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It's definitely a great time to build websites, but saying they _NEVER_ have been easier to make... I'm not 100% sure about that. Yes, tailwind might make css

by hooby 5y ago

It's definitely a great time to build websites, but saying they _NEVER_ have been easier to make... I'm not 100% sure about that. Yes, tailwind might make css a lot easier, and github copilot might make coding a lot faster... but is this really easier than in the early 90ies, when you could just type <html> into notepad and make a website that didn't require any CSS or images or JS or even more than just the most basic html tags? When it comes to reading a blog or article or consuming any other form of textual information on the internet - I find myself increasingly enamored with "Reader View" in Firefox, which basically ditches all the crap, and displays the web-page in a default-style, as if it was just the most basic html - just like that we did write in 90ies. Of course this doesn't hold true for any webApps that do more than just present textual information (and the occasional image) - but why do project like ViewPure exist? There seems to be at least some demand for getting rid of all the clutter. Is tailwind really easier to work with something like - let's say - pico.css? Of course if you want to do super-elaborate layouts, then probably yes - but if you embraced a more minimalist approach? Isn't Hacker News itself a really great example of a website that successfully uses only very basic html with very, very little styling and fancy extra features?

ajlburke 5y ago
Hacker News still uses tables - for layout! But it always loads super fast, and it just works. We figured out how to display text on a web page decades ago. It's a shame more people aren't just doing it the direct way anymore. (Applications are a different matter obviously)
- ape4 5y ago
  Because of your comment I just looked at the source - yup tables. And a spacer gif too https://news.ycombinator.com/s.gif https://news.ycombinator.com/s.gif
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    I think it's old enough to be a retro design choice now.
- hooby 5y ago
  I don't think any of this is "good" web-design. But my argument never was about the layout or design of Hacker News being "better". What I meant to argue was, that content is king, and that everything else should serve the actual content - not distract from it.
  - EricE 5y ago
    "What I meant to argue was, that content is king, and that everything else should serve the actual content - not distract from it." Thank you! So many sites have utterly garbage contrast, making content unreadable - it's so annoying. I spam this excellent discussion of color and usability as often as I can: https://designsystem.digital.gov/design-tokens/color/overview/ https://designsystem.digital.gov/design-tokens/color/overvie... but getting stupid 20 something designers with perfect vision to pay attention is almost impossible :p
- AJ007 5y ago
  I would have been horrified if I saw what websites would look like in 2010+ when I first started using the web. The amount of unnecessary garbage and JS added to sites goes well beyond the adtech part. Half or more of sites using frameworks probably should never have used them. A good contrast is Reddit vs hn. Reddit’s current site is basically unusable and sluggish on modern hardware that can you could train ML models with.
  - moritz 5y ago
    Just look at all the overhead of the article‘s website… When I first clicked the link the "website" crashed, so instead of the hot take, all I could read is that "addEventListener is not a function". That tells you all about the current state of affairs (Yes I get that webdevs' personal sites are their playground)
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      That website also loads 184 KB of Javascript to display a 13 KB static document
      - raytube 5y ago
        It could sit on a shit ton of interpreter too.
    - xemdetia 5y ago
      My favourite recent incarnation if this is when YouTube has its JavaScript go sideways and then it blames the internet being out instead of doing anything productive
- oblio 5y ago
  And if you try it on mobile, it's mostly crap. Let's not treat HTML tables as being some super special ability. If HN were implemented exactly the same but with flexbox or grid for layout, it would be objectively better with no drawbacks I can think of.
  - post-it 5y ago
    HN is fantastic on mobile. Much better than Reddit, even old.reddit and i.reddit.
    - Enginerrrd 5y ago
      Yeah it's easily one of THE best mobile sites I use.
      - notriddle 5y ago
        The touch targets are way too small, and I don’t even have fat fingers.
        post-it 5y ago
        Anecdotally, I've found that iOS handles small touch targets much better than Android. I had an HTC Raider, a Moto G, and a Moto X Play, and I felt very fat-fingered on all of them. Then I switched to an iPhone 6s and now an iPhone 12 Mini and with both of them I've had zero problems with small touch targets, even ones that are close to each other like with Nonograms.
  - g8oz 5y ago
    I dunno, it looks great on Firefox mobile.
  - Shikadi 5y ago
    Definitely works fine on mobile for me
    - 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- danShumway 5y ago
  > it just works. Going to push back on this line specifically, HN has a number of issues. They're not dealbreakers, but they're also not particularly hard to fix with modern HTML. HN has generally kind of bad accessibility/semantics, it's pretty frustrating to use on mobile, and it degrades kind of poorly without Javascript (collapsing thread buttons still appear even though they don't work, also, collapsing thread buttons don't work without JS). HN is (unironically) a great example of how kind of hacky you can make something and how little you can iterate on it while people still are mostly able to use it for its intended purpose. And (with the exception of maybe its blind accessibility problems) it should be held up as a great example of that. But it's not a good example of "do things simply and they'll just work well." If anything, HN is a great example of why stuff like tables were abandoned. And the HTML isn't even that simple, this must have been a royal pain to build, everything everywhere is another embedded table. It's a weird dig at how bad some major websites have become that people don't see HN's HTML as bloated or convoluted. Ever really dug into how HN threading works? Everything is a top-level comment, and it inserts transparent images to create the illusion of indentation. It's a wildly out-of-left-field solution that makes parsing out and styling threads way harder than it needs to be. Seriously, I've spent way too much time trying to figure out how to make CSS selectors for custom user-styling work on child comments/replies on a site that is supposed to be displaying a comment tree in the DOM tree. There's a one-to-one mapping there, you don't really need a complicated visual slight-of-hand to display this information; just put the comments in the tree. Again, not to get mad at HN; but I think people use it as a positive example in the wrong situations. HN has bad HTML with obvious downsides that would be pretty easy to fix, but it turns out that creating an elegant website and filing off the rough edges is actually a really small part of running a community, and doesn't matter that much in the long run when compared to other things you could be doing to foster that community (like moderation/curation), and that is a very good lesson for tech people to learn from HN. But nobody should praise the HTML on this site, there are much better examples out there on the web of sites that use simple HTML to great effect. ---- > (Applications are a different matter obviously) Much more minor push-back but I actually would love to see more applications embrace the interactive document model even when fully native and fully offline. Not all applications, but a bunch of them. Stuff like calculators, calendars, even bigger applications like database software/image viewers/file browsers, etc... User-accessible stylesheets for applications, user-accessible scraping tools for applications, etc... I think there's a lot of potential for user computing hidden behind a willingness to say, "no, many applications are just text displayed in tree/table form when you think about it, and the app/document divide was always sort of nonsense."
meotimdihia 5y ago
You still can build a simple web in 1 min with Next.js and with greater speed. Pico.css is for zero customize website. Once the website requires customization, it does not work. Tailwind is easier.
dna_polymerase 5y ago
But all the things you mentioned are optional. The web is amazingly backwards compatible. Best example: one of Germany's most read blogs: https://blog.fefe.de https://blog.fefe.de
Mezzie 5y ago
> Yes, tailwind might make css a lot easier, and github copilot might make coding a lot faster... but is this really easier than in the early 90ies, when you could just type <html> into notepad and make a website that didn't require any CSS or images or JS or even more than just the most basic html tags? I mean you still can, it's just that nobody's going to hire you to do that and nobody is going to be impressed by it. Even back in the 90s when it was that easy, it was all hobbyists. By the time the dot-com boom started taking off, it was complicated. CSS + JS, no responsive design (remember designing 3 different sites to deal with the 460x640, 600x800, and 1280x1024 resolutions? Frames and no frames? Different sites for each browser [or ones that only worked in one bc things were even less standard than now - 'this site only works in IE'?] etc.) Now it's the tools adding the complexity, but back then it was hardware, browsers, etc.
- leephillips 5y ago
  “no responsive design (remember designing 3 different sites to deal with the 460x640, 600x800, and 1280x1024 resolutions?” Using media queries with breakpoints, and doing exactly what you describe, was the original “responsive design”. What you have in mind (I think) is what might be called “fluid design”—responsive design without media queries. You could always do this to some extent with such things as inline blocks, auto margins, and other ancient CSS technology (and an unstyled site also reflows responsively), but flex and grid allow more elaborate fluid designs. There is also some advantage to making separate designs carefully crafted for a variety of screen shapes, that you give up with fluid design techniques.
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    Thanks for the correction/deep dive here. I was a kid + don't have an official education in cs, so I mix up terminology and what things were called sometimes. I remember when media queries came out. It was so nice. Amazing. 10/10 for the time. You can do a lot with auto-margins and other ancient CSS, but there are definitely quite a lot of limits. (Sighs in someone who does a lot of email design and academic CMS design... let's party like it's 1999...) > There is also some advantage to making separate designs carefully crafted for a variety of screen shapes, that you give up with fluid design techniques. I agree strongly with this from a UX/UI point of view and as an educator.
pech0rin 5y ago
I understand the point you are making but is HN really the best example of modern web app? For better or worse web apps have replaced desktop apps. Not everything on the web is a simple list of articles and comments. Some things require extremely complex interactions and workflows. I don't think minimalism is the cure for everything, sometimes you need _some_ complexity and yes sometimes things are easier to use with a little bit of interaction instead of just text, forms, and plain html.
- hooby 5y ago
  No, it's most definitely not the best example of a modern web app. But everyone reading this knows it, and it does serve as proof that you can build a successful website with extremely little design & features. Therefore it seemed a good choice to illustrate my point.
root_axis 5y ago
> is this really easier than in the early 90ies, when you could just type <html> into notepad and make a website that didn't require any CSS or images or JS or even more than just the most basic html tags? Nothing is stopping someone from doing that today, but that's no longer the only option, thus it seems accurate that it is easier today than ever before.
- swilliamsio 5y ago
  In a way, its more difficult today because there are so many options for web development that it's paralysing to even find out where to start. Still, can't go wrong starting with the most basic option.
  - root_axis 5y ago
    That's like saying "it's harder than ever to cut wood because there are 100 different types of saws in Home Depot". I don't really buy this line of reasoning, different tools exist to tackle different types of problems, if someone has no idea what they're doing then it's their responsibility to get educated, that's as true today as it ever was, except today it's much easier to get educated than ever before.
_fat_santa 5y ago
> Yes, tailwind might make css a lot easier, and github copilot might make coding a lot faster... but is this really easier than in the early 90ies, when you could just type <html> into notepad and make a website that didn't require any CSS or images or JS or even more than just the most basic html tags? The thing is you can still do all of this. But we have since built tools and frameworks to let you still do this, while giving you superpowers. I think Svelte is the best example of this. You can create a dead simple site with it and have the result you are talking about, but the real power is now you can employ many of those advanced techniques that were reserved for large web apps in the same dead simple site. > Is tailwind really easier to work with something like - let's say - pico.css? Of course if you want to do super-elaborate layouts, then probably yes - but if you embraced a more minimalist approach? I've used tailwind quite a bit, it's killer feature is the fact that it's just intuitive. With most CSS frameworks, even minimal ones, I always refer back to the docs to see how they do a specific thing. With Tailwind you refer to the guide a few times but very quickly pick up how it does things. I think that's why it's so popular, I've typed out classes thinking "is this a thing", and almost every single time, it was.
- thomasahle 5y ago
  > The thing is you can still do all of this. But we have since built tools and frameworks to let you still do this, while giving you superpowers. I think Svelte is the best example of this. You can create a dead simple site with it and have the result you are talking about I don't know. I just tried to use Netlify to upload a simple static Html/Javascript page I made. Now I'm trying to figure out CORS errors. Pretty sure that didn't use to be a thing. For better and worse.
  - jakelazaroff 5y ago
    If you're trying to figure out CORS errors, it means you're either loading fonts or making XMLHttpRequests across domains. Neither of those were available in the 90s era OP is rhapsodizing about. You don't have to use the additional features/complexity of the past 15–20 years… but if you do, it's not surprising that things get a little more complex!
handrous 5y ago
C. 2000 I was able to match state-of-the-art web designs, solo, without much difficulty, writing raw HTML & JS. And get paid for it. I was in high school. That was the best time to build websites. (Though at least "flat" trends and terrible UX out of several major companies mean my shitty designs are back to looking about as good and working about as well as "pro" designers, so that's, kind of, an improvement over ~2005-2014)
mattlondon 5y ago
In the 90s we didn't have the developer console or sophisticated debugging tools. The only way to debug was "alert("foo")" placed in strategic locations! We also had to handle significantly varied browser differences. You can do a 90s style site today and vastly benefit from modern tech.
- stef25 5y ago
  I remember putting border: 1px solid red around my layout "blocks" to help me build layouts (of course the extra pixels could mess with the layout). Then dev console came and you could inspect and mouse over those blocks and those red lines would appear and it was just amazing.
notjustanymike 5y ago
> Isn't Hacker News itself a really great example of a website that successfully uses only very basic html with very, very little styling and fancy extra features? Hacker News is an aesthetic that would be unacceptable to the majority of businesses in the world. The login page alone would cripple sales on any e-commerce site.
- albertshin 5y ago
  why do you think that's the case? is it because people will feel 'sketched out' by the bareness and leave?
  - notjustanymike 5y ago
    Yes exactly. Stripe built a whole business on this concept by creating an easy to implement, trustable experience for otherwise dodgy looking small shops. Trust is huge, and a sketchy looking form destroys trust.
- hooby 5y ago
  So... Are you trying to argue that it's easier today to make an acceptable company website than it was in the 90ies... or that it was easier in the 90ies than it is now?
  - notjustanymike 5y ago
    Neither. I'm arguing that Hacker News is not a good example to use when discussing web development. It's easy to make a site simple when you refuse to implement any features, but that refusal is a luxury most businesses do not have.
platz 5y ago
Is tailwind much better than tachyons?
- moritz 5y ago
  no, but the tachoyns devs are a bit "opinionated" as to which directions the thing should go (and which ones it shouldn't) and seem to have moved on for the most part. one of the reasons why even though tachyons came before tailwind, the latter has a much wider adoption and more active development
- rhtgrg 5y ago
  Tailwind seems to be more mature and better documented. Apart from that, they're pretty similar, so if you're used to one you probably won't get much of a benefit from switching to the other. I see that the example websites from Tailwind look much better than those from Tachyons, though I'm not sure whether that's just a matter of taste.
rhtgrg 5y ago
I'd like to reframe your argument around expectations. Regardless of the difficulty of building websites, the bar is dramatically higher than it used to be. Look at what Amazon was able to get away with at one point [0]. The need for good security practices is also the highest its ever been (and will continue to matter more in the future). So, in some ways, its never been more difficult to build a website. Thankfully FOSS lets us outsource a lot of the work. [0] https://i.imgur.com/OAyZWnZ.png https://i.imgur.com/OAyZWnZ.png
kitsunesoba 5y ago
In terms of accessibility I’m not sure we’ve done better than GeoCities and AngelFire. WYSIWYG page design tools have gotten better, but those are only “necessary” because page designs have become more complicated and simple, less “professional” styling has fallen out of popularity outside of technical circles. Those old page hosting services also served to get non-technical users to dip their toes into writing HTML, setting them on a path of learning, whereas newer page hosting services are either skewed no-code (e.g SquareSpace) or technical (e.g. GitHub Pages and Netlify) with little in-between, which keeps non-technical users locked into the WYSIWYG tools to a greater extent.
seer 5y ago
The reader view (from any of the browsers really) has become my base performance review tool. If a webpage is meant for presenting textual content and is actually _improved_ by a reader view, that means the design has failed. There actually are websites out there that don’t benefit much from that view HN being a prime example.
stevenicr 5y ago
agree it's false that it's never been easier, and like to add a few small datapoints. 20 or so years ago you had microsocft frontpage - anyone could build a site with little learning. heck microsoft word could spit out the doc as html I dunno how long ago. some 15 years ago or so, I ran into a 'junk hauler' I found via google, asked who did his site, he said he did. I was like wow you were #1 in google organic, that's amazing - he said he opened microsoft publisher, put in the text, added a picture of his truck and clicked publish. A lot has changed since then of course - google demands responsive layouts to rank well, and most people use a phone to surf.. which for a while made frameworks the magic since css grid was not baked into word/publisher/ie... anyhow as far as 'easy' the are many other easier tools to use than tailwinds to make a site, and have been for more than a decade. Now that browsers can auto fit via flex and grid - tailwind and similar are the bloat, not the easy-button.
taeric 5y ago
I seem to recall Dreamweaver was also good at pretty websites. And it is hard to deny that flash enabled some massively interactive sites back in the day. Of a nature that I don't see much nowadays. I suspect if you are wanting to create interactive things scratch is a gem.
atoav 5y ago
I am positively confident that I could teach a bunch of art students (so definitively non tech people) how to create their basic website only using html and css (without any framework/library etc) in 2 to 3 days including the domain and hosting part.
- inkeddeveloper 5y ago
  Weird flex, but okay.
  - atoav 5y ago
    What I wanted to hint at with this was, that good old HTML and CSS is both enough and probably trivially simple to get started with for the HN crowd if they don't know how to use it yet. A lot of simple websites don't need more than that. And if you sprinkle a bit of js on top you can also dig into the land of not so simple websites.
oliwarner 5y ago
You can still hack in HTML (and CSS) in a basic editor. I do occasionally. No design or js frameworks, no elaborate build systems, just me and my editor. I don't think I'd have been so cocky five or ten years ago. Bootstrap solved real problems with cross browser layouts, jQuery fixed serious holes in some browsers' standard libraries. But the things they did then are things I'd happily freehand now. In short, it's easier because 99% of browsers in use aren't awful and flex and grid make the float mess of the mid-Naughties irrelevant.

by hooby 5y ago

ajlburke 5y ago

Hacker News still uses tables - for layout! But it always loads super fast, and it just works. We figured out how to display text on a web page decades ago. It's a shame more people aren't just doing it the direct way anymore. (Applications are a different matter obviously)

ape4 5y ago
Because of your comment I just looked at the source - yup tables. And a spacer gif too https://news.ycombinator.com/s.gif https://news.ycombinator.com/s.gif
- Mezzie 5y ago
  I think it's old enough to be a retro design choice now.
hooby 5y ago
I don't think any of this is "good" web-design. But my argument never was about the layout or design of Hacker News being "better". What I meant to argue was, that content is king, and that everything else should serve the actual content - not distract from it.
- EricE 5y ago
  "What I meant to argue was, that content is king, and that everything else should serve the actual content - not distract from it." Thank you! So many sites have utterly garbage contrast, making content unreadable - it's so annoying. I spam this excellent discussion of color and usability as often as I can: https://designsystem.digital.gov/design-tokens/color/overview/ https://designsystem.digital.gov/design-tokens/color/overvie... but getting stupid 20 something designers with perfect vision to pay attention is almost impossible :p
AJ007 5y ago
I would have been horrified if I saw what websites would look like in 2010+ when I first started using the web. The amount of unnecessary garbage and JS added to sites goes well beyond the adtech part. Half or more of sites using frameworks probably should never have used them. A good contrast is Reddit vs hn. Reddit’s current site is basically unusable and sluggish on modern hardware that can you could train ML models with.
- moritz 5y ago
  Just look at all the overhead of the article‘s website… When I first clicked the link the "website" crashed, so instead of the hot take, all I could read is that "addEventListener is not a function". That tells you all about the current state of affairs (Yes I get that webdevs' personal sites are their playground)
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    That website also loads 184 KB of Javascript to display a 13 KB static document
    - raytube 5y ago
      It could sit on a shit ton of interpreter too.
  - xemdetia 5y ago
    My favourite recent incarnation if this is when YouTube has its JavaScript go sideways and then it blames the internet being out instead of doing anything productive
oblio 5y ago
And if you try it on mobile, it's mostly crap. Let's not treat HTML tables as being some super special ability. If HN were implemented exactly the same but with flexbox or grid for layout, it would be objectively better with no drawbacks I can think of.
- post-it 5y ago
  HN is fantastic on mobile. Much better than Reddit, even old.reddit and i.reddit.
  - Enginerrrd 5y ago
    Yeah it's easily one of THE best mobile sites I use.
    - notriddle 5y ago
      The touch targets are way too small, and I don’t even have fat fingers.
      - post-it 5y ago
        Anecdotally, I've found that iOS handles small touch targets much better than Android. I had an HTC Raider, a Moto G, and a Moto X Play, and I felt very fat-fingered on all of them. Then I switched to an iPhone 6s and now an iPhone 12 Mini and with both of them I've had zero problems with small touch targets, even ones that are close to each other like with Nonograms.
- g8oz 5y ago
  I dunno, it looks great on Firefox mobile.
- Shikadi 5y ago
  Definitely works fine on mobile for me
  - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
danShumway 5y ago
> it just works. Going to push back on this line specifically, HN has a number of issues. They're not dealbreakers, but they're also not particularly hard to fix with modern HTML. HN has generally kind of bad accessibility/semantics, it's pretty frustrating to use on mobile, and it degrades kind of poorly without Javascript (collapsing thread buttons still appear even though they don't work, also, collapsing thread buttons don't work without JS). HN is (unironically) a great example of how kind of hacky you can make something and how little you can iterate on it while people still are mostly able to use it for its intended purpose. And (with the exception of maybe its blind accessibility problems) it should be held up as a great example of that. But it's not a good example of "do things simply and they'll just work well." If anything, HN is a great example of why stuff like tables were abandoned. And the HTML isn't even that simple, this must have been a royal pain to build, everything everywhere is another embedded table. It's a weird dig at how bad some major websites have become that people don't see HN's HTML as bloated or convoluted. Ever really dug into how HN threading works? Everything is a top-level comment, and it inserts transparent images to create the illusion of indentation. It's a wildly out-of-left-field solution that makes parsing out and styling threads way harder than it needs to be. Seriously, I've spent way too much time trying to figure out how to make CSS selectors for custom user-styling work on child comments/replies on a site that is supposed to be displaying a comment tree in the DOM tree. There's a one-to-one mapping there, you don't really need a complicated visual slight-of-hand to display this information; just put the comments in the tree. Again, not to get mad at HN; but I think people use it as a positive example in the wrong situations. HN has bad HTML with obvious downsides that would be pretty easy to fix, but it turns out that creating an elegant website and filing off the rough edges is actually a really small part of running a community, and doesn't matter that much in the long run when compared to other things you could be doing to foster that community (like moderation/curation), and that is a very good lesson for tech people to learn from HN. But nobody should praise the HTML on this site, there are much better examples out there on the web of sites that use simple HTML to great effect. ---- > (Applications are a different matter obviously) Much more minor push-back but I actually would love to see more applications embrace the interactive document model even when fully native and fully offline. Not all applications, but a bunch of them. Stuff like calculators, calendars, even bigger applications like database software/image viewers/file browsers, etc... User-accessible stylesheets for applications, user-accessible scraping tools for applications, etc... I think there's a lot of potential for user computing hidden behind a willingness to say, "no, many applications are just text displayed in tree/table form when you think about it, and the app/document divide was always sort of nonsense."

meotimdihia 5y ago

You still can build a simple web in 1 min with Next.js and with greater speed. Pico.css is for zero customize website. Once the website requires customization, it does not work. Tailwind is easier.

dna_polymerase 5y ago

But all the things you mentioned are optional. The web is amazingly backwards compatible. Best example: one of Germany's most read blogs: https://blog.fefe.de https://blog.fefe.de

Mezzie 5y ago

> Yes, tailwind might make css a lot easier, and github copilot might make coding a lot faster... but is this really easier than in the early 90ies, when you could just type <html> into notepad and make a website that didn't require any CSS or images or JS or even more than just the most basic html tags? I mean you still can, it's just that nobody's going to hire you to do that and nobody is going to be impressed by it. Even back in the 90s when it was that easy, it was all hobbyists. By the time the dot-com boom started taking off, it was complicated. CSS + JS, no responsive design (remember designing 3 different sites to deal with the 460x640, 600x800, and 1280x1024 resolutions? Frames and no frames? Different sites for each browser [or ones that only worked in one bc things were even less standard than now - 'this site only works in IE'?] etc.) Now it's the tools adding the complexity, but back then it was hardware, browsers, etc.

leephillips 5y ago
“no responsive design (remember designing 3 different sites to deal with the 460x640, 600x800, and 1280x1024 resolutions?” Using media queries with breakpoints, and doing exactly what you describe, was the original “responsive design”. What you have in mind (I think) is what might be called “fluid design”—responsive design without media queries. You could always do this to some extent with such things as inline blocks, auto margins, and other ancient CSS technology (and an unstyled site also reflows responsively), but flex and grid allow more elaborate fluid designs. There is also some advantage to making separate designs carefully crafted for a variety of screen shapes, that you give up with fluid design techniques.
- Mezzie 5y ago
  Thanks for the correction/deep dive here. I was a kid + don't have an official education in cs, so I mix up terminology and what things were called sometimes. I remember when media queries came out. It was so nice. Amazing. 10/10 for the time. You can do a lot with auto-margins and other ancient CSS, but there are definitely quite a lot of limits. (Sighs in someone who does a lot of email design and academic CMS design... let's party like it's 1999...) > There is also some advantage to making separate designs carefully crafted for a variety of screen shapes, that you give up with fluid design techniques. I agree strongly with this from a UX/UI point of view and as an educator.

pech0rin 5y ago

I understand the point you are making but is HN really the best example of modern web app? For better or worse web apps have replaced desktop apps. Not everything on the web is a simple list of articles and comments. Some things require extremely complex interactions and workflows. I don't think minimalism is the cure for everything, sometimes you need _some_ complexity and yes sometimes things are easier to use with a little bit of interaction instead of just text, forms, and plain html.

hooby 5y ago
No, it's most definitely not the best example of a modern web app. But everyone reading this knows it, and it does serve as proof that you can build a successful website with extremely little design & features. Therefore it seemed a good choice to illustrate my point.

root_axis 5y ago

> is this really easier than in the early 90ies, when you could just type <html> into notepad and make a website that didn't require any CSS or images or JS or even more than just the most basic html tags? Nothing is stopping someone from doing that today, but that's no longer the only option, thus it seems accurate that it is easier today than ever before.

swilliamsio 5y ago
In a way, its more difficult today because there are so many options for web development that it's paralysing to even find out where to start. Still, can't go wrong starting with the most basic option.
- root_axis 5y ago
  That's like saying "it's harder than ever to cut wood because there are 100 different types of saws in Home Depot". I don't really buy this line of reasoning, different tools exist to tackle different types of problems, if someone has no idea what they're doing then it's their responsibility to get educated, that's as true today as it ever was, except today it's much easier to get educated than ever before.

_fat_santa 5y ago

> Yes, tailwind might make css a lot easier, and github copilot might make coding a lot faster... but is this really easier than in the early 90ies, when you could just type <html> into notepad and make a website that didn't require any CSS or images or JS or even more than just the most basic html tags? The thing is you can still do all of this. But we have since built tools and frameworks to let you still do this, while giving you superpowers. I think Svelte is the best example of this. You can create a dead simple site with it and have the result you are talking about, but the real power is now you can employ many of those advanced techniques that were reserved for large web apps in the same dead simple site. > Is tailwind really easier to work with something like - let's say - pico.css? Of course if you want to do super-elaborate layouts, then probably yes - but if you embraced a more minimalist approach? I've used tailwind quite a bit, it's killer feature is the fact that it's just intuitive. With most CSS frameworks, even minimal ones, I always refer back to the docs to see how they do a specific thing. With Tailwind you refer to the guide a few times but very quickly pick up how it does things. I think that's why it's so popular, I've typed out classes thinking "is this a thing", and almost every single time, it was.

thomasahle 5y ago
> The thing is you can still do all of this. But we have since built tools and frameworks to let you still do this, while giving you superpowers. I think Svelte is the best example of this. You can create a dead simple site with it and have the result you are talking about I don't know. I just tried to use Netlify to upload a simple static Html/Javascript page I made. Now I'm trying to figure out CORS errors. Pretty sure that didn't use to be a thing. For better and worse.
- jakelazaroff 5y ago
  If you're trying to figure out CORS errors, it means you're either loading fonts or making XMLHttpRequests across domains. Neither of those were available in the 90s era OP is rhapsodizing about. You don't have to use the additional features/complexity of the past 15–20 years… but if you do, it's not surprising that things get a little more complex!

handrous 5y ago

C. 2000 I was able to match state-of-the-art web designs, solo, without much difficulty, writing raw HTML & JS. And get paid for it. I was in high school. That was the best time to build websites. (Though at least "flat" trends and terrible UX out of several major companies mean my shitty designs are back to looking about as good and working about as well as "pro" designers, so that's, kind of, an improvement over ~2005-2014)

mattlondon 5y ago

In the 90s we didn't have the developer console or sophisticated debugging tools. The only way to debug was "alert("foo")" placed in strategic locations! We also had to handle significantly varied browser differences. You can do a 90s style site today and vastly benefit from modern tech.

stef25 5y ago
I remember putting border: 1px solid red around my layout "blocks" to help me build layouts (of course the extra pixels could mess with the layout). Then dev console came and you could inspect and mouse over those blocks and those red lines would appear and it was just amazing.

notjustanymike 5y ago

> Isn't Hacker News itself a really great example of a website that successfully uses only very basic html with very, very little styling and fancy extra features? Hacker News is an aesthetic that would be unacceptable to the majority of businesses in the world. The login page alone would cripple sales on any e-commerce site.

albertshin 5y ago
why do you think that's the case? is it because people will feel 'sketched out' by the bareness and leave?
- notjustanymike 5y ago
  Yes exactly. Stripe built a whole business on this concept by creating an easy to implement, trustable experience for otherwise dodgy looking small shops. Trust is huge, and a sketchy looking form destroys trust.
hooby 5y ago
So... Are you trying to argue that it's easier today to make an acceptable company website than it was in the 90ies... or that it was easier in the 90ies than it is now?
- notjustanymike 5y ago
  Neither. I'm arguing that Hacker News is not a good example to use when discussing web development. It's easy to make a site simple when you refuse to implement any features, but that refusal is a luxury most businesses do not have.

platz 5y ago

Is tailwind much better than tachyons?

moritz 5y ago
no, but the tachoyns devs are a bit "opinionated" as to which directions the thing should go (and which ones it shouldn't) and seem to have moved on for the most part. one of the reasons why even though tachyons came before tailwind, the latter has a much wider adoption and more active development
rhtgrg 5y ago
Tailwind seems to be more mature and better documented. Apart from that, they're pretty similar, so if you're used to one you probably won't get much of a benefit from switching to the other. I see that the example websites from Tailwind look much better than those from Tachyons, though I'm not sure whether that's just a matter of taste.

rhtgrg 5y ago

I'd like to reframe your argument around expectations. Regardless of the difficulty of building websites, the bar is dramatically higher than it used to be. Look at what Amazon was able to get away with at one point [0]. The need for good security practices is also the highest its ever been (and will continue to matter more in the future). So, in some ways, its never been more difficult to build a website. Thankfully FOSS lets us outsource a lot of the work. [0] https://i.imgur.com/OAyZWnZ.png https://i.imgur.com/OAyZWnZ.png

kitsunesoba 5y ago

In terms of accessibility I’m not sure we’ve done better than GeoCities and AngelFire. WYSIWYG page design tools have gotten better, but those are only “necessary” because page designs have become more complicated and simple, less “professional” styling has fallen out of popularity outside of technical circles. Those old page hosting services also served to get non-technical users to dip their toes into writing HTML, setting them on a path of learning, whereas newer page hosting services are either skewed no-code (e.g SquareSpace) or technical (e.g. GitHub Pages and Netlify) with little in-between, which keeps non-technical users locked into the WYSIWYG tools to a greater extent.

seer 5y ago

The reader view (from any of the browsers really) has become my base performance review tool. If a webpage is meant for presenting textual content and is actually _improved_ by a reader view, that means the design has failed. There actually are websites out there that don’t benefit much from that view HN being a prime example.

stevenicr 5y ago

agree it's false that it's never been easier, and like to add a few small datapoints. 20 or so years ago you had microsocft frontpage - anyone could build a site with little learning. heck microsoft word could spit out the doc as html I dunno how long ago. some 15 years ago or so, I ran into a 'junk hauler' I found via google, asked who did his site, he said he did. I was like wow you were #1 in google organic, that's amazing - he said he opened microsoft publisher, put in the text, added a picture of his truck and clicked publish. A lot has changed since then of course - google demands responsive layouts to rank well, and most people use a phone to surf.. which for a while made frameworks the magic since css grid was not baked into word/publisher/ie... anyhow as far as 'easy' the are many other easier tools to use than tailwinds to make a site, and have been for more than a decade. Now that browsers can auto fit via flex and grid - tailwind and similar are the bloat, not the easy-button.

taeric 5y ago

I seem to recall Dreamweaver was also good at pretty websites. And it is hard to deny that flash enabled some massively interactive sites back in the day. Of a nature that I don't see much nowadays. I suspect if you are wanting to create interactive things scratch is a gem.

atoav 5y ago

I am positively confident that I could teach a bunch of art students (so definitively non tech people) how to create their basic website only using html and css (without any framework/library etc) in 2 to 3 days including the domain and hosting part.

inkeddeveloper 5y ago
Weird flex, but okay.
- atoav 5y ago
  What I wanted to hint at with this was, that good old HTML and CSS is both enough and probably trivially simple to get started with for the HN crowd if they don't know how to use it yet. A lot of simple websites don't need more than that. And if you sprinkle a bit of js on top you can also dig into the land of not so simple websites.

oliwarner 5y ago

You can still hack in HTML (and CSS) in a basic editor. I do occasionally. No design or js frameworks, no elaborate build systems, just me and my editor. I don't think I'd have been so cocky five or ten years ago. Bootstrap solved real problems with cross browser layouts, jQuery fixed serious holes in some browsers' standard libraries. But the things they did then are things I'd happily freehand now. In short, it's easier because 99% of browsers in use aren't awful and flex and grid make the float mess of the mid-Naughties irrelevant.