HTML in notepad.exe I think it would have been a
| bit less fun. Seeing the closing tag was incredibly useful.
| spc476 wrote:
| How verbose. You should do {b.i.u Hello World} [1] instead.
|
| [1] https://corebloc.neocities.org/sexpcode.html
| bfung wrote:
| That's what we thought in the early 2000s until Google Maps blew
| it's competition out of the water, making use of XmlHttpRequest
| when no one took js seriously back then.
|
| Blogging? sure.
|
| Making interactive content? a turing complete language helps.
|
| Use cases, use cases.
| tabtab wrote:
| An application (like maps) and an online brochure are two
| different animals. A brochure for a company with a hundred or
| fewer products should generally be able to do fine with just
| HTML. Maybe a generator engine can assist with formatting, but
| there should be little need to add JavaScript unless you really
| really think eye-candy is important to sales. For a child or
| teen, maybe such gimmicks matter, but not for a furniture
| store.
|
| If you really need a fancy store with shopping carts and wish
| lists etc., there are plenty of online services you can rent
| for small and medium stores. It's a wheel you shouldn't have to
| reinvent. But a brochure for say 25 medical devices/services
| shouldn't need any JavaScript.
| threatofrain wrote:
| One consideration that goes overlooked is the importance of
| metrics in driving debate and design decisions for online
| stores. Otherwise decisions are made on the basis of
| personality and whim and the consequences thereafter are
| unmeasured. Even performance based design decisions are
| unaccountable without data.
|
| If you want empiricism then even a simple blog needs JS.
| prhn wrote:
| > dramatically increases site performance, accessibility and the
| end-user experience
|
| Where are the metrics? Who is the target audience? What is the
| distribution of hardware among this target? A dramatic increase
| in performance on a potato might be imperceptible on the latest
| hardware, lessening or even eliminating the impact of your
| technology choices.
|
| A dramatic increase in accessibility and end-user experience is
| also pretty hand-wavy. How did you come to this conclusion? Any
| examples? I don't see how HTML-only is tied to these things. You
| can accomplish or fail both with or without heavy CSS and JS.
|
| None of the sites she links to make the case for these
| assertions. Am I missing something?
|
| > Why all this backlash against HTML-only websites?
|
| What backlash? I see the HTML-only rhetoric so often these days
| that it's clear this position is becoming rather fashionable.
| [deleted]
| cosmotic wrote:
| I think the improvements to accessibility are generally
| accepted to be true in the industry to a degree that metrics
| aren't needed to back up the claim every time it's discussed.
| Can you get the same degree of accessibility with javascript?
| Sure; it just requires a lot more work.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| First impression: view-source ... "", OK then, way to
| deplete your own hypothesis before anything even renders to the
| page.
|
| They're using Eleventy and Netlify, those are not HTML either;
| Eleventy implies they start with markdown too I think?
|
| I'll forgive them image formats and the .js file for Twitter.
| But, they follow up with a heap of "lets use tables for design"
| examples, always hated that ... I'm nope-ing pretty hard there.
|
| I started writing HTML in the 90s using Pico, my roots are
| purist, but no, not really ... you need styles for a11y, you want
| styles for user comfort and engagement, even minimal things like
| favicons and svg. We've come a long way, yes, bloated messes like
| Sharepoint spews out are abysmal, but to make a website that
| meets any reasonable standards ... you need more than just HTML
| in this dinosaur's opinion.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Hear, hear. Though I guess they could have gotten all their CSS
| into a style tag in the (which might even be reasonable
| for reducing the number of requests for things that get
| hammered on, maybe, if you didn't also want them cached for
| other pages).
| crestfallen wrote:
| Are you talking about the site from the submission? To be fair,
| it never claims itself to be HTML only. It does say performance
| was improved by being much more mindful about how much other
| stuff, including CSS and javascript, is included. The linked
| blog post about the perf improvements goes into some detail
| about that. Doesn't smell like false advertising to me. The
| site then goes on to show by extreme example that you don't
| technically need anything other than HTML to make a website.
|
| I do agree with your points about what is necessary these days.
| A dash of CSS, tables only for tabular data, other small
| touches. Like, that's a more reasonable standard for "what is
| necessary". And to me, I think your comments are in line with
| the spirit of the original post.
| [deleted]
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I find all this minimalist website renaissance to be ugly
|
| I agree with the concept of just using HTML (and CSS), but the
| examples people chose are so bland!
| rado wrote:
| Just a reminder that Amazon shopping works without CSS and JS
| jakub_jo wrote:
| No, it doesn't: Can't change between my accounts.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| Yep, they just need state-of-the-art, high SLA servers that
| generate pages dynamically for the user. It's really unfair to
| criticize the complexity of high javascript sites comparing
| them to simple html pages that "just work" because all the
| complexity is hidden on the service side.
| squokko wrote:
| This is like saying "potatoes are all you need to make a meal." I
| mean, no, you're not wrong. But nobody really wants to eat what
| you're making.
| 2devnull wrote:
| I regularly eat meals like a potato. Many people don't want
| their food drowned in ketchup. Ketchup is a business plan to
| market sugar.
| squokko wrote:
| There are ingredients beyond potatoes and ketchup
| Julesman wrote:
| Incorrect.
| davedx wrote:
| It's all very self-evident
| curtisblaine wrote:
| I don't know if the author is talking to professionals who
| implement javascript sites at work or hobbyists with a simple
| blog page. In the first case, she has no data points to quantify
| how javascript adoption generates revenue for the company vs
| simple bland html pages (with more logic on the server side). In
| the second case, she has no business in what people implement in
| their spare time to learn new technologies or just unwind. In
| both cases, I don't really understand these kind of articles.
| [deleted]
| mdswanson wrote:
| Reminds me of a funny story. I grew up with the web, and I only
| know writing HTML, CSS, and plain JavaScript. I don't do web
| development professionally, as I've spent more time with native
| client and backend development through the years. A couple of
| years ago, though, I needed to show how to call some APIs, so I
| wrote a simple page as a demonstration. Immediately after sharing
| the page, the web developers asked if I could point them to the
| GitHub repo. I think I might have laughed out loud as I replied,
| "right-click, View Source." It's amazing that that's how we used
| to always do it and that it's almost never done that way anymore.
| Dwedit wrote:
| The big reason to use CSS Style is to have a separate stylesheet
| for printing. Your page can be printer friendly too.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| true, but HTML-only websites are often pretty clunky
|
| infuriatingly, if HTML had just a bit more oomph, we could make
| _a lot_ better websites with it, but they haven 't been moving
| HTML forward as a hypermedia for decades now (see
| https://htmx.org for what I mean, they could implement this
| concept in the browser in a week, and it would change web
| development dramatically)
|
| the upcoming view transitions API will help:
|
| https://github.com/WICG/view-transitions
|
| but, still, there are some really obvious and simple things that
| could be done to make HTML much more compelling (maybe let's
| start by making PUT, PATCH and DELETE available in HTML!)
| JodieBenitez wrote:
| HTMX is great ! So much can be done without even any scripting
| client-side.
| account-5 wrote:
| Isn't htmx implemented in JavaScript which is downloaded
| clientside so you can use the hx- directives?
| pphysch wrote:
| HTMX is a "HTML library" rather than a JS library. It just
| happens to be implemented in JS for necessary reasons.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| i think they mean "user written js"
| JodieBenitez wrote:
| Yes it is implemented in Javascript. You don't have to
| write JS yourself in your application though. Not that I
| can't write Javascript, it's just that some things are a
| lot easier with hx directives.
| ksec wrote:
| >see https://htmx.org for what I mean, they could implement
| this concept in the browser in a week, and it would change web
| development dramatically)
|
| Yes. Has anyone ever purpose it?
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| i tried to propose it a few times, but I'm a crazy man in
| montana, and I don't have a lot of pull
|
| hopefully at some point someone will notice it
| milsorgen wrote:
| Kudos to you for trying.
| no_wizard wrote:
| If you had a browser build as a working implementation
| you'd get a ton of interest quite quickly
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| best I can do is one hacked up javascript library
| tjoff wrote:
| Clunky, how?
|
| If anything I'd associate javascript with clunkyness.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Lets say you want something as simple as a table-of-contents.
| If you're doing HTML, you gotta render this yourself. In
| Wordpress or webpage generators like Jekyll or Hugo, table-
| of-contents generated from H1 / H2 headers is basically just
| one line.
|
| Lets say you want to sort all your posts by date and paginate
| the results (say, 20 results per page or something), as per
| typical blogging patterns. That's a lot of HTML cruft you
| gotta make for this to happen. Meanwhile, Wordpress / Jekyll
| / Hugo (etc. etc.) do this all automatically for you.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| As a predominantly (hobbyist) systems developer, the
| pervasiveness of NPM is a major detractor for website
| development.
|
| I have done a few Angular and React apps to keep the skills
| sharp. The imposed workflow for the power is an interesting
| set of tradeoffs, never mind the magic and amount of
| decisions you need to make to use both.
|
| Add on top of that the rest of npm, nvm, css compilers, the
| various css toolkits for layout, and the rest and it just
| feels so complicated, even for the most basic page which
| needs to pull in some data over an api.
|
| It doesn't seem to be getting any simpler.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| Well, I think a lot of people (developers at least) associate
| SPA-type web applications with smoother transitions, etc.
|
| I agree with you to an extent: I've had some very bad
| experiences with javascript applications as well, but the
| general sentiment is (reasonably, in my opinion) that a well
| done SPA will feel smoother than a well done MPA
|
| W/ htmx or similar libraries like unpoly or hotwire, you can
| close this gap. The big difference is the ability to update
| partial bits of HTML, rather than needing to do a full page
| refresh.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Funny. I was expecting the article in a pure HTML page.
| Instead, it has a rainbow of CSS & JS.
| pdntspa wrote:
| > PUT, PATCH and DELETE
|
| Is this really _that_ much better than POST
| http://www.mysite.com/thing/100/delete ?
|
| GET and POST have actual client-side implementation
| differences. The rest is simply semantics.
|
| I love REST but these extra verbs seem redundant.
| schappim wrote:
| >> I love REST but these extra verbs seem redundant.
|
| The extra verbs make your URLs less redundant!
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| If you are treating URLs as references to resources, you want
| the ability to CRUD those resources.
|
| PUT and DELETE correspond with U and D, so they make sense to
| include. PATCH is a little less obviously useful (partial
| update vs. a full update w/ a PUT.)
|
| Regardless of our feelings about them, they are there in
| HTTP, the HyperText Transfer Protocol. So maybe we should
| make them accessible through the HyperText we are
| transferring.
| pdntspa wrote:
| I really doubt the world is going to standardize over that
| specific style of implementation and, frankly, the semantic
| web is dead. Long live the bazaar...
| dmitriid wrote:
| Those are literally standards. With very specific
| semantics and expectations https://github.com/for-
| GET/know-your-http-well/blob/master/m...
| pdntspa wrote:
| And the number of projects that I have seen follow them
| is fewer than the number of projects that just seem to
| wing it. Which is my point... perhaps this standard is
| superficial and unnecessary, and maybe we should discard
| it.
|
| IETF/whoever can write whatever they want, I only care
| about what I actually encounter. That's "standardization"
|
| edit- All those nice looking checkboxes depend on the
| individual implementation. It's a nice concept but how
| many projects have actually implemented it to the
| conventions about idempotency/etc shown?
|
| edit2- who is for-GET anyway? A random github link
| doesn't have much more worth than a random Medium link
| pphysch wrote:
| If browsers natively supported HTMX features (and possibly
| _hyperscript) that would be a total game changer.
|
| Well, at least it's no trouble to include these two libraries
| and bring your clients into the 21st century of hypertext. But
| doing so without JS would be amazing.
| Veuxdo wrote:
| Let's abolish the word "need" from article headlines
| airstrike wrote:
| We need to talk about the word need in headlines
| blahblah1234567 wrote:
| 0's and 1's, my friend
|
| actually, scratch that. transistors.
|
| or no wait, a mancala board.
|
| a game of checkers, etc.
| avgDev wrote:
| All you need is 18,000 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes,
| 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and
| approximately 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints.
|
| :)
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must
| first invent the universe."
|
| - Carl Sagan
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "Some people claimed that websites without CSS and JavaScript are
| "bland". Who cares? If your content is readable and accessible
| without the noisy bells and whistles of loading animations and a
| fancy-pants design, then ship it.
|
| Someone else said HTML-only websites are "ugly as hell." I
| disagree. They're beautiful."
|
| Is the www an information system for hyperlinking and sharing
| information over an internet or is it something else. Is the www
| the software program (e.g., "browser") used to access it.
|
| Imagine if people criticised books for the fonts they are printed
| in, how the paragraphs are formatted, whether they have images,
| and so on. Imagine if readers were forced to wear special reading
| glasses to see the text.
|
| Generally, book reviews focus only on the textual content not the
| presentation. I wonder why.
|
| Using a text-only browser (not Lynx, mind you), I can read
| content faster and easier, with less distraction, than I can
| using a graphical browser running Javascript provided by an
| advertising company. YMMV.
|
| As it happens, I can discuss www content submitted to HN with
| folks who are using such graphical browsers. Yet I cannot see the
| same fonts, images or formatting, nor do I execute any
| Javascript. For example, I read the text of the OP website and I
| am commenting on it here, but I have no idea what it looks like
| in a popular, "modern" graphical browser running Javascript and
| controlled by an advertising company. How is this possible.
|
| It seems to me there is a functional aspect of www content, i.e.,
| information, that is independent of the software used to view it.
|
| Web developers like to assume there are only a handful of
| software programs that can be used to view www content, and thus
| by manipulating those programs they can control how www content
| appears to the reader. In practice, given the takeover of the www
| by "tech" companies living off advertising and VC money, that may
| be true. However text is text. I can view and process it with an
| infinite variety of software. I can make it look however I wish
| on the screen.
|
| The www can be whatever someone wants it to be, as text can be
| extracted and manipulated in an infinite number of ways. Users of
| the www can, in theory, process the information found via the www
| in any way they choose.1
|
| 1. For example, GPT-3 was created using a text-only corpus
| extracted from the www, namely Wikipedia and Common Crawl. Web
| developer Javascript is ignored.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Honestly - I think you're wrong here.
|
| You seem to be stuck in the era where the "web" was really
| about distributing text content - often blogs or articles.
|
| I'd argue that's not really what the web is anymore. A good
| chunk of it still does that (for example - this discussion
| probably falls into that category). But there's a whole section
| that actually is distributing applications using html/css/js.
|
| They are _not_ distributing long form text. They are providing
| spreadsheets, collaborative word documents, rich monitoring and
| analytics solutions, custom CAD software (yes, really -
| https://www.tinkercad.com/), online chat applications, plus far
| more than I can list.
|
| Basically - if there was a desktop app for something, there's
| probably a website version of it now too.
|
| So - no, I don't agree that the web is just text. I also don't
| agree with your main focus comparing it to books.
|
| Imagine the fucking gall it would take to walk into a comic
| conference and say this: "Imagine if people criticised books
| for the fonts they are printed in, how the paragraphs are
| formatted, whether they have images, and so on."
|
| How out of touch would you seem?
| bobajeff wrote:
| That's the thing is though if most of the web is about
| sending documents and media, while only a fraction of it is
| spent on delivering desktop applications, then wouldn't it be
| better to just split off the part of the runtime needed for
| applications into it's own thing so we don't have to run
| untrusted code just to read a blog or watch YouTube?
| horsawlarway wrote:
| You're more than welcome to do that if you'd like, but most
| users don't like - because it turns out documents and
| applications tend to go hand in hand (just like your code
| is data, and your data can be code). Basically - that line
| is a hell of a lot more blurry than you're making it out to
| be.
|
| If you don't want to run javascript - use a browser that
| doesn't run javascript, or turn it off in your browser of
| choice.
|
| If you don't want to run js to play youtube - open the
| video url in VLC.
|
| But again - I think you're glossing over the progressive
| nature of a lot of these applications. Ex: Youtube isn't
| just a video feed (despite what we'd sometimes like). It's
| an application with comments, streaming, voting, searching,
| sharing, and many more features.
|
| Can some of those be done without JS? Yes.
|
| Does it make since to use JS to implement many of them?
| Yes.
|
| Can some of them only exist with JS? Yes.
|
| Go click the "Go live" button in Youtube and then come back
| and tell me how you're planning on implementing that
| application feature in plain ol' HTML?
| bobajeff wrote:
| Of course documents and applications go hand in hand. You
| need applications to view them after all. But do
| documents need to also be applications?
|
| I submit they do not. Maybe YouTube has to have js for
| it's features but I don't accept that that's good. I
| don't accept that what YouTube, Twitch, Vimeo and
| Dailymotion provides warrants the need for each to have
| their own separate applications that have to be
| downloaded and allowed to run on my system.
| c7b wrote:
| How are you supposed to take an article with this title
| seriously, on a website that makes heavy use of modern CSS
| (flexbox, grid,...), has a Twitch stream link and even embedded
| Twitter (with JavaScript)? This is 'Do as I say, not as I do' at
| a quite extreme level.
| [deleted]
| pvg wrote:
| _How are you supposed to take an article with this title
| seriously_
|
| You read it and if you have anything interesting to say about
| its content, you write that. Picking apart the implementation
| details of the site itself just brings the unseriousness to HN
| which is why the site guidelines ask you not to do that sort of
| thing.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| c7b wrote:
| Website design is arguably not _tangential_ to a discussion
| about website design, which is the only thing that the
| guidelines discourage.
|
| If someone indulges on a beef steak while talking about
| something, that would be tangential in most circumstances,
| except when the talk is about the benefits of veganism.
| You're creating a strong dissonance between your message and
| your mode of delivery.
|
| What the guidelines _do_ discourage, however, is commenting
| on whether the article has been read.
| pvg wrote:
| It's tangential to the ideas expressed in the content
| beside being a really predictable and repetitive (notice
| how it's in three separate bottom comments in this thread)
| gotcha on top of 'how can I take it seriously' itself being
| just a bombastic trope.
|
| _is commenting on whether the article has been read._
|
| They do, which is why I didn't.
| c7b wrote:
| > It's tangential to the ideas expressed in the content
|
| One of the ideas expressed in the content is to use HTML
| tables for styling and aligning content - using grid and
| flexboxes flies in the face of that suggestion.
| rchaud wrote:
| Is there an HTML-only way of separating menus from the html page?
| Similar to how external style sheets only need to be edited once
| to apply on all pages where it's linked?
|
| Of course we all know something like:
|
|
|
| But in order to get that working, the site can no longer be HTML-
| only, it will need a web server and pages must be titled .php.
| This assumes most people are building multi-page sites, and not
| those one-page "link in bio" style pages.
| golergka wrote:
| Once upon a time, many years ago, web designers used iframes
| for this -- however, this is not something I would recommend.
| But it is an html-only way.
| giaour wrote:
|