Hacker News Reader

Comment by dusted | Hacker News Reader

I just read that you didn't want to troubleshoot html, css and js, so my goto toolkit for simple UIs might not fit your bill, but hear me out :)

At work, when I do internal tools, they are usually well received. They also pass just below the threshold of having their looks be judged. They're not ugly, because they're almost not there.

Very plain HTML: HEAD+TITLE, H1, H2, UL, OL, A, IMG, INPUT, BR, TABLE, P Javascript as needed, usually embedded in the HEAD There is no CSS.

There's simply no design to attack, no colors or alignments to disagree with. It exposes the interface to communicate with the backend, nothing more.

It's also the fastest and simplest way of getting stuff done, if you don't need to expose it to "end users".

View on HN

There's a ton of very simple "minimalist" or "classless" or "markdown" [0] CSS files that you can apply to plain HTML to get modest good looks versus browser default styles these days. No changes to your markup, just use that raw HTML you are already comfortable with and LINK tag in a single CSS file.

This seems like a very good list with lots of handy easy to compare preview screenshots: https://github.com/dbohdan/classless-css

[0] From that idea that sometimes you just want to take a Markdown document's boring raw HTML output straight out of the processor without any other templating in between.

I recently took a similar approach for a couple of simple websites (https://abyteofcoding.com/survey/ and https://crosspromote.io), and found that surprisingly people don't really care that much. It's still very annoying to deal with responsive stuff (changing design based on screen size) though.

Your site is broken for crosspromote - things are too wide for the viewport leading to things being clipped and so unreadable (at least on mobile).

Ugh, dammit. Thanks for catching that.

A small bit of CSS will clean this up no problem :)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Text/Wr...

I do this for internal science stuff at my work. The scientists love it. Simple and fast.

It would only take a tiny amount CSS to make it usable.

The examples by vonadz are minimal to the point of being a chore to use.

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

Ugh, way to overdo it... #444 is WAY too low contrast.

If black is too dark, I'll reduce the contrast of my monitor myself, so can y'all please stop trying to force me to squint to decipher your gray-on-gray oh-so-beautiful but unreadable text?

https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/

https://thebestmotherfucking.website

Bang on. We have internal tools like that and they just work - something which dumps a list of switches and information for example, trivial to find what's plugged in etc. The interface doesn't get in the way. Dynamic pages are a matter of "print" stuck in the middle of the php.

We also have internal tools based on gigabytes of react across millions of files, we have data fields in there you can't actually highlight and copy the label from that require 3 days efforts to add a tiny feature. But it probably looks nice.

I pretty much do this as well. The only thing I do different is, when I need to present it to someone, I will drop in a minimalist css library like PureCSS or Milligram.

this

Reply on news.ycombinator.com