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Comment by trvz | Hacker News Reader

The happiest software developers are those who write HTML, CSS, PHP, and just a sprinkle of JS like they used to do 20 years ago.

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Then they drag-and-drop the project folder into FileZilla connected to their FTP shared hosting and send the invoice to the client.

Although... while this seems like heaven at first, seeing this being done in practice, it is hell. It's just people don't know they are in hell. They got used to it.

My job requires the whole modern pipeline with Vue front ends, Quarkus services and k8s deployments and it's suitable for what we do in our teams.

But I have dozens of websites I built and am still building today in the way described and it works just as well for me. As a single developer with "simple" websites it's just great to have so little mental load when fixing some small things.

Admittedly I have a small script to upload stuff via ftp (if ssh/rsync is not available), so no FileZilla anymore :)

I, too, settled on a minimalist process for deploying my blog, just build it with a Hugo, copy the files over to a cheap server, and there you go, deployed. It's the right tool for the job (for me).

> I, too, settled on a minimalist process for deploying my blog, just build it with a Hugo, copy the files over to a cheap server, and there you go, deployed.

Meh. That's over-engineered[1] /s :-)

--------------------

[1] I have a bash script that produces the site from markdown snippets, commits it to a repo and the VPS pulls master periodically.

Or, for that matter, using GitHub Actions to do the final Hugo build and remote deployment when you do a git push.

I thought about that process, too, but it’s more convenient to skip the whole “lots of commits” and GHA loop.

At the moment I’m still mainly fixing and customizing the theme, but I expect that once I actually start blogging instead of fixing the theme and learning Hugo, GitHub actions would make sense again.

Bro, if you want to start blogging, just do it and get rid of all these dev stuff and focus on blogging.

I suggest you use a platform like justblogged.com.

Shameless plug, yes I built it.

Bro, thank you for the plug, though I’m fine with recreational theme tweaking first, then blogging at some point in the future.

I still think about the person on Mastodon I saw months ago: "My deployment pipeline is to click FILE->SAVE"

Never a git history rewrite after a declined pull request, pure “index.html_previous_3” bliss

Hell is being the sys admin at a web hosting company.

You can either pay a web developer to update your fully static site once a year, or you can pay them five times a year to clean up your Wordpress install when it inevitably gets popped because that one mailback form plugin you demanded... you know the one that has never received a single non-spam submission... hasn't been updated in ten years... and also you're too cheap to pay someone to maintain your Wordpress site because "why would I do that the site is finished?"

I know, right, it's not like, like software rots or whatever.

A workflow that sounds a lot better than 99% of what I read goes on in modern web development from comments on HN.

Don't believe all the horror stories on HN are necessarily representative without trying it yourself. People generally came up with these newfangled things for a reason. I personally very much appreciate having CI/CD that deploys my changes every time I push.

and then they wake up and go "oh, aw crap!"

CSS has been steadily improving across browsers, addressing pain points and real world scenarios.

CSS grid and subgrid, nesting, variables, container queries, css layers…

In 2025 it’s a pleasure to work with. Props to the amazing people involved in pushing the standards forward.

Totally agree. There's no real complaints, and the coalescing around the Chrome layout engine means far less compatibility issues in general.

I can't argue with this.

Then again, writing stylesheets is still one of those things where, if you're not careful, everything spirals out of control. Often I'll make changes and wonder why nothing's happening and realize something was overridden by another rule somewhere, or I was mixing up two properties, or some other silly thing...

I also find it's a bit awkward to write var(--foo) every time... I wish I could just write --foo... I suppose there's a grammar issue somewhere, or maybe it would have increased the complexity of implementations of CSS.

I dont mind the var(--foo) but I wish I could do var(attr(foo)) to use a var defined in the attribute foo.

`attr()` is being updated to basically do that, the modern spec lets you specify a datatype and access any attribute (with some exceptions, you can't get URL types for security reasons), then use it generally.

E.g: aspect-ratio: attr(width px) / attr(height px);

Interestingly, the bug for this feature is already 17 years old (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435426).

> Then again, writing stylesheets is still one of those things where, if you're not careful, everything spirals out of control. Often I'll make changes and wonder why nothing's happening and realize something was overridden by another rule somewhere…

It doesn't have to be this way; just write your CSS using Inverted Triangle CSS (ITCSS) [1] and these issues go away.

[1]: https://matthiasott.com/notes/how-i-structure-my-css

To a large degree yes, but it blows my mind how complex some of the new features are when what seems like basics are still nonexistent. Root level variables for example (think media queries).

No way. There have been so many nice improvements to all of those languages over the last two decades that make development so much safer to implement, faster to code, and easier to test. I personally would lose my mind if I had to go back to the way things were running 20 years ago

Given the ageist in tech, I would guess most devs actually writing code were still children 20 years ago and some were still babies so I don't think they are used to life before build tool JS. And writing plain js is outrageous like stepping outside in your underwear.

Funnily enough, I did all that.

And it made me want to claw my eyes out.

Browser idiosyncrasies, horrendous security vulnerabilities, the blood sacrifices to do basic things with CSS, trying to debug in IE, the daily “maybe Flash isn’t that bad” introspection.

There are many good things about this world.

2005 web dev is not among them.

> Browser idiosyncrasies, horrendous security vulnerabilities, the blood sacrifices to do basic things with CSS,

...

> There are many good things about this world. 2005 web dev is not among them.

Maybe, but the 2005 process will work better now, because the current process was started as a way to paper over all those

> Browser idiosyncrasies, horrendous security vulnerabilities, the blood sacrifices to do basic things with CSS,

Now that those things are smaller issues, "Write JS, copy it to the server" is not so stupid. Especially if you've got mostly web components.

You can pry flexbox out my cold dead hands.

Go and vertically center a div in whatever way you see fit.

That was my point, with the tech improvements we now have in frontend many of the reasons for abandoning the 2005 process becomes moot.

New tech makes the old process more viable, not less.

The article is about CSS properties.

Is that new tech or new process?

New tech.

There really aren't browser idiosyncrasies to worry about today. In fact, if you're concerned about rendering differences between Chrome and Safari, you're probably worrying too much about the exact presentation details.

I very often find websites broken in Safari that work in Chrome.

Swap PHP with C# and we're in full agreement.

I'm not a CSS expert but being able to do so much with it before having to reach for JS is fantastic.

And with Blazor, some of that JS sprinkle isn't even needed anymore.

Eh. I've found that increasing use of CSS variables / custom properties has made me a much happier developer. Sometimes new things aren't necessarily bad.

Because you can actually parameterize things. It's wonderful!

I would say that is all the more reason for writing HTML and CSS with a sprinkling of JS - you need less JS for the same result, you need CSS frameworks less.

I am not so sure about PHP, but I think the intent is more "do it in the backend where possible" which i agree with.

the happiest software developers are those who write apps that run in a single command line process on a local linux machine (:

Have you ever actually met backend Linux engineers? They are, typically anyways, a very salty and unhappy bunch. I definitely include myself in that lot as something I'm working on.

yeah, I work on commandline based compilers and code analysis tools and I'm very happy doing it! apart from the work itself being interesting, I find it really nice to just have to care about stdin, stdout, and filesystem access. I enjoy working on desktop gui apps too, but at least to my mind IPC and networking add a layer of unpleasantly error-prone concerns to deal with, and web apps dial that up to eleven.

Hear, hear. Compilers are so much fun: you get data in, you put data out, and in between it's all algorithms and data structures. Nothing but the good stuff.

I'd also say HTML4 is much nicer to write than HTML5. I know it's technically "obsolete", but it was more pleasant to work with (and allows your site to be accessible on almost every browser/version).

There must be some confusion here. HTML 5 simplified doctypes, codified rules for interpreting malformed HTML, and added some new tags. Unless you’re using some crazy deprecated tags, you should just be able to write HTML4 and update the doctype.

By HTML4 I mean non-use of HTML5/CSS3 features. I'd also add that, while still supported by browsers, HTML5 deprecated lots of elements and parameters that I find handy.

Which deprecated HTML4 features do you use? Also, what do you think of the more semantic elements in HTML5 such as <date>?

I occasionally use font tags. As an example, this:

Your text here

Looks way better than:

to me.

May I ask why you compare the element to using inline style rather than giving the a class and styling it in a separate stylesheet? Doing it this way also allows users to override your style with extensions like Stylus.

(Again, not trying to criticize, just trying to understand.)

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