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Comment by bitexploder | Hacker News Reader

That's cause the web is full of hype. Try Python Flask. A three line Python function and you are going. No magic. Just request and response. It is easy. Bang out a model class and read the SQLAlchemy tutorial. The web and RDBMS with just enough magic. Screw HTML front ends. Write the ugliest HTML you want. Never spend time in HTML. Make your app / idea work. Get your data right. Front ends and modern front end tech stacks are an unholy time suck that offer little for hobby or small apps.

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> Write the ugliest HTML you want. Never spend time in HTML. Make your app / idea work.

Huh? That HTML is what your users will spend 90% of their time interacting with. They won't care one bit what RDBMS you're using.

Front end development is deeply frustrating but it's also incredibly important.

Yeah but users don't read the HTML, the browser does, and it doesn't care that you're using ten <br> tags for vertical spacing instead of an elegant CSS styling property.

Edit : just want to make it clear that I'm trying to paraphrase here, I don't know if I agree (although I do want to point out that HN is built in this philosophy)

I’d argue that in this era of mobile devices, hard-set line breaks like <br/> are a bad idea even in the immediate term. Regrettably, the front end isn't simple any more, and while the tooling doesn't help I think it's simply not an easy problem to fix any more.

yeah I was just giving an example of quick-and-dirty HTML that I thought was being advocated.

You're absolutely right, but the comment above seemed to be explicitly making a point about getting acquainted with HTML GUI layouts.

Maybe what parent meant to suggest is to wait with "proper frontend" and keep ugly quick&dirty minimal HTML until the whole software/app/system/server/set-of-services/whatever is "done", and just works. Because once you distract yourself with making it pretty, it's a rabbit-hole of ever-new, ever-different, ever-more-promising paradigms to switch to and fro. But not sure if that was his idea here..

Yes. Write simple but correct HTML. Don't make it look nice. Make the UX good. Don't spend time with crazy JS frameworks. Simple forms. Use properties for screen readers and usability if you must. When you are learning avoid getting sucked into JS and CSS holes.

When you are learning spending time on the front end is a terrible time investment. Your first web apps are for yourself usually. This is exactly why the grandparent gets frustrated. Make an ugly app that works first.

> Write the ugliest HTML you want

Writing correct HTML helps people using screen readers because they can navigate a page using the descriptive HTML elements. In fact, writing correct HTML is probably the simplest and easiest thing to do when it comes to creating a web page. It's CSS that's needlessly complicated and unpredictable.

If you want to write web apps, save the HTML for last. When you are writing apps for yourself you write just what you need. That is what I am saying. Functional HTML first. It's not hard to write plain looking but very good UX. I think we are agreeing. I meant write stuff that works but is not fancy and avoid the big JS frameworks.

Yes, I agree. Sometimes (maybe often?) plain HTML and CSS with a little bit of Javascript (and server-side logic) works perfectly fine for many "web apps". It can even be faster (and simpler) than downloading all the app logic and a fat Javascript library to the client.

That's why It's a good thing to develop mobile-first, you tend to keep things more minimal.

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