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I love the point the site is trying to make but I'm confused as to why this is built with a vue.js static site generator requiring node/npm/yarn and an almost 7
by jameskilton 8y ago
I love the point the site is trying to make but I'm confused as to why this is built with a vue.js static site generator requiring node/npm/yarn and an almost 7,000 line yarn.lock file.
Shouldn't this literally be a single page, hand-built HTML file with inline CSS? Is this trying to be self-ironic or something?
- jlgaddis 8y ago> ... but I'm confused as to why this is built with a vue.js static site generator requiring node/npm/yarn and an almost 7,000 line yarn.lock file. > Shouldn't this literally be a single page, hand-built HTML file with inline CSS? Is this trying to be self-ironic or something? Yes? I can't be certain but I think that was the point.
- gerdesj 8y agoShouldn't this literally be a single page, hand-built HTML file with inline CSS? Is this trying to be self-ironic or something? Yes, I'm going to assume that is a parody. However, signs of FrontPage or Word as an editor would be cool.
- madeofpalk 8y agoReminds me of the Bloomberg tech site, which had a lot of effort put into its 'brutalist' design to look like a 1995-era web page.
- zeusk 8y agohttps://www.bloomberg.com/politics/404 https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/404 https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/500 https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/500 https://www.bloomberg.com/500 https://www.bloomberg.com/500 Their error pages are still quite funny (and epic shit).
- denverkarma 8y agoThese are amazing, thanks for sharing!
- gchucky 8y agoJust for proper attribution, these pages are the work of Steph Davidson.[1] It's generally believed that these page were created when Richard Turley was working at Bloomberg as their creative director.[2] [1] http://stephdavidson.com/ http://stephdavidson.com/ [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/richard-turley-2011-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/richard-turley-2011-4
- thisrod 8y agoCrikey is good too: https://www.crikey.com.au/zxy https://www.crikey.com.au/zxy
- madeofpalk 8y agoWhile we’re on it, https://theaustralian.com.au/404 https://theaustralian.com.au/404
- Mahn 8y agoI guess we now have an answer to what comes after material design. Somebody tell the maintainers of Bootstrap so we can have the entire internet updated asap.
- madeofpalk 8y agoEh. This design trend is on the way out - 2016 was its hey day.
- arbie 8y agoYou jest, but Material Design is the new standard for approachable UX design. Looking forward to see what topples it.
- wereHamster 8y agoHand-build HTML file with inline CSS, that you edit with $YOURFAVOURITETEXTEDITOR which requires an OS that's 50 million lines of code. And you're complaining about 7000 lines in an auto-generated file, which doesn't even have to be touched nor edited by a human? The tools we use are insignificant, what's important is the result. If the result is a HTML file with inline CSS, who cares how it was created? You can use punchcards and a 20ton 'computer' for all I care.
- TobiasA 8y agoWay to miss the point.
- lemonberry 8y agoIndeed. From her twitter post: "We started making websites because it was fun because we wanted to make dumb shit and now everything is so serious and sometimes I feel like we need to go back" Leave it to an internet forum to get all gripey about something someone did for fun. Theodor Adorno said about philosophy that, "Philosophy is the most serious of things but then again it is not that serious". I'm pretty sure we can say the same thing about web development. https://twitter.com/NikkitaFTW/status/995670345624555520 https://twitter.com/NikkitaFTW/status/995670345624555520
- mherrmann 8y agoTools come with overhead and complexity. You're right that only the end results matter. But (eg.) loading time is one aspect of it.
- about_help 8y agoAs someone else said you missed the point. I will tack on my own opinion that building sites that only function with javascript is a massive disservice to everyone. From disabled people with accessibility needs, to old hardware/software, and even to security/privacy conscious people the JS paradigm is a massive problem. The trend for "new shiny" has become ridiculous and I find most modern websites to be pretty but rather useless. I have to scroll forever past slices with massive images and marketing lingo just to find something that seems potentially helpful but just goes on to more marketing bullshit. Want to get my buy-in for your tools? Stop making them a hard requirement and make sure you have a non-JS fallback that works.
- zzzcpan 8y agoThis is more like fun old web being reborn as brutalism in web design. Sadly, doesn't have anything to do with hand made html and css, just visuals. EDIT: An article on brutalism and antidesign: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/brutalism-antidesign/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/brutalism-antidesign/
- mygo 8y agoI don’t really think this qualifies as brutalism. A key element of brutalist design is the lack of the excess. Web 1.0 was full of excess. We’re talking 3D rotating words on fire when bold would suffice. Lots of drapery, lots of window dressing. A brutalist site would be more like the sites that have a structure, but the seams are not made seamless, and excesses are avoided... Like craigslist.
- Finnucane 8y agoSurely if it was good enough for time-cube guy, it should be good enough for us.
- colorint 8y agoThat's Dr. Gene Ray, Cubist and Wisest Human to you.
- shams93 8y agoThat's not surprising because all the tools we had to make these horrible, ugly sites were pre-css and often browser specific items that would only work on say ie4.
- JepZ 8y agoMost headlines aren't even bitmaps :-D ;-)
- some_account 8y agoIt's funny because as humans, we always try to improve things since we are dissatisfied with imperfection. But we tend to make simple things very complex in order to make them perfect. The complexity then becomes the problem. And we are back where we started for another attempt at perfection. The wheel goes round and round.
- im3w1l 8y agoExcept this is ugly AND complicated.
- aje403 8y agoPlus there's also "I can't understand what your code is doing therefore it sucks I need to write everything from scratch using a more modern language that looks better on my CV"
- peterwwillis 8y agoTo achieve perfection you have to get every little thing just right, and that implies complexity. What it doesn't necessarily imply is complex processes or products, which is the problem with software. Making the perfect knife, or the perfect cup of tea, can be done by one person with just two or three tools. But you have to know how to get everything just right, and that requires a lot of knowledge and experience. You can make a machine or abstractions to handle most of these things, but rather than reach perfection, they just reach a reliably satisfactory facsimile. We keep tinkering, like an amateur sculpter carving out a mountain, because we're still hoping for perfection.
- ry_ry 8y agoPerfect is the enemy of good. Although i understand Voltaire was using an cracked version of HoTMetaL Pro to make his web pages, so the whole premise is a little questionable.
- confounded 8y agoSee author’s response in thread.
- wmccullough 8y agoI keep seeing this general attitude about frontend, but I have a serious question: What’s the better alternative? I’m not asking this rhetorically because I have an answer, I just keep seeing the same remarks with no decent solutions. Is it time for the way we deliver the web to be rethought? Are we really in the golden age of the frontend but everyone is being too much of a hipster to realize it? What’s the solution here?
- bunderbunder 8y agoI don't know, either, but it does seem that the latest crop of frontend libraries (React & friends) is optimizing for a very high level of richness that simply isn't needed for most sites. Which is fine, but where it gets worrisome is when that lofty level of complexity is the only thing people know how to use. I recently got to watch someone spend nearly a full week fiddling with building a React app for filling out a form for submitting a batch job on an intranet site. It's a lot of code, and it's non-trivial to understand how it works, what with all the async methods and clever state management and whatnot. It needs to be built, which is a thing, and building it requires having the right environment setup. (Its build speed reminds me of my C++ days, too.) I wouldn't be surprised if someone's already talking about incorporating Docker into its future. At least to me, that's a rather arresting amount of time and money to see being sunk into a job that could have been accomplished with a simple HTML form on a static page.
- 80386 8y agoI see a lot of frontend devs these days who remind me of the interview horror stories about enterprise C++ guys getting a question like "how would you pull 10,000 phone numbers in NNN-NNN-NNNN format from a gigantic HTML page?" and responding by laying out an architectural plan for a hulking >1kLoC monstrosity, because they'd never heard of (nor could they imagine) grep. On the other hand, obscene overengineering is probably a good way to build a portfolio. Nobody will get hired for demonstrating that they can build an HTML form on a static page.
- devxpy 8y agohttps://github.com/nucleic/enaml https://github.com/nucleic/enaml We're just starting. IMO, if we started from a better language than JS, we would take stuff like data-binding in react for Granted, since it would be much easier to this stuff it in other languages.
- headsoup 8y agoFrom the linked Github page: > It's complicated on porpuse btw, I wanted to do it in ReasonML and Graphql but didn't have time as this was done in an afternoon hackathon And yeah probably the ironic thing. This sort of page should be simple, much as a wide portion of websites out there.
- ehnto 8y agoThey needed to polyfill blink.
- pietrovismara 8y agoI think your missing the point that it is not about how web sites are built but about the content.
- originalsimba 8y agoI'm fairly certain it isn't making a point at all. It's just a troll site. "MySpace" websites were not "Fun", and they weren't "fun" because they looked like shit, either. They looked like shit because the tools for people who couldn't be bothered to learn HTML were shit. Now the tools are better. There is a specific word or phrase to describe the site we're discussing, but I lack that... it'd be like someone saying "Remember when cars were suicide cages? Let's get rid of seat belts and have FUN again!". I can't say anything nice about it.