Deploying a Web app in 14 days, No HTML | Hacker News Reader

Deploying a Web app in 14 days, No HTML

korynunn.wordpress.com

20 pointsnathanhoad9 comments

Interesting. I like HTML, but can't imagine that it is the pinnacle of development. Surely we won't be writing it in 20 years time, right?

One thing I would love to hear more is how do you deal with CSS? If everything is generated on client, do I need to "reverse engineer" using inspector?

Code requires a programmer to design, write, and maintain. Sometimes writing code is necessary, but often all that is needed is simple data, not complex code.

HTML is data. It has value in not requiring programmers to write it. Instead it can be written by designers, or generated by other programs, including visual tools. Yes, code can also be generated by tools, but writing code to generate code is a more difficult task than writing code to generate data. Except for Lisp of course, where code and data are the same.

This is absolutely true, for fairly simple sites like news sites and forums, HTML is great. For building applications it is tedious. The web platform is amazing for applications, when you don't treat the web like a piece of paper.

Hey, I was the lead dev on this, will answer questions.

The Article says that HTML is a derivative of XML. IIRC, HTML comes from SGML not from XML. And SGML is definitely made with being written directly by a human in mind.

True, perhaps a better description would be that HTML is a sibling to XML.

Whether HTML was intended for humans or not, it isn't in my opinion a particularly nice way to develop applications. Don't get me wrong, I love web applications, but writing them with HTML isn't a requirement.

I agree that writing them in HTML isn't a requirement, but saying that as being a sibling of XML and not being made for humans to write is not a good argument against writing it.

Btw, Gaffa sounds like a nice idea, definitely interested on how it plays out in the future.

Hope you don't need a search engine to index your site or anything.

We don't, it is an application.

All the static pages are just HTML, the application is not.

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