5 ms·

Pure HTML y'all. No megabytes of css, no bootstrap, no webpack with plethora of dependencies to load, parse and execute. We went the other route.

lmm 10y ago
Bootstrap is fine - frankly it's stuff that should have been the browser defaults already. There's no reason that something like motherfuckingwebsite shouldn't, in a modern browser, look like it would under bootstrap (that is to say, it should have thin but nonzero margins, high-contrast text but maybe slightly off-black on off-white, and any form controls should be bigger than the standard browser ones).
Nition 10y ago
Well, there is a little bit of CSS. http://web.archive.org/web/20041010133026cs_/http://www.stanforddaily.com/static/daily2.css http://web.archive.org/web/20041010133026cs_/http://www.stan...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
allover 10y ago
Why the drive-by attacks on good tools? This kind of stuff is tiring and just adds to the noise. > No megabytes of css Why would there ever be megabytes of CSS for such a site, apart from for ads, which is the main problem with modern 'content sites'. > no bootstrap Bootstrap can be tiny, and a big win in productivity/quality, so 'no Bootstrap' likely cost the devs in its lack of availabilty at the time. It looks far worse and is less usable on mobile particularly (but on desktop too) than it would be if built with Bootstrap. > No webpack with plethora of dependencies to load, parse and execute. Why is that even relevant? Who exactly is advocating for 'webpack with plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website?
- the_watcher 10y ago
  > Bootstrap can be tiny Sure, but it oftentimes isn't
  - allover 10y ago
    So it can be misused? All good tools can.
    - Taek 10y ago
      Meh. There are tools that can be misused on accident and there are tools that you have to go out of your way and have technical knowledge to misuse. And then there are tools where misuse is the default, and you have to have special or technical knowledge to use well.
      - allover 10y ago
        So which specific tool are you laying this accusation at? Bootstrap, which has been refined into tiny Sass and Less modules, and which for people who use neither, has the customize link in its main nav?
- noway421 10y ago
  > Why would there ever be megabytes of CSS for such a site Bootstrap, a theme for it, app css, a couple of 3rd party vendors, and we are over a megabyte. > a big win in productivity/quality Only if you are doing an SPA which mimics desktop applications. Which journalism sites are usually not >Why is that relevant for such a site? Who exactly is advocating for a 'plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website? Well no one, but sites still do this in the wild, while being driven by business decisions rather than technical concerns, which is understable surely, but look how nostalgic people are getting.
  - allover 10y ago
    >> Bootstrap, a theme for it, app css, a couple of 3rd party vendors, and we are over a megabyte. Who's doing that? And if they are adding dependencies without consideration of page-speed, they're to blame, and they'll never understand performance. Bootstrap is not the problem. Hypothetical bad devs would have been making similar mistakes with flash prior to that, or whatever alternative CSS libs were available, and were being cobbled together piecemeal prior to Bootstrap. > a big win in productivity/quality >> Only if you are doing an SPA which mimics desktop applications. Which journalism sites are usually not That is false. Bootstrap's primary use-case is as a CSS framework, not something solely for SPAs. From the early days it solved cross browser issues even for supposedly simple things like 'forms' for which there were no well-established conventions beforehand. Go trawl through the BS1 & 2 issue threads around form elements, and see all the things they fixed. > Why is that relevant for such a site? Who exactly is advocating for a 'plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website? >> Well no one, but sites still do this in the wild [...] So those tools don't deserve the abuse/noise.
    - gkya 10y ago
      Nobody's picking on Bootstrap anyways. > Who's doing that? You either don't use the web since 2008 or something or are lying: nearly all websites start with this setup.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  It's not that the tools are bad, it's that they are the goto for building sites. Sites that typically end up worse for having used them. It's an industry wide issue that we keep trying to solve using shitty duct-tape and hacks, while not addressing the underlying problem. This is just a reaction to that (and one that I agree with) Edit: > Why would there ever be megabytes of CSS for such a site, apart from for ads, which is the main problem with modern 'content sites'. Dunno, but people keep doing it for some reason > Bootstrap can be tiny, and a big win in productivity/quality, so 'no Bootstrap' likely cost the devs in its lack of availability at the time. It looks far worse and is less usable on mobile particularly (but on desktop too) than it would be if built with Bootstrap. Bootstrap can be, but IME it typically isn't. Additionally, I constantly hear webdevs say it "makes mobile better", but I tend to disagree. I admit that this is purely opinion. > Who exactly is advocating for 'webpack with plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website? Pretty much every webdev I talk to. Admittedly not necessarily webpack but usually something similar. I do understand that good tools being misused aren't bad tools, but, as a user, you can't expect me to be happy when I see those or similar tools when most of your industry is abusing them.
- saghm 10y ago
  > less usable on mobile To be fair, there really wasn't any "mobile" to speak of back then, so the developers couldn't even try to make it look good on mobile.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    There was WAP, which was kind of the ancestor of AMP. It wasn't terribly popular then either.
    - tdkl 10y ago
      I'll rather browse WAP pages again compared to modern "mobile optimized" sites. Huge fonts, huge pictures (sadly this trend came back to desktop, what's information density again), sticky toolbars with retarded social icons, ads that make a multicore mobile device with several GB of RAM to hiccup, etc. Desktop view was fine.
    - noway421 10y ago
      > WAP, which was kind of the ancestor of AMP I feel like while they were inspired by some concepts from there, the biggest contributor to the idea (apart from the need of locking in people in one 'easily acessible' platform) was opera's OBML format/protocol which was really decent at the time and provided a lot of benefits AML is marketed for. Probably the only problem with it was the lack of any interactive javascript, and that where it failed to meet adoption. Oh, but well, it was really niche as well, that did nothing good too.
at-fates-hands 10y ago
which is odd since a lot of css "frameworks" are now back to promoting inline css. https://acss.io/ https://acss.io/ I like this idea, but I wonder how long it would take my brain to think like this.
- ehnto 10y ago
  That is crazy. Why make it an entirely new syntax with an entirely new lexicon? Bgc () instead of background-colour? I feel like new people keep entering the web field and forgetting all the lessons learned from the (very very recent) past. The inline approach might work for a small site. But in that case, why use a pre-processor at all and why would you need config objects? CSS doesn't need to be rocket science. If you want atomic CSS then leverage CSS and style the base elements, it's actually pretty good at what it does. Edit: I may have misinterpreted it's use case, I am all for compenent based styles. I still think there is no need for a pre-processor of inline styles with a completely new lexicon. If you are already in the context of a component you already have the beauty of a scoped and simplified CSS workspace, why make that so much more complicated with a new build pipeline and completely new syntax and lexicon?
  - gkya 10y ago
    I wonder how much of those entering The Web Field have any formal education on CS and CS history, and to what extent most of them know the tools at their hand (HTML, JS, CSS, Standards, HTTP(S), browsers, other programming tools, etc). It seems to me that most of the professionals in the sector are actually paid amateurs with shallow knowledge of their own fields. This leads to reinvention of tools for that are at most on par with the existing tool chain.
    - blauditore 10y ago
      I have a similar impression; and based on the people I've met, it's somewhat accurate. People with higher education in CS I know tend to go more towards full stack or back end work, while web front end devs often are career changers. The entry barrier for web technologies is just rather low. This is probably the main reason for Node's huge growth in the past years: It's just the path of least resistance to get into back end development.
bartread 10y ago
The hilarious thing: I have this CSS book, and it bangs on about how old skool table based layouts, and styling with old skool HTML elements, is BAD because it leads to slow loading, bloated web pages. And speaking purely from a technical perspective, that could be true... but the reality. Like you say, we went the other way. Any of those old 90s/early noughties sites is going to be rocket fast by comparison with many modern sites.

lmm 10y ago

Bootstrap is fine - frankly it's stuff that should have been the browser defaults already. There's no reason that something like motherfuckingwebsite shouldn't, in a modern browser, look like it would under bootstrap (that is to say, it should have thin but nonzero margins, high-contrast text but maybe slightly off-black on off-white, and any form controls should be bigger than the standard browser ones).

Nition 10y ago

Well, there is a little bit of CSS. http://web.archive.org/web/20041010133026cs_/http://www.stanforddaily.com/static/daily2.css http://web.archive.org/web/20041010133026cs_/http://www.stan...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

allover 10y ago

Why the drive-by attacks on good tools? This kind of stuff is tiring and just adds to the noise. > No megabytes of css Why would there ever be megabytes of CSS for such a site, apart from for ads, which is the main problem with modern 'content sites'. > no bootstrap Bootstrap can be tiny, and a big win in productivity/quality, so 'no Bootstrap' likely cost the devs in its lack of availabilty at the time. It looks far worse and is less usable on mobile particularly (but on desktop too) than it would be if built with Bootstrap. > No webpack with plethora of dependencies to load, parse and execute. Why is that even relevant? Who exactly is advocating for 'webpack with plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website?

the_watcher 10y ago
> Bootstrap can be tiny Sure, but it oftentimes isn't
- allover 10y ago
  So it can be misused? All good tools can.
  - Taek 10y ago
    Meh. There are tools that can be misused on accident and there are tools that you have to go out of your way and have technical knowledge to misuse. And then there are tools where misuse is the default, and you have to have special or technical knowledge to use well.
    - allover 10y ago
      So which specific tool are you laying this accusation at? Bootstrap, which has been refined into tiny Sass and Less modules, and which for people who use neither, has the customize link in its main nav?
noway421 10y ago
> Why would there ever be megabytes of CSS for such a site Bootstrap, a theme for it, app css, a couple of 3rd party vendors, and we are over a megabyte. > a big win in productivity/quality Only if you are doing an SPA which mimics desktop applications. Which journalism sites are usually not >Why is that relevant for such a site? Who exactly is advocating for a 'plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website? Well no one, but sites still do this in the wild, while being driven by business decisions rather than technical concerns, which is understable surely, but look how nostalgic people are getting.
- allover 10y ago
  >> Bootstrap, a theme for it, app css, a couple of 3rd party vendors, and we are over a megabyte. Who's doing that? And if they are adding dependencies without consideration of page-speed, they're to blame, and they'll never understand performance. Bootstrap is not the problem. Hypothetical bad devs would have been making similar mistakes with flash prior to that, or whatever alternative CSS libs were available, and were being cobbled together piecemeal prior to Bootstrap. > a big win in productivity/quality >> Only if you are doing an SPA which mimics desktop applications. Which journalism sites are usually not That is false. Bootstrap's primary use-case is as a CSS framework, not something solely for SPAs. From the early days it solved cross browser issues even for supposedly simple things like 'forms' for which there were no well-established conventions beforehand. Go trawl through the BS1 & 2 issue threads around form elements, and see all the things they fixed. > Why is that relevant for such a site? Who exactly is advocating for a 'plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website? >> Well no one, but sites still do this in the wild [...] So those tools don't deserve the abuse/noise.
  - gkya 10y ago
    Nobody's picking on Bootstrap anyways. > Who's doing that? You either don't use the web since 2008 or something or are lying: nearly all websites start with this setup.
CaptSpify 10y ago
It's not that the tools are bad, it's that they are the goto for building sites. Sites that typically end up worse for having used them. It's an industry wide issue that we keep trying to solve using shitty duct-tape and hacks, while not addressing the underlying problem. This is just a reaction to that (and one that I agree with) Edit: > Why would there ever be megabytes of CSS for such a site, apart from for ads, which is the main problem with modern 'content sites'. Dunno, but people keep doing it for some reason > Bootstrap can be tiny, and a big win in productivity/quality, so 'no Bootstrap' likely cost the devs in its lack of availability at the time. It looks far worse and is less usable on mobile particularly (but on desktop too) than it would be if built with Bootstrap. Bootstrap can be, but IME it typically isn't. Additionally, I constantly hear webdevs say it "makes mobile better", but I tend to disagree. I admit that this is purely opinion. > Who exactly is advocating for 'webpack with plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website? Pretty much every webdev I talk to. Admittedly not necessarily webpack but usually something similar. I do understand that good tools being misused aren't bad tools, but, as a user, you can't expect me to be happy when I see those or similar tools when most of your industry is abusing them.
saghm 10y ago
> less usable on mobile To be fair, there really wasn't any "mobile" to speak of back then, so the developers couldn't even try to make it look good on mobile.
- pjc50 10y ago
  There was WAP, which was kind of the ancestor of AMP. It wasn't terribly popular then either.
  - tdkl 10y ago
    I'll rather browse WAP pages again compared to modern "mobile optimized" sites. Huge fonts, huge pictures (sadly this trend came back to desktop, what's information density again), sticky toolbars with retarded social icons, ads that make a multicore mobile device with several GB of RAM to hiccup, etc. Desktop view was fine.
  - noway421 10y ago
    > WAP, which was kind of the ancestor of AMP I feel like while they were inspired by some concepts from there, the biggest contributor to the idea (apart from the need of locking in people in one 'easily acessible' platform) was opera's OBML format/protocol which was really decent at the time and provided a lot of benefits AML is marketed for. Probably the only problem with it was the lack of any interactive javascript, and that where it failed to meet adoption. Oh, but well, it was really niche as well, that did nothing good too.

at-fates-hands 10y ago

which is odd since a lot of css "frameworks" are now back to promoting inline css. https://acss.io/ https://acss.io/ I like this idea, but I wonder how long it would take my brain to think like this.

ehnto 10y ago
That is crazy. Why make it an entirely new syntax with an entirely new lexicon? Bgc () instead of background-colour? I feel like new people keep entering the web field and forgetting all the lessons learned from the (very very recent) past. The inline approach might work for a small site. But in that case, why use a pre-processor at all and why would you need config objects? CSS doesn't need to be rocket science. If you want atomic CSS then leverage CSS and style the base elements, it's actually pretty good at what it does. Edit: I may have misinterpreted it's use case, I am all for compenent based styles. I still think there is no need for a pre-processor of inline styles with a completely new lexicon. If you are already in the context of a component you already have the beauty of a scoped and simplified CSS workspace, why make that so much more complicated with a new build pipeline and completely new syntax and lexicon?
- gkya 10y ago
  I wonder how much of those entering The Web Field have any formal education on CS and CS history, and to what extent most of them know the tools at their hand (HTML, JS, CSS, Standards, HTTP(S), browsers, other programming tools, etc). It seems to me that most of the professionals in the sector are actually paid amateurs with shallow knowledge of their own fields. This leads to reinvention of tools for that are at most on par with the existing tool chain.
  - blauditore 10y ago
    I have a similar impression; and based on the people I've met, it's somewhat accurate. People with higher education in CS I know tend to go more towards full stack or back end work, while web front end devs often are career changers. The entry barrier for web technologies is just rather low. This is probably the main reason for Node's huge growth in the past years: It's just the path of least resistance to get into back end development.

bartread 10y ago

The hilarious thing: I have this CSS book, and it bangs on about how old skool table based layouts, and styling with old skool HTML elements, is BAD because it leads to slow loading, bloated web pages. And speaking purely from a technical perspective, that could be true... but the reality. Like you say, we went the other way. Any of those old 90s/early noughties sites is going to be rocket fast by comparison with many modern sites.