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Comment by dwheeler | Hacker News Reader

My personal site was posted on September 12, 1999, is still updated, and has no problems. It;s a static site that mostly uses straight HTML/CSS. There are a few scripts that generate pages, but generating HTML/CSS pretty easy. https://dwheeler.com.

Geocrasher said:

> I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page.

Yes. I don't get paid to maintain my personal site, so simplicity and longevity are most important. If I have to rewrite things because of incompatible changes in the infrastructure components (e.g., Python2 to Python3), or because proprietary company C has decided to stop supporting product P that I depend on, then I have to spend time that doesn't actually provide any new value. Keeping things simple, and minimizing dependencies, can be useful. Like everything else, there's a trade-off.

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You might say your website was designed to last[1]

1. https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/

No kidding. Already, I've found some interesting articles to read.

I'm taking a look at https://dwheeler.com/essays/easy-cross-platform-gui.html, which has references to XULRunner etc. which since 2009 have fallen out of favor.

Would you continue to recommend those wanting to invest in (for the 80% of use cases) wxWidgets for FLOSS cross-platform GUI apps? BoaConstructor et. al look interesting.

Thanks for taking the time to look at this comment. If it helps give you some context, I'll throw in that I currently am most familiar with WinForms .NET apps or very small Win32 native applications, and have avoided JS successfully so far.

A lot of that stuff is overtaken by events, but I clearly say that the essay was written in 2009. Nevertheless, if you wanted to see what I wrote in 2009, there it is. It hasn't disappeared from The Ether, there's a disturbingly large amount of information that was written only a few years ago and has totally disappeared. One of the reasons that much information has disappeared is because the website can no longer stay running. If your website is designed to last, then the information is more likely to stay available. Yes, I know it's more complicated than that. But it's a start.

wxWidgets is a poor platform abstraction that just results in the lowest common denominator of UI.

I haven't seen any cross-platform widget APIs that allow you to build a MacOS toolbar, for example―at least among the popular APIs. You mostly can only specify that the titlebar and the toolbar should be merged. Qt can draw something, but it will look like a Qt toolbar, not a Mac one.

So I don't see how WxWidgets is an outlier here.

It's fine for small apps and in-company utilities and isn't hard to use at all if you're a c++ house.

Boa Constructor best RAD IDE ever! why does no one understand this?

You could use a static website generator such as Jekyll or Hugo. Then, if the tools stop working for any reason, you always have the generated HTML than you can update.

Or you could not do that. Did he not just show that his way works just fine?

They already are, hand-rolled: "There are a few scripts that generate pages"

Hugo has a single static binary. So the site will always generate the same way with the same binary.

... with the same execution environment

Pbatengf, lbh'ir qrpbqrq zl frperg zrffntr. Fbeel, ab cevmrf. ?

Answering your question will unfortunately defeat the purpose of that text being what it is.

spoiler alert

rot13

This. Notice how simplicity is also the most important thing for users. Typography and graphics aside, it's remarkable to see how modern your layout looks.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Spreadfirefox

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