Hacker News Reader

Comment by karatestomp | Hacker News Reader

The other day I started an HTML document from scratch, in VSCode.

I kinda blacked out and came to 5 seconds later, and thanks to autocomplete and muscle memory, the whole skeleton of a document was there. HTML and Head and title and body and all that. It was so fast & fluid.

I'm ashamed to say I'd kinda forgotten how easy it is to just write fucking HTML. It's even got me reconsidering things like Markdown—I mean, fine for webforms and such, but if I'm just writing a document, is it of any use? Toss in a script to add a menu & header to every page & dump the output in a folder and I'm not sure I need more, now, and I can write that in Perl or Bash or Python or whatever in a minute or three and it'll run everywhere, nothing to install.

View on HN

This! I wrote my personal website [1] a few days ago (after it was blank for years) and went for concrete css [2] and plain HTML together with some Go code to serve the files. I set up a server on Hetzner Cloud [3] and my site was up within minutes using Traefik to get a SSL certificate from Letsencrypt. All in all it took me about 2 hours. If you start to play around with a CMS it can take you days if not weeks. Just write plain HTML, boring but sometimes very efficent.

[1] https://marvinblum.de/

[2] https://concrete.style/

[3] https://www.hetzner.com/

Edit: Bonus! I did the same for my brothers website: https://schnittfest.gmbh/ Just if you're curious.

I heard in a jazz bar that you can host static sites for free at Zeit and use plain css for grid now, but I am unable to verify the rumours as my work limits Internet only to hackernews

Sure, but I'm on Hetzner anyways for different reasons. I didn't say it's ideal, just that it's simpler to write HTML+CSS sometimes. How you serve the files doesn't matter.

Cool. I am sometimes posting for lurkers maybe someone gets inspiration

tcp over hackernews comments?

> my work limits Internet only to hackernews

A workplace of dreams. What else do you need anyway?

Very nice and < 125 kB, well done.

Well done. Looks quite good for the level of simplicity.

Thanks for using my css microframework <3 It means a lot to me !

I did the same for my site (https://maddo.xxx)

Turns out html covers pretty much everything. Learned a few cool things along the way like:

- `@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)` (Still working on nailing down color contrast there)

- doing footnotes via anchor tags that (a) automatically number themselves in text with counters and (b) automatically highlight the footnote using the `:target` selector.

not a single line of JS. The biggest perf issue by far is a font that's 64KB, which is probably including more than it needs to.

Deploying is 1 line of `scp`. Recently I got all fancy and added 30 lines of bash to support flags for only deploying assets or posts.

all of it is so fast. Coming from rails and react and all of that, it's refreshing.

I like the way you present your work history at the bottom. If I was an interviewer it's got everything I need to know and nothing more.

I may have seen this on here, but someone made their blog with just html and the posix tool m4: https://github.com/technomancy/technomancy.us

If I ever make a static dev blog, I'm doing the same. I've tried hugo, and it just felt way overcomplicated for what I was trying to accomplish.

The primary advantage of markdown is that it is more readable in plaintext.

I second this. I'm all in on Markdown and other ASCII-readable formats. By all means, render out to HTML to make things pretty, but consider keeping the source in plain text. You can browse my personal site with curl or even netcat:

curl https://anderspitman.net/txt/19

nc txt.anderspitman.net 3838 <<< /txt/19

Web browsers are terrible plain text readers. Especially mobile browsers. The problems are manifold.

If your plain text document has line breaks to enforce some column width it will rarely match a browser's viewport width. This means the browser will break lines to fit in the viewport but still respect line breaks. So you get lines broken by the viewport and then line breaks a few words later. The text does not flow well at all.

If you only have line breaks at the end of paragraphs the text might flow better but the default viewport width on mobile browsers is (usually) 980px. Desktop browsers set their viewport width to the window width. In either case text ends up hard to read because lines end up really long.

You also lose hyperlinking which makes the web...a web.

If you want a plain text website just make it HTML with a minimal or no stylesheet. A single viewport meta tag will keep the page readable everywhere. Setting it to the device width will make mobile browsers reflow the text based on the screen size.

No one is going to read your blog with netcat or just curl into a pager.

No one is going to read your blog with netcat or just curl into a pager.

Idk, maybe we should revive the world of information served raw over TCP or telnet. HTTP is out of control.

In what way do you think HTTP is out of control?

Before you reply please keep in mind JavaScript web apps don't have anything to do with HTTP.

Ok, "out of control" is a slight exaggeration, but HTTP has become a complete reimplementation of what amounts to TCP or SCTP.

Again, in what way? TCP is making sure data gets where it's going and there were no errors introduced by the transmission. A raw TCP socket doesn't have any metadata about what the data is that's coming over the socket. There's a reason the Application layer exists in the first place.

You can make an argument that HTTP should be replaced with another application later protocol but just raw sockets everywhere is ridiculous.

HTTP has eaten the world of application layer protocols because it is flexible and expressive. It's also relatively easy to implement and there's lots of good FOSS server packages available. Most servers make it really easy to plug in back end applications. Combine that with ubiquitous HTTP clients and it's a super low barrier to entry.

You're not going to replace that ecosystem easily and you definitely won't replace it with raw sockets.

> If you want a plain text website just make it HTML with a minimal or no stylesheet

I have an HTML version of my blog for people who want to read it in browsers.

> No one is going to read your blog with netcat or just curl into a pager.

No one is going to read my blog, period.

Yeah, but you lose lots of HTML features—not even layout-related things, which of course aren't present in Markdown, but things like image captions, <abbr>, <mark>, and so on. I love it for cases in which plain text would otherwise be used but it's lacking a lot of really nice features in HTML that aid readability and accessibility.

You can define the image meta, but yes it sounds like HTML is good fit for your needs.

Any HTML is valid inside of Markdown, so you just write Markdown and then add HTML when it makes sense.

I just converted a site to mostly static html because the old cms was out of date and nobody wanted to pay to migrate the site to the newest cms version (for like a decade).

Well eventually the hosting provider no longer supported such an old version of php and the old cms did not support the new php... So it was either re-code the whole site for the new cms or dump it to html and html (with php header and footer) won.

I was trying to redo my project and consulting site. I did one side in hugo. The other I tried react and type script. I just said the heck with it.

I did a basic html page, using an open source css lib, cirrus[1]. Changes are very simple, and I use gitlab pages. My blog is still backed by ghost. But I think raw html is still very powerful.

[1] https://spiderpig86.github.io/Cirrus/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com