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Comment by noway421 | Hacker News Reader

Their web site is beautiful. Static served over h2 with regional POPs from cloudflare provides seamless experience between pages, and that's with no javascript. After first load it caches and literally takes less than a frame to switch between pages. It feels like an SPA.

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Frontenders: take note! This is the next step logical step in the frontend evolution.

All javascript can now be minified to zero bytes [0]. This can result in a significant improvement in asset load times as well as render times.

Furthermore, by following the process backwards developers can save time in the build process.

I'm also happy to announce that this new technology is supported by all major browsers that anyone will ever want to use: Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Edge, lynx etc.

(PS: there are also significant improvements waiting in accessibility and SEO.)

Sincerly,

Greybeard

Fullstacker

[0]: for more details about how this can happen see the papers linked here: https://www.google.no/search?q=html+spec

> Frontenders: take note!

Frontend communities have been building their docs as static sites forever. You aren't telling 'frontenders' anything they don't know here.

Who should we blame in your opinion?

No one, it's not productive

So what should we do to end this massive abuse of js in places where it isn't needed?

Don't blame, educate.

That's what he was doing.

No, he was making generalisations, in a patronising manner.

Ok, then I failed somewhat.

Because I was just trying to educate in a somewhat lighthearted manner.

So I ask again: how do we stop the current JS abuse?

BTW: I've been my tems dedicated frontender for the last few weeks ;-)

Hi, I am glad that you like it! In case you haven't noticed it, the demos on the homepage (which is a slideshow with animations) also works without JavaScript, it degrades gracefully into a top-down layout.

Really nice, thanks for the extra effort! Good to see there are more and more sites popping up shifting the paradigm!

There is nothing special about this. Any static site from the years 2000 felt like that. Use plain old HTML + CSS and your site feels like this.

>Use plain old HTML + CSS and your site feels like this.

That's just the point. Few people do this, yet the effect is vastly more usable, readable, and clean than "modern design", which ironically is much more difficult to pull off.

But how will I alert all eighteen analytic companies that someone from Malaysia who is between 18-24 and likes over ripe mangos has looked at my site so that they can be better served by one of my twenty ad providers?

I think beacons are potentially the only thing you want to leave on a static web site, out of all possible javascript assets. And it'd be best to load them asynchronously (which pretty much all the tags already do, by creating a request <script> tag dynamically).

Certain tags also provide noscript 1x1 gif, so even your analytics is gracefully degraded!

Potentially web fonts are another candidate for a necessary javascript inclusion (css fonts are load blocking unfortunately), but that's by itself is pretty excessive.

> It feels like an SPA.

It doesn't feel like any SPA I know.

Yeah, it's missing the traditional loading/empty page state just after opening it.

It's also missing the .8 s delay & locking of all inputs after every click as well as random breakage, broken browser navigation and broken deep linking.

It's extra annoying when that .8s lock happens right in the middle of css animation.

How else can you enjoy the animation uninterrupted?

It's a bit faster than some SPA's I've used :) I don't think it's as well set up as the GP does though...most links 301 to put a trailing backslash on and while it's served from CDN it's not set up to use the browser cache.

Seems to be cached to disk cache on chrome at least..

That's true - I looked into why even though there's no cache-control header: when there's no explicit cache header, some browsers will cache anything with a Last Modified header for some small fraction of the distance between the current date and the header.

Here's the chrome code for that:

    https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/49.0.2606.2/net/http/http_response_headers.cc#949

As this is a static site, those Last Modified dates are probably coming from the fs under the webserver. Obviously for dynamic sites the Last Modified header won't be there unless you put it there.

Easy to say when your site has almost no functionality besides just displaying some info ;), Elvish is software you download and install, not a web app.

Yeah, but that's the thing: these days, tons of sites that do nothing but display some info are horrifically bloated and slow to load, and full of Javascript, just to show a little bit of text.

Does not work for Safari, each click loads page and it takes a fraction of second, definitely not less a frame. With Google it seems to work faster, but still far from frame. Full page reload, relayout, etc and it's visible. Good SPA would be more smooth. This site is fine as it is, though.

I'm getting a FOUC though, which is a little annoying.

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