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I love this because it's a reminder that simplicity is just around the corner if we only are open-minded to rediscover old truths. No complex server software, n

I love this because it's a reminder that simplicity is just around the corner if we only are open-minded to rediscover old truths. No complex server software, no package managers, no git, no SSG bullshit - just basic HTML and CSS.

TacoToni 6y ago
I am not a developer. I am simply someone who is fascinated by creating software and websites. I remember taking a HTML/CSS class in high school 12+ years ago and it was one of the most fun classes i've ever taken. Didn't really know i could make a career out of it at the time, but i wish i did. With that said, i love visiting websites that are pure HTML/CSS. They are fast to load and easy to read.
G3rn0ti 6y ago
Well, most developers hate simplicity and simply love automation. From some point on automation usually becomes a process that's merely shifting complexity from a manual process to maintaining a growing software stack. I'd say for a simple web blog managing its entries by means of html files on the server is a valid solution. I am not sure how the author maintains an index of his blog entries this way, but updating an HTML index page manually does not seem like a huge effort to me.
SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
We always forget we move away from simplicity - this won't scale and if you want to make a global structural change you're now performing the operation as many times as you have pages. I find myself coming back to a metaphor that was in the comments here yesterday - yes, this is a beautiful, stylistic self portrait, but if your job is to paint the whole house this is a terrible way to do it.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  In the context of this post, i.e. publishing a small personal blog, simplicity works well.
  - sovnade 6y ago
    Is it simple though? Copy & paste into a WYSIWYG editor is pretty error prone, and he's already talking about creating several shell scripts to keep things in sync. Seems a bit like re-inventing the wheel, no?
blacktriangle 6y ago
Unfortunately basic HTML has one glaring problem: it has no concept of code reuse. No layout, no shared footers, nothing like that. Frames were probably HTMLs answer to reusing common elements, but oops, frames are a disaster. Instead it was so bad there were actually Apache extensions to reuse HTML (see server side includes). Then compound this problem with something like a blog where you have hundreds of pages who all need to have their menus updated every time you post something, and yeah...pure HTML is just unacceptable.
- door101 6y ago
  IMO the solution is to design around these constraints, ie, don’t include a menu on your blog posts, just a link to the home page, which has a list of all the posts.
  - blacktriangle 6y ago
    And then you've completely destroyed the point of hypermedia.
    - door101 6y ago
      What do you mean? You can still like to other documents, just drop the idea of linking to the same list of documents on every page
      - blacktriangle 6y ago
        That works, but it's not what users want. Granted this is personal anecdata, but I've spent years pushing back on client expectations in the name of architecting things in a way the web supports at the lowest levels, and it's been an exercise in failure. No user is going to accept that behavior in a blog, and frankly as a reader on the internet, I find that solution pretty lame as well. I absolutely agree with minimizing the impedance mismatch between how we develop and how the web actually works and the associated tool-chain simplifications that come with that, but at some point we have to accept that web tech just wasn't designed to do what we need from it and add some layers on top. The challenge is balance.
max1984_2 6y ago
People see all of the simplicity through rose tinted spectacles. Copy and pasting bits of HTML around was a chore and was prone to error. No decent source control (the source control at the time was garbage and tbh was a relatively new concept in web dev) meant that you had no idea what you had done previously or why. I remember have lots of zip files with dates and README.txt in there. No package managers meant that I had to keep track manually of scripts and CSS in folders. Nah I don't think I will be going back to that madness thanks.

TacoToni 6y ago

I am not a developer. I am simply someone who is fascinated by creating software and websites. I remember taking a HTML/CSS class in high school 12+ years ago and it was one of the most fun classes i've ever taken. Didn't really know i could make a career out of it at the time, but i wish i did. With that said, i love visiting websites that are pure HTML/CSS. They are fast to load and easy to read.

G3rn0ti 6y ago

Well, most developers hate simplicity and simply love automation. From some point on automation usually becomes a process that's merely shifting complexity from a manual process to maintaining a growing software stack. I'd say for a simple web blog managing its entries by means of html files on the server is a valid solution. I am not sure how the author maintains an index of his blog entries this way, but updating an HTML index page manually does not seem like a huge effort to me.

SketchySeaBeast 6y ago

We always forget we move away from simplicity - this won't scale and if you want to make a global structural change you're now performing the operation as many times as you have pages. I find myself coming back to a metaphor that was in the comments here yesterday - yes, this is a beautiful, stylistic self portrait, but if your job is to paint the whole house this is a terrible way to do it.

arkitaip 6y ago
In the context of this post, i.e. publishing a small personal blog, simplicity works well.
- sovnade 6y ago
  Is it simple though? Copy & paste into a WYSIWYG editor is pretty error prone, and he's already talking about creating several shell scripts to keep things in sync. Seems a bit like re-inventing the wheel, no?

blacktriangle 6y ago

Unfortunately basic HTML has one glaring problem: it has no concept of code reuse. No layout, no shared footers, nothing like that. Frames were probably HTMLs answer to reusing common elements, but oops, frames are a disaster. Instead it was so bad there were actually Apache extensions to reuse HTML (see server side includes). Then compound this problem with something like a blog where you have hundreds of pages who all need to have their menus updated every time you post something, and yeah...pure HTML is just unacceptable.

door101 6y ago
IMO the solution is to design around these constraints, ie, don’t include a menu on your blog posts, just a link to the home page, which has a list of all the posts.
- blacktriangle 6y ago
  And then you've completely destroyed the point of hypermedia.
  - door101 6y ago
    What do you mean? You can still like to other documents, just drop the idea of linking to the same list of documents on every page
    - blacktriangle 6y ago
      That works, but it's not what users want. Granted this is personal anecdata, but I've spent years pushing back on client expectations in the name of architecting things in a way the web supports at the lowest levels, and it's been an exercise in failure. No user is going to accept that behavior in a blog, and frankly as a reader on the internet, I find that solution pretty lame as well. I absolutely agree with minimizing the impedance mismatch between how we develop and how the web actually works and the associated tool-chain simplifications that come with that, but at some point we have to accept that web tech just wasn't designed to do what we need from it and add some layers on top. The challenge is balance.

max1984_2 6y ago

People see all of the simplicity through rose tinted spectacles. Copy and pasting bits of HTML around was a chore and was prone to error. No decent source control (the source control at the time was garbage and tbh was a relatively new concept in web dev) meant that you had no idea what you had done previously or why. I remember have lots of zip files with dates and README.txt in there. No package managers meant that I had to keep track manually of scripts and CSS in folders. Nah I don't think I will be going back to that madness thanks.