Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
mohkohn.co.uk
mohkohn.co.uk
> There was a sad coda; as is the way of contract work, I moved on. I explained what I had built to my replacement, that it always worked even without javascript. He was appalled and said, “but that’s a lot more work for us.”
Why is it more work? The approach described in the article seems honestly reasonably simple: just write the standard <input> components for the form, have a submit button at the bottom. When I was making my own websites many years ago now, that's how it worked, and it wasn't that hard. Maybe it's reflecting my ignorance in this field, but doing fancy front-ends seems much harder to me.
"Old" SSR apps are mature, not obsolete. It's ridiculous when they're not considered even when they'd be the right tool for the job. I wouldn't try to clone Google Docs in Django, but something like Linear could 100% be modeled as a CRUD app with new page loads on click without a substantial loss of functionality from the user's POV. Not to mention built-in, automatic support for pervasive "deep linking", aka "linking", because you access a URL's contents by GETting and rendering that URL is just how it works.
Speaking of Knuth, imagine being asked to "write a program to add two numbers" and using something like Python instead of assembler, or because really that's complex too, machine code. Do you think that the amount of housekeeping and computer activity is justified for adding two numbers? Objectively, it is not, its just that steady-state dominates the transient over time.
But do we really need all that stuff? Build steps, bundling, tree shaking, all for what? And is it really simpler… hmm
I am convinced the one single thing that made HTML unusable over the time was that people wanted or needed a way to re-use parts of the page across multiple pages, like headers, navigational elements and footers.
This meant people used frames, PHP, templating engines or any other new technology mainly for the purpose of creating shared elements, simply because HTML failed (and to this day: fails) to offer a way to include one HTML file in another without having it suck (like frames definitely did, since the browser treated each subpart of the page like its own entity including caching).
I certainly used the heck out of them in the late 90s, though.
It would have been very cool if HTML had been created with the ability to do client-side includes without having to resort to using a Turing-complete VM in the client to do it.
The `<template>` tag has gotten very close. Right now you still need JS (optionally wrapped as a Web Component) to load a `<template>` from an outside HTML file (at which case, yeah, it's so easy to just use a JS-based HTML renderer instead of a template today), but discussions are ongoing about closing that loop for simpler "JS-free Web Components".
I don't know when that will be accepted into the web platform, but it still feels more like a matter of time that it may happen eventually.
I've found at least some of my static page generation has moved to just dumbly appending `<template>` tags to the bottom of a page rather than use some other template language, so it feels like we are closer every day to finally having "HTML-native" simple part reuse.
If you wanted to reduce server load you could “compile” those includes at publish time.
writing straight html and css sucked. building reddit css themes sucked
Also: the meaning of the word semantic is that the used elements give you context about the contents. So if you place text in an <aside> that tells you that this is additional information as opposed to the stuff in <content> for example.
If you use a hundred nested divs, there is probably a better way to do it.
Modern frameworks such as Astro allow for a similar development experience (and can optionally use JS, React and other client-side libraries) while still being able to generate a static site if desired.
I think server-side rendering and static site generation are less familiar to many web devs who came up in the React/Vue/Svelte era. The patterns and mental model are just different. In an ideal world we combine both: fast static HTML that works everywhere, with progressive enhancement for interactivity. Astro does this well; Next.js supports it too, though the SSR parts have a learning curve.
A few of them would outright not know how to do anything else. No knowledge of how to stand up a boring HTTP server to send pure HTML. No experience building a form that validates or submits without JavaScript. These are not the people who post here on HN. They are not engaged in online discussions of new tools and skills (or old tools and skills!). These are people who learned just enough from a bootcamp, or their uni's single "web apps" course, to get a job. Since then, they have just-in-time learned whatever their employer required, or whatever particular tools someone else on their team chose for a project.
As an old, it took me a while to recognize/realize it, but I understand them now. Depending on their career path, someone will encounter the simplest aspects of HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript after they learn the complex, framework-specific aspects of each. It feels (to them) like more esoteric, advanced, or tertiary knowledge.
Tying it back to to the quote "that’s a lot more work for us", that's not necessarily an intentionally false claim. It probably does feel like a lot more work to perform a task using unfamiliar tools, even if they are less-complex tools.
These are the people writing React monstrosities for government benefit websites, and testing them on fast iPhones and fast 4G, without realizing that every page load for actual users will take 30 seconds on their old $200 Android on 3G, and users won’t complete the form.
It’s a culture of not giving a shit, that’s the deeper issue.
shit, I'm too old to remember those...
My experience was the reverse. I learned HTML and CSS first, then Rails in college to serve templated pages. I understood the client/server boundary fine as a concept, what I couldn't see was where it actually sat in a web context. I sort of knew JavaScript ran in the browser, but then I'd see ERB templates stamping values directly into script tags, so the server was writing the JavaScript that ran on the client, and my mental model fell apart. Where does my code actually execute? Why does this variable exist here but not there? Why does the page have data the network tab never fetched? Nobody ever sat me down and explained the request/response lifecycle as its own thing. I had to assemble it from fragments over years. This was around 2017 for context.
How you learn something shapes how you keep learning. If your mental model is misaligned, everything downstream is friction. The thing that finally made it click for me was reading the actual HTTP RFCs, which is apparently a weird thing to do, because HTTP itself is absent from nearly every guide and curriculum. Tutorials teach you the framework, maybe the language, and just assume the protocol underneath. These days I make newbies read the MDN docs like a book and skim the HTTP wiki page, learn the history of the protocol. It's short! It's not even a book! That gives you a firm foundation. But if your foundation starts at React, drilling down is like digging past bedrock. People don't know where to start, and Googling only shows them wrong answers because they don't yet know how to ask the question.
Crazy enough, I also hold doctors and surgeons to higher standards than web developers.
Much like how relying on a resident nurse instead of a cardiologist when you are experiencing a heart attack can end your life pretty badly as well.
FWIW, maintaining at least a moderate degree of empathy even in systemically frustrating situations is good for the empathizer and thus in one’s interest
I like how HTMX does SPAs. It straddles the divide nicely between simple and capable.
Looking at the code, I found it was using UI elements for data storage and other such nonsense. A colleague and I had to tell the manager that the entire thing had to be rewritten. I'm not sure he actually went pale, but that's how I remember it.
I think you'd be surprised who ends up making those decisions.
Which goes back to the original point (that's valid for any project) - keep your user in mind. If your users will be using recent-ish iOS or Android devices, use as much flair as you'd like. If your users will be using mass-market low-end devices or used devices from 4+ years ago, then maybe dial down the interface.
Knowing your user is important, no matter what level you're at.
[1] Unless we're talking about some kind of large system that's being redesigned by a consulting company on a cost-plus contract. Who knows how those decisions are made.
> Knowing your user is important, no matter what level you're at.
I agree, but it's absolutely ridiculous to expect a junior dev to make excellent decisions on this. Software development is a massive industry with no prescribed methods. It's not like these folks are going through a residency before getting the job. Even if they went to uni for CS those programs don't teach these skills.
The behaviours of developers as well being beholden to their managers rather than the craft; meaning not saying No we will not move forward without proper unit tests, or pushing back when business demands quick corner cutting solutions.
Anyway, decades of bitterness. I wish we had associations to uphold some level of accountability on developers as much as protect developers. I think things would be a lot more expensive and slow if we did that though.
Fundamentally I agree with your take, not just on dev side but just the web/dev/produce' a culture of not giving a shit.
A lot of products don’t come close to rising to the level of a government website, industrial control systems, financial transactions, etc. in terms of needing structure accountability.
The frontend was in React because the company that got the contract initially used React for everything. The frontend was a 5MB SPA, but it could've been (mostly static) HTML files with some interactivity for forms like TFA. Everyone working on the project agreed React didn't make sense, but we couldn't do anything about it because someone from the government IT department would have to admit they made a mistake. There was no budget for rewrites in the contract. The few times a developer attempted to remove any "React monstrosity" they got in trouble.
Sometimes developers care, but the people in charge don't, and in government environments every change must go through them first.
To be fair, the same thing happens in private companies. How many UI changes have people gone through that didn't actually make anything better and just made everybody relearn everything? We would have been better of scrapping many of those and let people continue to use what's already familiar, but that too would have to involve someone admitting failure, which is a hard thing to do for some people.
A very slow website I can think of had something like 200 GET requests required to load the landing page, and it used Liferay with Material Design Bootstrap. That was closer to the "style at the time". React is the style of this time, but you can write very slow websites in anything, I'm convinced.
So I tied an onion to my belt.
Theres lots of open questions about the future of our profession in the age of AI. But, playing with opus and fable, I think the future will be bright for our users. There is no reason any more for teams to put out junk that’s worse than what an LLM can do.
I think most of us have seen incredibly creaky codebases that are too buggy to be maintained any longer, where we make the hard choice to wipe the slate clean and build a new one.
We might find those rewrites happening every 12-24 months instead of after a decade.
[1] Frontend people, I mean no disrespect -- just that React & friends are (ab)used for nearly every website now, even those which map perfectly onto the "Simple document viewing with occasional submission of incredibly simple form data" model that plain HTML has always been perfect for.
You barely need domain expertise any more. Just ask claude to make it go faster and it will.
This.
As I’ve pointed out in other posts, I work in two languages: Swift (my main language), for native app clients, and PHP, for backend work.
I have a lot of experience, with each language (12 years for Swift, and 25, for PHP).
My experience with an LLM, is that I get very good PHP, and fairly mediocre Swift. The Swift often looks like fancy tricks, that newer enthusiasts like to demonstrate. Lots of unnecessary threading, and complex, dogmatic, overengineered approaches to simple problems.
I suspect that this has a great deal to do with the availability of high-Quality public repositories. PHP is more than twice as old as Swift, and, by nature, is a much more open language.
They are referring to this:
https://us-east-1-shared-usea1-02.graphassets.com/cluuijofv0...
But yeah, generally I've seen a better experience buying used phones (in good condition) instead of budget/cheap new ones.
https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-...
The top two lines are the fastest devices available in the iOS and Android ecosystems each year, and when using Samsung S-series devices, I have made sure to pick the faster of the Qualcomm vs. Samsung Semi parts (both are used historically, but Qualcomm is most prevalent in the US). As explained in the piece, the bottom two lines are taken from representative devices in the mid-range and low-end price categories. There's wild variation in those market segments due to short-run discounting, and the most meaningful uplift in CPU speeds has coincided with 5G radios (for obvious signal-processing reasons). Because the lowest-priced segment doesn't yet feature 5G, those processors have remained stubbornly slow, even if they get cheaper every year.
I also saw you addressed in your blog post the growing market for refurbished phones and in the last year or so I've noticed a similar thing in Romania where a e-commerce giant is involved with a company that refurbishes and resells old user devices to try and corner a big piece of the pre-owned (second-hand) market where previously you'd be stuck hunting for good deals on the national Craigslist equivalent or searching for small-ish repair shops that sold refurbished devices.
> only goes back to 2015
https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-...
Mobile devices rarely last beyond the 5 year mark, although the age span has been increasing in the past several years and the resale market is booming thanks to inflation, geopolitical instability, and a global cost-of-living crisis.
You can't win against cargo-cult coders because they just assume you're from a different, competing cult.
They have no concept of engineering or science, they have never encountered it.
I had an argument a few weeks ago because our page took 4 serial requests before content appeared. I argued - with solid data - that it should be 1. If we could manage that, cold load time would ~ halve.
Where's the benchmark or at least the numbers? If not, that's not proof of anything. Nothing to argue about. I'd just laugh.
> You can't win against cargo-cult coders
You don't need to. Unless you're not in control or don't have influence then whatever. It shouldn't be about "winning". It's either some vote (hence influence) or there's a process e.g. PoC with backed numbers.
I like to fight this kind of asinine "push back" by simply reversing the time order:
Here's an app that does 5 CDN-cached requests of its JavaScript. Demonstrate why disabling the CDN cache and splitting that into 500 individual requests is better.
@concinds, you yourself are being too empathetic. I am trying to view these websites on my $2,000 PC on high speed internet, and it still is maddeningly slow.
This is how things goes when the employers ask for a list of technologies...
Not their fault.
This is a direct effect of being a low barrier industry to enter. Most of the ppl among us are mostly here because of a good paycheck. And it SUCKS!
Absolutely agree! Just because I understand how they got there doesn't mean I think it's a good state of affairs ;)
My post was already quite long, and I didn't want to append a treatise on what one should do when encountering those engineers. It depends on many details. Avoid hiring them, if that's a power you have. If you are stuck working with them, depending on your authority, encourage them to learn or force them to learn. If you're coming in to clean up after them... well, hopefully your comp is worth the annoyance.
We are all simultaneously in the position of encountering "the world as it is", understanding it, and doing what we can to improve it.
The thing is, people often assume that bootcampers/self-taught devs are only in it for the money and do not "care about the craft", or else they would have studied CS in the first place. But this is not true: There are many reasons why someone could have found their passion for software engineering only later in life. Some of the best engineers I know are self-taught or bootcampers.
“HTML only? Nobody is doing it!”
A few decades ago, IT jobs were for the most part done only by people who were in it for the kick they got out of working with computers. They already hacked at their dad's computer in their early teens (or sometimes even younger), and just could just never let go. It was for people who loved it because it was a niche.
But today, IT is no longer that. It's the backbone of much of our society. And so the field no longer attracts just the die hard fans, the nerds. It attracts ordinary "career people", who just need to have a job to feed the family. Who turn the machine off after 8 hours. Who don't go on coding all through the evening on their hobby project. Who don't try out new tech just for the heck of it.
I think it's hard to understand if you belong to the first group, the nerds, that anyone working in the field isn't like you. Because they all used to be! But those days are gone. We live in the times of enshitification for a reason. If you have the hacker spirit, you don't enshitify because you simply can't. You know what is the right way to do it. Sometimes that's a React app but sometimes it's just an HTML page.
You're not just in it for the money. You care. Not necessarily for the end user, although that would be nice. You care for the tech. And when - like in this article - both come together, sweet things can happen.
Not me, if they want shit I give them shit. I used to care 30 years ago, but they beat it out of me. Now its all for the money, HODLing to retirement.
It's like how a lot of people these days reach for an electric drill/driver for even the most simple projects like tightening a screw. It never occurs to them to use a screwdriver, or even a butter knife.
But I also achieve faster HTMl with vanilla and never touched react, so .. I will continue to stick with using the right tool for the job.
that was 8 years ago in my first gig. now i kinda wonder... having those skills made it easier to put off implementing a robust long term solution. it was playing with fire, sure, but i was a rookie
I'm not a web developer. I built a few websites in high school, but these days I write safety-critical real-time code for robots.
A few years ago I was back in grad school and I took a class with undergrad senior CS students. We had to write a fairly simple web service, and I was blown away by how complicated they were making it. Based on the requirements we easily could have written 90% of it in plain HTML, but everyone else insisted it should be 100% react. Part of that is honors students wanting to do everything the most complex way possible to impress teacher, and part of it is them simply not knowing that other options exist.
All these new kids walk in and learn the CSS framework du jour first, then find themselves stranded when things move on. If they had just learned CSS the first time, they'd be set for life.
Nobody should learn React before learning HTML and vanilla javascript.
HN last week: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48347483
(I’m team CSS standards although my knowledge is a bit tilted towards late 2010s, currently revisiting)
I still remember when a good chunk of the web took Bootstrap's defaults and ran with it.
That said I've still got a bone to pick with Tailwind but I understand it's a good compromise in a world where BEM and CUBE and other methodologies require more effort up front and if done incorrectly impose a bigger burden.
It's akin to writing a backend in Haskell. Chances are you could write something performant that leverages FP in a way that serves as a magic bullet for your domain. But now everyone after you needs to learn Haskell and how to model all future problems in a way that conforms with it - or rewrite things again.
Before LLMs I would have agreed.
LLM + framework you don't understand goes in ... unmaintainable garbage comes out.
If you just have it built something with a framework you don't understand, it will do so just fine! But over time every "vibe coded" change you make will drift it further and further, until you are left with a mess of vibe-coded spaghetti.
But the GP point, that you're better off finding people that already, truly understand and are familiar with the tech (ie. Astro), imo still stands.
I read a fun comment the other day from a frustrated windows user who failed to configure linux in previous attempts but now with LLMs it was very easy for him.
I would love to know what this is supposed to mean.
> the GP point, that you're better off finding people that already, truly understand and are familiar with the tech (ie. Astro), imo still stands.
Someone is saying that they delivered a very reasonable solution that's simpler than most would come up. Person taking over was not happy.
Do we know if the code being handed over was high quality? Were they reacting to the fact that it was "not React"? Maybe they have a template they enforce in the company about how apps are built?
We don't know.
It seems like a lot more work because you have to keep the backend and frontend in closer sync. The backend has to be aware of and able to store every sub-form in the full process (which sounds like a "wizard form" with a multiple sub-forms to get through the full "form" process), not just accept a "finished" or "complete" submission. If a sub-form needs a change the backend, the backend's storage, and the frontend all need to change. The backend and frontend have to agree on validation logic for each small piece of the form. The backend and the frontend need to both validate every small piece of the form, and maybe can't share that validation logic (depending on what language the backend is written in), especially if one of the goals is to do as much of the frontend validation as possible with Browser native validation tools (`<input required` and `<input type="email"` and so forth) so that you get the most benefits of progressive enhancement.
The original ways of making websites were "full stack" and from a full stack perspective it shouldn't seem that hard to have a coordinated frontend and backend, especially when a progressive enhancement approach likely means a smaller more agile frontend, but current siloed world where frontend and backend are different teams with different goals and alignment makes that seem like way too much work.
Then they just validate on the front end, and we validate on the backend.
Now it's worse. It's "just run <claude or codex>"
The entire approach went out of style with the advent of single page apps, React, Angular, VueJS, etc.
There were always certain UX requirements that required JS, and that meant the company wasn't interested in testing to make sure it worked without JS. None of their customers were going to use it that way.
Angular, React, etc helped force it further, but they didn't cause it.
Agree that most people didn't, but I was always an advocate.
download the whole app and run it in browser. you can even run it off line!
As someone that reads a lot of code written by others, I'm confident that "learning a new way to do something" is perceived by many as the hardest thing in the world.
I'd pee myself in happiness to take over a project like this.
Our app was fast, and simple, but it also came at a cost: we were limited in our ability to take rich UI elements off the shelf with an npm package. We had to do a lot more work to provide a rich user experience. Everything took longer, and the user experience was worse as a result. We cared, but sometimes you don't have time to carry through.
The company failed, and I don't think react would have saved it. But I can tell you first hand that righteous adherence to "simplicity" didn't help either. It's always a trade-off.
When the startup is trying to attract customers and also impress investors, sometimes there is a lot of effort spent on the investors just so they keep putting money into the machine. "See! We have an ultra modern/sleek site so it must be some other variable that is causing customers to churn..."
The hard part is coming up with a recipe that solves your problem and that the machine can run without breaking things when it runs around with a few billion steps per second. You have to think ahead for it and handle edge cases in the recipe.
That is the really hard part.
Yes, it's because many people are quite bad at their jobs and reach for the same tool regardless of whether it's the right one. Let's not make excuses for incompetence.
To start off, writing a basic crud website with forms is much easier with htmx.
But when you start building more complex components, and integrate with other systems (OAuth for e.g.) there are tons of libraries and SDKs for the react ecosystem, but not many for pure html components.
At this point, it's much easier to use off the shelf components than it is to manually write html to handle all the bizarre UI edge cases.
Some people might say, "Why do you need all that oAuth complexity? Rip it out and use a cookie like God intended."
We, the devs/ICs, don't often get to make those decisions. We're placed into teams working on specific features/apps/tools and we often have to integrate with a myriad of business systems by default.
Yea, I would love to work on a simpler system, but I don't get to make that decision. Especially not when my company has been acquired by unbounded VC cash three times in the past 5 years and now I'm forced to fold in my lovingly crafted baby into the behemoth.
that menu is maintained manually, and every time a page is added, all copies of the menu have to be updated. at some point that will get tedious. then i have a few options:
i generate the menu using a backend framework. the downside: the website is no longer fully static. i now depend on a backend framework for hosting. static hosting is out. i also have to edit the content through the backend, and i have to continuously maintain the backend for the lifetime of the site.
i generate the menu using a static site builder. the downside: i can no longer edit the content directly in html. i have to keep a source version for the static site generator, and more critically, i have to keep a copy of the site generator in my repo because i want to be able to make changes to this site 10 years from now and not find that the version of the site generator i was using is no longer available for download and my source is not compatible with the new version of the site generator.
i generate the menu using xslt. works, but xslt is no better than javascript security wise. it's possibly even worse. and xslt support may be removed from browsers in the future.
the final option is javascript. using some framework that doesn't need build tools, or something homegrown. i am afraid javascript is the only option that is futureproof while letting me avoid manual work to maintain the menu.
Also, here is a little secret. If you want something that is future proof, try something that has been around for decades and still runs large parts of the internet. People will scoff at this, but PHP is actually really neat for personal websites and has been for decades.
A while ago I also found myself looking at static site generators, workflows from github to my host, etc. Eventually I realized I don't update things nearly enough, don't blog, etc.
For similar reasons as you I didn't want to go completely static as that is just too much hassle when doing multiple pages. So I decided to utilize that good old lamp stack to basically do something like this.
<?php
$pages = json_decode(file_get_contents('pages.json'), true);
$page = $_GET['page'] ?? 'home';
if (!isset($pages[$page])) {
$page = 'home';
}
$pageData = $pages[$page];
$contentFile = basename($pageData['file']);
$contentFilePath = "content/{$contentFile}";
?>
<html>
<head>
<title><?= htmlspecialchars($pageData['title']) ?></title>
</head>
<body>
<main>
<?php include $contentFilePath; ?>
</main>
</body>
</html>
As a bonus I also rediscovered PHP in itself works really well as a templating language (as you can see) so no need for extra stuff like handlebars. As an extra extra bonus, I can just go to any shared webhosting party and get it running with no issue at all.
I am not saying you'd need to go down this road. But I just want to illustrate how stupidly simple a website can be with "old" basic technologies even if you want some form of backend.
People expect the entire screen not to redraw whenever they interact with an app and expect behaviour asides from the HTML defaults.
I've found it's enough for most projects.
One of my sites is image heavy and serves 10 TB of traffic per month. For this, I use the following setup:
1. S3 (I wanted reliable data storage) 2. In front of it, I have Cloudflare (with Tiered Cache enabled, which makes POPs prefer pulling from Cloudflare rather than the origin). I've set rules to cache everything on both the browser and Cloudflare for 1 year, ignore origin cache policies, ignore query strings, etc., and I simply use immutable objects that require revisioning. 3. BunnyCDN in front
Cloudflare will not let you run an image heavy site on its own, so I use this approach to massively cut the bills. Their policy says you cannot use it primarily for images; it must be used for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other site content.
And if you run only S3, the bills will be huge.
But yes, lately I’ve been building mobile apps. PWAs are limited; the OS can evict IndexedDB storage, so I cannot offer people reliable data storage in the app without sign up or involving a backend.
What can I do? So I was forced to switch to Flutter on Android, but I ran into another pain point: app updates sometimes spend a lot of time "under review," which is frustrating. For the same app, I maintain a web app that is very quick to update by comparison.
I wonder why there isn't a mobile OS that simply lets you build apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS and gives you reliable storage without all this effort.
I like how quickly you can update PWA app.
Would like to hear about your Go stack for building htmx apps.
There is! You just have to time travel all the way back to 2009 when webOS was launched by Palm. Time travel is the easy part, you then also need to somehow prevent Palms demise and webOS fading into obscurity as a smartphone OS.
If 2009 is too far back you can try your luck in 2012 with Firefox OS.
Joking aside, people and companies have given it a go. But a combination of bad timing and various other events never made that reality happen in our timeline.
Running `npm install` on Android isn't so easy.
(Caveat: The new Android Terminal that only works on a handful of models.)
Not my site, but someone on HN (can't remember who) built it: https://pwascore.com
It's not great for every task - in particular the lack of abstraction-building capabilities - but it's great for business-logic-heavy server apps. It feels like it's specialized for that and not trying to be a jack of all trades.
I can't imagine this kind of traffic without acting as a CDN, advertising broker, pornographer, or part of a massive ecommerce site. I have to wonder, what are you doing that generates 10TB of traffic per month?
I have a civil engineering firm as a client, they take video & photo’s of roads they help project manage the maintenance on.
Small towns of 10000 can have ridiculously big road networks in Australia. And you take a photo every 10m, likely more but you only care about every 10m. It adds up, quick.
I’m only now investigating a web version of the app I wrote them because I think origin file system will work for them but I would never consider serving their 200TB+ of their imagery as a website.
Working on a "simple html page" that is actually 5 different independent "subpages" (routes, views, templates) in the backend is awful. The UX was improved, but the DX was sacrificed.
I recommend having a single view function for each page/SPA and do sub-routing within that function to handle page fragments. In other words, use a GET/path/Header parameter that indicates which fragment is currently needed, defaulting to the full document as normal. Just make sure you are considering request logging and client-side caching in your solution.
This makes it very easy to add/remove async content from the page, since you are just editing the one view function/template and you can easily reason about the entire page as one logical unit.
It also means you don't need to duplicate security logic or other middlewares for the page, since it can be implemented once at the start of your multi-faceted view function.
Pages has a 20k-100k limit on static files, but if they just guide you to R2 to offload it, which is still Cloudflare.
Did you mean the CDN? In which case, I'm not seeing that in the terms. [0] Though, I would have expected they'd have a similar thing. R2 resources don't generally count towards your cache limits.
[0] https://www.cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-applicatio...
https://blog.cloudflare.com/updated-tos/
interesting, it seems now i can host stuff directly on r2 and put CF in front and serve images, video and other files!
Because there isn't a 30% walled garden you can create with that.
What? On the server, where else would you put it?
Then that approach will work. If you need to scale beyond that, you need some way to route the request to the server with the right data. And what if a request needs data that was stored on two different servers?
Those are the kinds of questions I had in mind.
Your Go server can have endpoints that render XML instead of HTML and basically get the same server-driven experience of your HTMX site. Fully skips the need for the app review process since you're not updating the actual client app code to make UI changes.
Very cool!
> But yes, lately I’ve been building mobile apps. ... What can I do?
I am currently building HTMXNative.
Together with Objective-Smalltalk, which has linguistic support for REST built-in.
The idea is that you create your model in a natural way and then thinly wrap it to deliver wherever.
I created a couple libraries to abstract the SQL and HTMX/web/OAuth bits; my apps are now very similar and easy to copy features between.
There's a couple of Rust libraries like this; right now I'm building an app in Tauri+Svelte.
It looks like Wails might be a similar framework in Golang.
Cloudflare R2 object storage is S3-compatible, offers free egress, and does not share their CDN product's fair use policy against image-heavy use. Storage is 65% the per-GB cost of S3.
There WAS. Firefox OS phone! HTML+CS+JS apps! But Mozilla kicked it to the graveyard even though it was very popular in third world nations. I guess it was not $$$$$ enough for the Mozilla CEO of that era.
Then I start to wonder if that's just because I'm not smart enough to understand React or whatever the fancy technology of the day is.
Feels like I have a hard understanding threshold that cannot be breached - give me a simple editor like Sublime and ask me to make a web page - even with JavaScript - and it's my happy place. Give me VSCode or Zed, Claude/Copilot/ChatGPT plugins everywhere, React tutorials and my brain goes to mush.
Embrace Extend Extinguish is real, and the people going along with it deserve to be replaced by a LLM that lies and spits out garbage code just like they do but faster.
I generally prefer solidJS nowadays, but the react ecosystem has enabled lots of amazing user experiences (and developer experiences too if you don't fall into the trap of overcomplexity).
keeping things simple is not a bad thing, and often requires you to be smart enough not to overcomplicate them.
May I ask what tech is used for mobile apps? I am guessing not a full mobile app but it uses webview.
I built some libraries that ease the process, and they power the new MOJ Forms and GOV.UK Forms.
Rails still has a decent foothold across departments, but it's being nibbled away at by Python and.NET.
https://williamkennedy.ninja/javascript/2022/05/03/in-defenc...
"Satire isn’t dead.
Satire won.
This is what it looks like from inside, looking out. "
Nice work!
In Defence of the Single Page Application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31275178 - May 2022 (32 comments)
Attributing this to the technology driving the browser experience is silly. You can make a brilliant user experience with React. You can make a terrible website with plain HTML.
The improvement comes from the change design, not tech.
Fun thing, TFA describes a kind of multi-page wizard style form that I haven't seen a lot anymore in the last decade or so. But when I did see it, it's always some dogshit enterprise system. Some Oracle product for expensing expenses last time.
The problem with those things always seems to be that they are slow in the middle of doing your task. Every button is seconds of waiting. Doubly annoying if you have to go back a step or two. The badly coded SPAs seem to be slow at the start. It takes a while to load, but once it's loaded its performance is usually okay.
> Is it slow though? Like in practice?
The multi-page wizards? The ones I've seen were. Enterprise crap systems.
As soon as you include a network roundtrip in anything you're opening up a Pandora's box of slow connections, slow DNS queries, network outages, what-if-the-user-is-on-a-train problems, what-if-their-IP-changes-mid-flow problems, etc.
Reducing the network calls in any app has upsides and downsides. It isn't really true that SPAs are faster to render (as your example proves) but rendering speed isn't the only thing that matters.
You could argue that the constraints of using HTML-first (as they call it) helped them stay away from the bad patterns they were using before.
But you’re right: The user change came from fixing the design, not the technology used.
This is a lot like those bad resume bullet points where someone tries to claim an increase in business was due to their code change. “Increased visitor count 100% by rewriting website to be HTML-first”. Then when you ask them about that point they concede that the entire site was redesigned to fix some design problems or add a feature and that’s what drove the visitor increase.
JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford is a comically short book. React: The Good Parts would be shorter still.
However, I do not like how it is framed as "simple html is better than react" - because you could just as well have told the same story as a react developer.
(Nb. I could go on forever about the complexities and intricacies of storing things session based on a server vs browser based and etc - and lots of other things that were skimmed over in this article, but that would be too long)
All of those things that are simple in html are also simple in react.
It's literally the same code - there's nothing preventing you from using browser based html validation in react - all the same code that gets complicated in react (overly complicated validation logic) also ends up being complicated in astro - they have their own thing around schema validation etc and integrating it within an astro site means you have to integrate their client router etc etc.. so it's very easy to go overly-complicated there as well.
The comparison is also with an off-shore team doing development for you with probably incomplete knowledge and the way projects are structured they have an incentive to create the solution as fast as possible, in as little time as possible, with the biggest amount of complexity as possible.
The last point is devious - it's not necessarily that the contractor does this by design, but the incentive structure makes it so something that's overly complicated actually benefits them, so they don't have a direct incentive to go with something simple.
Anyways, a simple solution, directly addressing the problem at hand is always better - no matter what stack you pick.
(I'd like to say that I don't have anything against Astro's form validation, I was just trying to highlight how there's more to it than "native html browser validation")
Assuming the processor isn't horrible, I can still browse plenty of sites with those specs without much issue, and on the sites that do require more, it's very rarely because the sites actually needs it (i.e. I'm not running Windows XP in a VM in the browser or something). It could just be normal HTML and CSS and normal forms, sprinkled with some light JS to help out a bit. But the amount of sites made with that level of care and attention are sadly rare, since the people responsible rarely feel the pain or have the empathy to fix the problem.
And their mobile device should be the cheapest Android phone from a monthly cell provider you've never heard of. This is what the real world is for a lot of people, and a huge number of developers simply don't know or care.
The number of websites that are almost useless on the iPhone SE is getting pretty insane. Many site have a massive header, maybe a footer and a sticky ad. That frequently leaves less than half (~4.5cm) the screen usable.
I don't even think Apple cares about smaller screens anymore, because iOS UI elements also overlaps in some places.
Sadly, the internet as a whole seems to disagree. Even the most useful resource on the web one could use over plain HTTP, Wikipedia, only allows connections over HTTPS. I guess it kind of made sense as part of the campaign to push the internet as a whole over to HTTPS, but anyone who's connecting to any website over normal HTTP these days is doing so because they literally can't use HTTPS.
If you are concerned about accidental login or API keys without TLS, then you can consider supporting mutual TLS, which improves security (and flexibility) in other ways as well. (You do not necessarily, have to require mutual TLS, in case someone prefers to use a username/password login, or 2FA or something else like that instead.) (In the case of login forms, you can have the links to the login forms to always use HTTPS, in order to avoid the problem.)
You'd think the person was creative but maybe insane.
This is the exact same feeling I get when I see web "apps".
TLS 1.2, the standard, may be from 2008 but support for it in browsers did not start to appear until around 2013.
If the creators of React haven't figured it out, what makes you think you can?
facebook was super popular in 2014s because they were just starting the transition from mostly being about people to mostly being algorithmic rage bait, and they tapped a new market of fox news/conservative talk radio listeners
You don't have to have a technical discussion whether or not React is too complex, you just have to look at the average website created with it.
Bingo. And that's one of the reasons you will face a lot of friction whenever any discussion surrounding this comes up.
2. The design constraints had always existed, the previous app just failed to meet them.
1b. They may have thought they knew what they were doing and spoke confidently enough to convince whoever was doing the acquisition, likely non-technical, of the same, but the bad hire and the bad hire’s work product shows that neither was the case.
2. Ideas merely exist. To be constraints, they must be enforced.
2. It was enforced, just at a higher level (expensive fines triggered by customer complaints). A good engineer broke down and actually applied the constraints in a preventative way.
Too much VC money and big tech influence in the JS ecosystem made the web worse in some ways.
I've had far more trouble with web pages that only work on a computer that's at least 80% similar to the developers computer, and the RAM sacrifice has been accepted, than from bots diluting real user-generated content, assuming I can even get to the page, if the CDN doesn't think I'm a bot myself, because I'm not logged into a Google or Apple account and their captcha is so bad only a bot could get through it.
> Of course, your javascript-based analytics package doesn’t see the users you are bouncing because of javascript failures.
It is frightening to think of how many people are alienated from critical systems every day because of this bias reinforcing the idea that they do not exist.
I can't imagine trying to use links/lynx or a browser with less market share than FF that isn't based on chromium.
It doesn't work if you disable JavaScript...but it wasn't always this way!
They had a mobile version of their online banking service at https://m.chase.com that was EXTREMELY FAST and did 85% of what you need to do in an online banking portal (check balances, transfer funds). They scrapped it when they moved to their current bloated monstrosity of the portal that they have today.
It was a big reason why I moved to a credit union (who outsources their online banking services to Alkami, which maintains a very tight portal and supports 2FA AND passkeys!).
Someone at chase isn't checking their work on firefox.
It's just how i roll. it seems to bug a lot of people that i don't want to be bleeding edge. i don't particularly mind that.
Nice to see that Astro supports non-js browsers. Perhaps website developers, especially ones needing to develop for government services, should use 1GB Raspberry Pis for testing, but that would still have modern javascript. I got a 1GB RPi 4 in about mid-2019 and was rudely reminded of how much memory Chrome used even back then. More than 1 tab open and it would be killed.
The Eden quote is here https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiven... and it has some stats of gaming consoles using uk government sites.
Astro itself works just fine with React, and it can still be HTML-only.
But you can also render React on the server yourself using renderToString, if you don't want a framework.
This is an absurd statement. Just because something is a proverb, doesn't mean it's automatically true for all cases.
A professional woodcarver armed with only a metal spoon will still make a nicer woodcarving than I can given a full wood shop. Similarly, if you only give me notepad.exe, I can still make a pretty nice website.
Does using the right tools make our lives easier? For sure. Using mildly-wrong tools (react, in this case) isn't going to hold us back very much though.
I have trouble seeing how React vs Astro is two tools of different kind entirely?
It can use other libraries with it too, or just plain HTML, but it’s not in the same space.
React can’t work on the backend by itself without Astro, Next.js, etc, or some hand-made micro-framework.
> A poor workman blames his tools
which is towards the opposite meaning
(I still very much support fast, simple HTML websites. The good ones are a fantastic user experience)
The article is clearly aimed at non crappy developers or developers who want to do better for their users.
And it provides an anecdotal experience where an HTML first option developed by a good developer was far superior to what a JS necessary option would have been, given the user base of this application.
* Have working back/forward buttons * Have working progress indicator as provided by the browser * Show errors to the user - even if they are ugly * Be accessible to keyboard navigation
With SPAs these are all things the developer has to get right.
So often when using a SPA I'll click a button, you get a spinner and then nothing will happen. Is it still in progress? Don't know. Eventually I'll open developer console and trace the network requests to find the JSON HTTP request that returned "ERR_BAD_EMAIL" and fix what I've entered. With a normal form submission at least the user will see the error message and can press back and then fix it.
An "old school" Ruby on Rails/Symfony/Django app, with templates, usual get/post forms etc, frames you and pushes you in using the standards and relying on browser default behaviors.
In JS-heavy apps, it's as easy to code normal `button` elements as it is to code clickable `div` elements. But with the divs you just forget to handle keyboard nav, proper element roles, etc. It's easy to create fake links, not relying on `a` tags, using an internal JS router that doesn't expose URLs, doesn't handle middle click mouse, for no particular reasons.
In less JS-heavy contexts, the easiest way to do is to use proper HTML so you are less inclined to mess up.
Even on codebases that use a decent framework like Next.js that handles those for you on paper, it's often we see people not very aware of the benefits of using proper semantics and standard behaviors, and you easily end up with web apps with poor UX in the end.
But I 100% see where the author's coming from, considering the massive fragmentation of react codebases/patterns and decision paralysis of React development in general. I really doubt most React apps, even the more accessible ones, are testing their multi-page form wizards with JS completely turned off.
HTML-first does seem highly underutilized in the commercial web, and I learnt a lot from reading this (as a solidJS/react dev).
Back to HN comments it looks like this wasn't actually intentional?
You've only got yourself to blame, there.
> A venerable web application pattern that has had a small modern renaissance thanks to Remix
Remix is not that popular. I don't think attributing this to remix is accurate. Next.js quite possibly.
> A venerable web application pattern that has had a small modern renaissance thanks to Remix, form submissions and redirects took a while to explain to my colleagues, on account of everyone being used to heavily client-side web applications.
(Although it's not really a joke, it's pretty amazing how many professional web developers these days don't know how to use forms without JavaScript.)
I recently had to intervene during the latest office holy war to explain that you don't need JS for file uploads.
It was eye opening.
I'd be curious to see the stats on how often Next.js users lean into the server component model that makes the frontend fast. My anecdotal experience is that it's an afterthought for many. By comparison, Astro (as mentioned by the author) makes you think about this stuff upfront via opt-in rather than opt-out. It's a wonderful framework.
OK, I'm still at the beginning and irrelevant to the article, but as a USA-ian, I am so jealous about that. Unheard of here.
The public sector, simple, no frills, accessible, no flashy graphics, websites were a massive eye-opener.
They just worked. They had a job. They did it. I wasn't going to buy more from them because of it, and they didn't care. It was great.
I've heard that recently they've dismantled the centralised team that wrote all the rules, enforced it, and started moving to decentralised hosting, but so far the whole still seems to hold to together really well. I think, I hope, they have embedded the expectation that the local council, the tax office, your visa status, etc, should just be utilitarian in nature, and work for everyone.
I worry how long it will last...
Personal anecdote: Recently they were updating everyone to "smart meters" on the gas lines. They needed me to be home so they could enter my apartment and bleed the gas out of the line by turning on the stove prior to replacing the meter. I played phone tag with them for 6 months, setting up countless appointments, and nobody ever showed up, the meter remains un-upgraded. At the same time, I have received weekly phone calls and monthly physical letters stating that if I don't upgrade the meter, my gas will be shut off. I just moved, so the new tenant will have to deal with it now.
Yeah, reminds me of the b52 story re holes in wings on the planes that made it back from missions, leading them down the wrong path of strengthening wings. They weren't looking at the planes that never came back with holes in the fuel silages.
All completions were real people. It's a government website.
We have to eat the bullet, there is only one way out: restore noscript/basic HTML interop in "security" infrastructures (can still have a non-mandatory web app on top). And it will probably require super strong _technical_ regulations and expect the 'whatng cartel' to fight hard, because they won't like critical web sites not being web apps then forced to run on their massively complex web engines...
Don't forget, a few years back, most, if not all, online services were able to run on 1D or 2D (simple table) HTML documents.
How many such devices can still support modern TLS certificates anyway? By this logic, shouldn't we also use plain HTTP instead of TLS?
If you're using a decade old phone to sign up for a utility, you've got bigger problems in your life and no self-respecting person should be adding to them.
React already existed in 2016, so did Vue and Typescript. Never mind good old JS.
I frankly can't imagine a device capable of supporting modern TLS stacks but incapable of supporting JS. Much less a phone, which in many countries basically requires LTE (and sometimes even VO LTE) support to function at all, due to the 2G and 3G shutdowns.
Better would be to use plain HTTP in addition to TLS, rather than instead of TLS. TLS does have benefits, but if it is optional then it can also be used on computers without TLS (as well as potentially other situations where you do not want TLS or where it is not useful).
- Old browsers without the modern JS features you're trying to use
- Different browsers, with different features
- JS didn't load due to network errors
Did I miss it, or did the article neglect to explain why this was a problem?
Also, Microsoft.
https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/im-building-parallel-... https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/how-about-new-java-ba...
JavaScript-heavy approaches are not compatible with long-term performance goals 178 points by luu 3 months ago | 237 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47029339 (should be called "Why React is not compatible with long-term performance goals")
Does anybody like React? (jsx.lol) 242 points by brazukadev 15 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48274077
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30528473
SPAs Were a Mistake (gomakethings.com) 692 points March 2, 2022 | 620 comments
In this article he recommends the “validation-enhancer” library:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/validation-enhancer
I’ve also seen one called “formisch” that the author of valibot is working on:
https://github.com/open-circle/formisch
They’re both pretty new. Has anyone tried them?
Not even that old. 60 year people can't user your fancy site because then don't have an internal model of how a computer works.
You know that when pressing a button a hidden engine runs in the backend (or something runs in the backend). You expect an answer and if the expectation do not match the result, the model in your mind creates an hypothesis about what maybe happened and iterate from there. Maybe you should have clicked something before? Maybe you should mark some form checkbox?
Old people don't have that because they didn't grow up with computers.
What is on the screen is what they see. I clicked next and nothing happens. Well... the site is broken.
You known when you plug your refrigerator and nothing happens and instead of reflecting on the possible blown out resistor that you can bypass with a small wire you understand that your only relationship with the refrigerator is plug and unplug or call for help? That is an old person using your site. They won't fight against it. They'll give up immediately.
I wouldn’t sweat the broken fridge either though, there’s so many other electrical appliances in the house to use.
"Why did the bank change the layout? I want the old one back!" - Don't like it? Change bank then. That's what I did.
I get that changing to another bank is a big unknown, but it's probably still worth it to show your displeasure. Plus her bank are morons when it comes to several other things.
My main bank changed their UX not too long ago, and I liked the old one better, but the banks I've signed up for since are even worse. I signed up with them for other reasons though, so I put up with them because it's worth the pain. It does make my main bank look better though --- mobile style on desktop is annoying, but at least I can easily find everything I need... And it's not really their fault there are seven different options on the transfers page (including my favorite: same day transfer vs next day transfers... at one point same day transfers had a fee but they don't anymore so from a user perspective, it's the same thing but you can have it slower if you want...)
Also, signing up for a new bank these days is an exercise in KYC frustration. And then you can't actually transfer your money and use it, because banks responded to the dumbass check fraud that was being promoted on social media by limiting new accounts.
I agree. Better to deal with the devil you know rather than potentially one you don't.
Thankfully, I switched to a bank with a UI that was known good going by all the chatter I'd heard, but that's not really something you can guarantee to know. And even if you do know, if the rate is drastically worse at that bank than any of the others', then that's kind of moot.
I mean, we learn that a enroll is normally a flow. Flows have steps. So if you came to the end of the flow and the finish button is gray, you think.
Hum… I'm used to flows. This is a multistep flow. Flows normally need me to fulfill some small checks and won't let me proceed between steps if something is missing. But some won't. Maybe this is one of those? Some flows have warnings in the end, some have next to the thing missing. I don't see any warn in the last screen, so I'll go back every step and check field by field for errors. That'll probably do.
This is the model you have in your mind, of how a website or an app works.
People that came to computers, apps and websites later in life didn't learned the puzzles.
Aren't insane.
When did the industry put the onus on the user to understand how the computer works? What happened to the old days of Xerox PARC's HCI studies putting the user first? The computer is in service of the user, not the other way around!
If I need to build a mental turing machine to understand your application, it is a bad application. It is rather the engineer's job to build a mental model of the user and their needs, and if you can't do that you should not call yourself a software engineer.
This is even true for things as seemingly non-technological as getting to your flight once you arrive at the airport. People who are used to dealing with a service desk might just show up with their printed ticket without even having looked at it, take it to the counter, and expect instructions on what to do next without having read or considered all the fields present on the ticket.
It's not just about understanding the technology, but sometimes about understanding the business, policies, whatever. When a human agent or customer service worker is handling that stuff for you (typical in the pre-computer age), you barely have to think about that stuff and even if you're told, it can be "in one ear, out the other". Automation very often means pushing a requirement of more understanding onto customers/users.
Maybe this isn't applicable to all software devs. If you make web apps, users actually see your UI, they click an icon or type in a URL and hit enter with the intent of using the thing you made. With firmware, that's not how it works.
When you hit the "mute" button on your laptop keyboard, it should just do it. The audio should turn off and the little LED should light up. If that fails, even once, the mirage is broken. The user is forced to think about the fallibility of firmware, which is a word they might not even know, and still struggle to conceptualize if they do. I think it also has a lasting effect on the way someone thinks about the pruduct: Is this going to work today? Why did that happen? Was that a virus? So on.
OTA firmware updates have the same problem. Most users don't know what the hell firmware is. All they know is their computer is showing a loading screen they've never seen before. It's unfamiliar and weird.
Like I said, I don't know if this mindset translates perfectly to other fields, but the priorities that fall out of my philosophy certainly apply. Reliability over everything, and get it right the first time.
This is my philosophy too working in infrastructure. It’s my job to care way too much so downstream users don’t have to.
It's like being a plumber.
Yeah, it's like a plumber: do your job right and nobody should notice. But when you fuck it up, everything gets full of shit.The pendulum is overdue for swinging back the other way, but I don’t know who or what has both the capability and will to give it the push needed to send it on its way back.
Just after the turn of the century, that was when there was a big shift in the industry to move all user interface design work to artists, and away from original user interface specialists. The whole profession of user interface designer (one who understood "form follows function") ceased to exist in the early 2000s, as all work was assigned to graphic designers (who only understand aesthetics).
This movement can be seen clearly in the evolution of widget toolkits for desktop applications, which peaked in usability in the late-90s/early-2000s, and have been losing usability while getting prettier with every iteration since.
I think this is a bit outdated. I'll be 60 in a month, and have been practicing and writing about machine learning, for money, for a straight 10 years now; and I was a young man (and a full stack developer) during the digital revolution.
If anything, GenX had to work harder to get into these brittle emerging technologies and paradigms. There's no-one of my age group, at least that I know of, who is remotely as tech-illiterate as your comment depicts.
Truth is that it took so long for smartphones to dumb down everyone's tech acumen that those of my generation had already learned to do it the hard way.
Absolutely. I am in full-time work, and expect to be for another decade. I have worked my entire career in IT, doing tech support, training, systems design and implementation, tech journalism, and tech writing (i.e. documentation).
I will be 60 in less than 18 months.
> Word processors and spreadsheets having been ubiquitous for office workers from at least the early 90s.
You did say "at least", but still... longer than that.
I started work in 1988 and they were already ubiquitous in my world. Richer companies had the fairly newfangled IBM compatibles, which were still big and expensive. The cheap Amstrad PCs were just starting to appear.
Older hands had multiuser boxes with SCO Xenix or DR Concurrent CP/M or Concurrent DOS and a bunch of dumb terminals. My company had switched to these from Alpha Micro systems running AMOS -- and again, dumb terminals. One of my clients had a DEC PDP-11.
The real old hands had 8-bit kit: some CP/M, and a few BBC Micros.
The first big migrations I saw were from standalone (or multiuser) PCs to LANs, and from pre-PC systems to PCs and Macs.
60-year-olds who worked blue-collar for a significant part of their life, this is not so obviously true for.
Also probably not true for 60-year-olds who worked in other non-office jobs, like acting or sports.
There have been a variety of well-paid jobs that didn't use computers that a 60-year-old might have done over their life, meaning that this can't even be broken up along class/income lines.
My mother, born in 1934, had no problem using computers. She didn't internalize how they work, but she learned the workflows she needed. How to launch applications and so on.
The situation described in that comment is just a broken app, it has nothing to do with the age or the understanding of the user.
my mum, a boomer now in her 70s, would have no bloody clue what you're talking about. she used to work helping out a guy who was doing punchcard programming back when she was young. she ain't dumb. if i broke it down into normal human english words, she'd probably get a sort of idea (or at least nod along to humour me).
i've lost count of the number of conversations i've had with my dad, late 70s boomer, where he complains that they've changed the UI. "It's all different and i don't understand, why did they have to change it? I don't know where anything is now." he's been moaning about things like this for over a decade now (so since his late 60s).
there are definitely technically not-very-literate 60 year olds and the general point about older folks, whether that's >60 or >70, is very real:
older people exist who don't have a clue about SPAs/PWAs, and chances are they're either asking their offspring for help (my mum does this), trying to phone someone instead (my mum does this) or just walking away from it (my mum does this).
Instead of "old person" he put a number on it. (Cue the people who need to cut me down because I used a male pronoun for an unknown poster)
If the button doesn't work, the average user is going to say "this most be broken" and then use a competitor (or contact your support). That's why it's really important to error-proof one's design (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke).
So instead of the button failing because you didn't check a box, pop up with a message telling them "Please click $box before continuing". Or if you want to be fancy, feed them whatever form you're giving them piecemeal, so that they can't continue until they finish this small part (e.g., have them input a name, then the next page only has a spot for an address, then the next page only has a spot for card information, then the next only has a spot to select shipping). Simple bite sized chunks anyone (well, anyone you would ethically want to sell to) can understand.
Either it works right away without any further questions, or they'll not do it.
Sadly, also if they can't do it on their phone, they will not do it. It's actually very hard to get people motivated to do anything that has to do with sitting down at an actual computer anymore. Which is a bit hard if you're in a very technical political advocacy group, kinda makes me the guy to do everything remotely complex... XD
Keep it simple and light. HTML+CSS first, JS to expand functionality. Don't re-invent the wheel.
You know, it's time to stop this trope.
People who are 60 today were born in 1966, they probably entered the workforce in the mid 80's. They probably are not even retired yet. They know how to use computers, they own a smartphone (or if they don't, it's probably for economic reasons unrelated to their age).
As a founder and product manager, this kind of thinking is unhelpful as we design the future. In many ways it's actually ageist to imply that old people are unable to utilize everyday technology.
I was building public service websites (BBC News website) back in the early 2000's where accessibility was a real and important consideration. Technology progresses, and the bar for accessibility has moved up.
My father is about to turn 80 - he checks his heart with his Apple watch, video calls his grandson from his iPad, and asks ChatGPT questions from his iPhone and MacBook Pro. Maybe he's more unusual for 80yo's but it's time to stop this lazy trope that old people are technically illiterate.
(also, shit, I'm only 15 years away from being 60 myself :/ )
> Adults at this level are able to understand simple problems and develop and implement solutions to solve them. Problems contain a limited number of elements and little to no irrelevant information. Solutions at this level are simple and consist of a limited number of steps. Problems are embedded in a context that includes one or two sources of information and presents a single, explicitly defined goal.
This test is administered on a tablet, so I think scores can be interpreted as a sort of combo of computer use and problem solving.
A full 40% of adults from 55-64 are at that level or lower. Wikipedia thinks that a novel online form would be a Level 2 task, provided it involves navigating across more than 1 page. Based on that framework and assuming your dad can use the sort function in his email, he represents a top 20th percentile adult for the 55-64 age group. It's probably even higher considering his age as the trend is towards older groups having a rougher time with the survey.
I also think it's ageist to assume that older people can't use a computer. But assessments like this indicate that a full quarter of the US regardless of age would have trouble with some of the basic tasks we associate with computer use. So designers should consider their intended audience when deciding what's simple or not simple enough.
[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp
I got taught in school to check whether or not the piece of paper we got with the test on it had something on both sides, so you didn't hand in a test that was only half done. I thought that went without saying back in the day, but given that filling out a two page form is a non-trivial task for what should be literate people, I guess it doesn't.
I've seen static sites with these same problems, 404 was invented decades before React...
You realize that someone who was 18 when the Mac was first released would be 60 now?
It's not about age. It's about ability.
A lot of the people I build web pages for are poorly educated. The text we use for web is written for people with an eighth-grade education. Print material is fifth-grade.
People in the SV bubble can't imagine that there are tens of millions of people in America who cannot understand how an SPA works.
These people are invisible, even as they ladle out the food in the Google cafeteria, and polish the chrome in the Meta lobby.
28% of the US is at Level 1 or below. That level roughly corresponds to reading a simple text and being able to answer a question about it that requires limited inference (i.e. if the question is "what color are pigs," the answer would be in the text as "pigs are pink in color.")
[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp
"I click the <next> button on this form, nothing happens. Given that I have an internalized notion of forms as a multistep flow, maybe it couldn't advance because something is missing on the current step? Maybe it will give me those messages below or above the form? Maybe some read message somewhere? I'll search for those and try again"
vs
"I click the <next> button on this form, nothing happens. Not sure what would happen next. Maybe the thing will tell me? I can't see no dialogs, no messages, no error screen. Nothing changed. Maybe if I press it again? Nothing? Hum, maybe is disconnected from the network? It's the wifi again? Maybe if I power cycle the wifi router it will reconnect? I click next again now I get a clear error message: no internet connection. I suppose my internet is broken again. Will call my tech-savvy friend."
Many developers are unaware how many people are not comfortable with computers.
Here's an example with my dad, 64. During Covid, he had to get his medicine by emailing his GP instead of going to him. He received the email address as a photograph of a piece of paper over WhatsApp. (Clearly the doctor wasn't comfortable with tech either.) The paper said:
Send your medication request to:
- john.smith@some.long.medical.site.org
He said "I tried everything: lowercase, uppercase, spaces between '.', no spaces, space between '-', no space... Nothing works!"
He thought "-" was part of the email address. To some people it might seem like he was being dumb, but he's never had to seriously use computers before. When he bought our first computer he was 38 and never used it. He got his own laptop at 46, and only used it for movies and Skype, before WhatsApp existed. It doesn't seem that odd to know how email addresses work. (He is a technical person, but not a computer person. For example, decades ago he etched a circuit to make an HBO decoder so we can watch HBO for free.)
"why
ohgodwhy"@example.com is a valid email address (although I suspect most providers will reject it).
Try having that make sense without all the prerequisite knowledge the average computer toucher has. "Well you see, [...]"
Shipping tens of megabytes per web page is impolite, if not outright disrespectful to users.
React is too heavy weight for a lot of things. But it's ridiculous to call it disrespectful.
if it sounded "clean" on all 3, without the bass muffling everything, and the highs not hurting the eardrums, we called it "good" and released.
I wonder if David Lynch watches his stuff on a tiny screen just to make sure everyone has a good experience.
hint: no, he thinks small screens are stupid.
ETA: after like 3 years of mastering and reviewing this way i trusted my ears and my studio monitors enough to know what it would sound like. I also wrote in headphones and mastered on speakers, then remastered in monitor headphones. Anyhow, i think the whole point i was making is "yes, this is a good thing to do, for music, for websites, for software, etc"
If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load on the free Metro Wi-Fi, I'll go back to my search and pick a different page. If it takes more than 3 seconds to load on gigabit on a PC, I'll remember it and never click on links to it again.
If you don't respect my devices, then your work doesn't deserve my respect.
(Don't get me started on people calling themselves software _engineers_)
I have been asked by someone in late 40s why uploading a video takes a lot longer than uploading a photo.
They are not dumb people. They just do not know.
The onus is on the engineers to design for them.
If a 40-year-old can not answer that question, then they are in fact - dumb.
A brilliant physicist friend likewise once told me he is clueless how real numbers are handled in computers (not talking about floating point encoding specifics but conceptually itself). Yes, I can say that feels dumb, but I cannot deny that he is a brilliant physicist.
The only "excuse" would be if someone didn't know what a film is at all, because they can't be expected to reason about something they don't have any knowledge about.
And don't dare to contradict me, the fact that MIT-bred leetcode ninjas paid half a million per year can't produce a simple (mostly static) website on that stack it's only because of management that wants to ship the next product. /s
You're being generous with what I would consider negligence.
They have also either completely forgotten or for newer devs never learned anything about HTML / non JS front end development. Hence "but that’s a lot more work for us." Somewhere along the line HTML and CSS became Assembly. They somehow became dark magic.
For real users, no one cares about the tech being used. And most of the so called advantage provided by JS front end sites are at best marginal and realistically speaking imaginary unless you are Google Earth or Online photoshop / spreadsheets.
> Shipping them 20MB of javascript before we even render a form would be a ridiculous thing to do.
> I have seen teams waste person-months of effort wrangling React validation libraries.
> It is not acceptable to bounce users on old browsers, users with bad network connections, users using assistive technologies.
> Build a web application that works on a playstation portable on a 3G connection - if you do, it will work for all your users, and it will still work 30 years from now.
The other day I added a fix so that the website would work in a PS5. Before that I didn’t even know that PS5 has a browser.
This is the "wonder" that happens when you build for the client instead of for yourself. It takes being truly intentional: sometimes the client (especially that kind of client) does not know what he needs or want; sometimes you as a dev simply build something with good intentions but just out of habit.
Taking the time to ask true, relevant questions, and build backwards, is one of the ways you achieve this. It takes time, energy, intentionality (once again)... but it's worth it.
Sometimes it is just a form that you need, with the web page loading a new one after 'submit' has been clicked. Yes we can do fancy things to ajax-submit the data, but did the customer want that?
Getting to the form in its 'final form' takes work, particularly if asking the customer for more information, such as proof of purchase or important documents. Do you just start the conversation with a 'contact us' box to have customer service ask for the bits they need later, or do you ask the customer for all information up front, reducing the need for back and fore?
You need to actively test what your customers will do, with metrics such as time filling in the form and how big the ticket queue is.
There can also be internal problems that prevent getting the form right. For example, if there is some manager in charge of customer service that is an empire builder, with a vast team. If your form decimates the team because everyone is efficient and able to go home at the end of the day with an empty queue, then you have undermined the empire builder, so he will want you gone!
There are some huge benefits to getting customer service right. You can brazenly have phone numbers, email addresses and even physical addresses, all published on the website. If the forms work then the phone never rings, the inbox is empty. And nobody can accuse the company of hiding behind a wall of corporate website small print.
The word of mouth aspect is also not to be overlooked. You can harvest reviews from happy customers that should have been unhappy under the old system. If you fix their problem in an hour, or get a replacement product to them the next day, then they will write you a rave review, with that being great for the customer because they explain better than you can how dedicated your customer service team is.
I use the word customer lightly here, there is the term 'service user' that is used in the public/third sectors, but that doesn't sound good in front of the 'service user', probably because they have an actual name.
Getting to the form 'in the final form' means quite a few small changes that can be easily reverted and monitored. It could be just making an input box only show capital letters, or show a numeric rather than standard keyboard.
Ideally, a submitted form does something when completed to place the ball in either the customer service court or that of the customer. If the customer need to provide some information before anyone need look at the ticket, the form needs to send out that email, then park the ticket awaiting whatever the customer does next. There should be no need for someone on the team to do that step.
I know AI does everything awesomely under all circumstances, but the 3-6 month journey needed to deeply understand the customer, the product and the team is something that needs a human, simply because you are dealing with humans and their emotions.
What has proven to be a huge bonus is CSS grid styling. Inputs and labels can be written without the div and span cruft, with everything lining up nicely with a few align 'center' CSS things.
What a fun time to be doing forms that actually work!
> Adding a lot of pressure, this was a regulated monopoly
> Some requirements I derived: > ... > We had to meet WCAG accessibility (the team settled on AA rather than AAA)
The author doesn't doxx their employer by giving any dates, but if we take the story at face value and assume it took place in last few years, it is pretty shocking.
How does it take a single hero to be fighting for AA compliance as an afterthought for a project with this scope in the 2020s?
I've worked on much more niche projects that treated this with the respect it deserves as a quasi-legal requirement.
Ideally, they ignore WCAG altogether, then throw on an overlay if compliance is required, which can be easily blocked by a dedicated blocker (e.g. https://www.accessibyebye.org/) or I just add a list of overlay domains to my ad blocker.
This is so sad
P.S. your solution seems to have disabled the custom font instead of fixing it
Personally, rather than this luxurious approach, I just do one giant form and store all values in local storage. If something is wrong have one message at the top listing which fields failed validation and why. Generate some css to put a red border around the fields.
Local storage might not be a good idea for such sensitive data but if you can get away with the simplicity it's lovely.
To some extent, I share the view that forms should be simple (e.g., at one point I built a reservation system that worked in Links2 (the CLI browser)), but having a blog that can't be read in a modern Firefox seems a bit weird when preaching such messages.
Don't get me wrong, I actually have enjoyed React over these past 10 years. But, including it blindly is just silly.
it doesn't work for everything and imo is worse for (p)react due to the lack of native JSX, but it does allow for bringing in stuff that usually takes an `npm install && npm build`
While it still does the job, I'm a little curious to explore more modern options, if for nothing else to understand the choices a more junior dev would face/make today.
I'm seriously considering giving Atro a go. Is it worth it?
Large spa apps are very fast if components are only loaded when needed
Coming from a angular1 -> vue2 -> svelte2 -> settling on pure web components with no shadow dom it's a joy to work with, and fast
I guess the main argument is how easy it is for an LLM to ingest the content, since I can bet all of the crawlers are llm-enabled one way or another.
Is it more work?
When messing around with my blog's Javascript, this mantra is so thoroughly embedded into writing it, that I try to include "enhance" in function names where it makes sense. I might have to do likewise with my CSS.
Accessibility functions are also helpful; if designed well then it would be helpful for everyone (not only if you are blind or other disabilities), in many possible circumstances.
Even if it is more work (it isn't, the author of this phrase probably is just not familiar with this "tech stack"), the sum of saved time for the users is far more important.
That's it. I will report back if it works.
Isn't that more open to fraud and abuse though by the "someone" whether that is a gov employee or otherwise.
PS: I have actually suffered through some of this, badly so, though in an unrelated setting.
It comes back to which system is more robust/mistake-proof and more practically recoverable.
However, I thought more about this and I now agree to your position. Till there is still a significant enough percentage population that is not setup to use the new approaches (digitization/Internet in the example at hand), the older methods need to stick. Meanwhile, assuming the new approaches actually offer more value, there should be an appropriate push for moving the remaining population towards it.
To apply for their services, customers could either use an old ASP form on the website, or follow a manual process
"Clutched in her hands is a games console - a PlayStation Portable. She stares at it intensely; blocking out the world with Candy Crush."
She was using what is broadly comparable to a WebTV browser to access a government site, and it worked because the guidelines for gov.uk are so very, very good.
(The UK gov sometimes gets a bit of stick for being needlessly useless, but their web guidelines are extremely good. Absolutely a fantastic starting point for anybody interested in web development.)
https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressi...
>The PSP’s web browser is - charitably - pathetic. It is slow, frequently runs out of memory, and can only open 3 tabs at a time.
Alluring, an annoying property of private software development is that making websites and software in general inaccessible to lower end hardware is actually a positive effect, as it filters out 'undesirable' lower-income prospects.
That, along with pressure to produce fast, without much concern for quality (with notable privileged exceptions of luxury software like Apple or 1B+ user software like Google), as well as a disregard for sourcing "I don't care if you do it yourself, or npm install software from effectively unpaid volunteers", ends up in a state of software lacking craftmanship, software that one is not proud of to work in.
In my experience, Apple and Google are the worst offenders at software bloat, maybe because they can afford to create releases every few weeks, so the bloat accumulates faster.
why not take the html5 standard (see https://html.spec.whatwg.org/ ) and if needed (dont think so for these use cases... "for clients ranging from energy companies to political parties") htmx or alpinejs ...
What were some of the downsides? Illuminating the tradeoffs would elevate this post from good to great.
> "but that’s a lot more work for us."
And it's not that any individual or team is lazy. Most teams have a constant barrage of priorities to balance and are paid by companies valuing efficiency over everything. That said, I think the article makes a great case for adjusting our prioritization. Going a bit slower won't kill anyone, in fact doing so will probably save some.
I don't want to be that guy, but the title is misleading. The number of users completing the form doubled.
Ie customers of the utility company were completing the form, not random users from the internet.
I have done exactly that on a project that was under similar constraints. The UI models live in .tsx files and the browser gets pure HTML with zero JS by default.
I loathe this area of software development, loads of unnecessary frameworks and spinning gears that add complexity while making less and less functional applications
Ah yes, when you have to explain to your esteemed web developer colleagues how the web works xD
This made me really, really angry.
Every single person I showed it to including my then-70-something mother said "that just looks like menstrual bleeding".
Every single person said that.
They still went with it. Conversion rate? Dunno, never got numbers high enough to test the script.
The applet took 30 seconds to load. Once it loaded, it showed five buttons to click to get to different sections of the site. When you clicked on one, instead of changing the content frame, it sent you to an entirely new frameset. This, of course, caused the sidebar to take another 30 seconds to load. Hitting the back button did the same thing.
Meanwhile, I knew someone whose friend made a little applet that he showed me; it was a Java applet that you could provide an image URL for and it would load the image and then, below the image, show a rippling effect as though you were looking at something on the shore of a rippling lake. This applet took less than a second to load and ran incredibly smoothly.
Java was a curse, not because Java was bad but because Java applets were written badly and used badly simply because they were neat.
I would like to say the early interweb was just a learning experience, but today's interweb hasn't learned any of the lessons. It's just changed which language the lesson is being relearned
"ATM" means "Automatic Teller Machine", so "ATM Machine" is "Automatic Teller Machine Machine".
Both are mentioned in the animated movie "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse".
Not in the Wikipedia page (but check the Italian version): it started as "Mons Belli" (Mount of the Battle) because of a battle fought by the Romans a few years before the Hannibal campaign. Then the original meaning was lost and it gained another "of battle" in the 1800s. Mount of the Battle of the Battle. Hopefully there won't be another one to add.
My favorite from Southern California.
It's only a matter of time until someone posts "Torpenhow Hill" -- which does not exist.
These gems are brought to you by the department of redundancy department.
- shrimp scampi
- Old Adage
- chai tea
- Naan Bread
- Rio Grande River
- Lake Tahoe
- PIN/ VIN number
- ATM machine
- GPS system
- Panini sandwich