3 ms·

You can still build web pages like it's 1999. Nothing is stopping you. You can add menu bars like you're imitating Word 6, for all I care. But people will stop

by tgv 2y ago

You can still build web pages like it's 1999. Nothing is stopping you. You can add menu bars like you're imitating Word 6, for all I care. But people will stop visiting your site. The eye likes candy. That's why.

ndriscoll 2y ago
The problem is that others are building 2025 web pages. I recently had to pay for parking online (already an annoyance) because the kiosk was broken. That one transaction used like 3% of my data for the month. Why does it take dozens of megabytes to ask for a credit card number, license plate number, and lot id? Please just send me a single 500 byte form with some inputs. I'm not on your site to be entertained. It doesn't need to be a SPA. It needs an "enter your info" page and a "thank you" page.
- moralestapia 2y ago
  I'm guilty of that. Last week I shipped a few updates to one of my sites and completely ignored @ndriscoll's UI/UX guidelines. Can you believe it? Now, let's say I entertain your idea for 0.001 microseconds, we are going to backtrack on the largest human collaborative platform ever created and severely cripple it, forcing everybody to comply with your demands or else they're out of "the web". Do you even have them written in some document we can easily read/share? Or is going through your entire history of HN comments to figure out your arbitrary preferences expected as well?
  - ndriscoll 2y ago
    Sure, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element has a list of off the shelf elements and what they're for. If you're building a form, you can find the relevant bits under "Forms". In this case, they needed 2 pieces of short text, so they would use 2 text inputs, 2 labels, and a submit button. The lotid could've been in the URL so they could display the name on the page and the user wouldn't need to enter it if they used a QR code to navigate to the page. If they're feeling particularly adventurous, they could spend another hundred bytes on the Luhn algorithm in javascript to validate one of the two inputs. Or they could do it only on the server. It doesn't make much difference.
  - phkahler 2y ago
    >> Now, let's say I entertain your idea for 0.001 microseconds, we are going to backtrack on the largest human collaborative platform ever created and severely cripple it, forcing everybody to comply with your demands or else they're out of "the web". The problem is that the web designers are the ones "forcing everybody to comply" with their FONT choice and downloading all that font data. Keep the self-centered trait applied to the correct party please ;-)
    - moralestapia 2y ago
      Wait, how come the party that owns the website should not be the one who decides the content in it?
- wruza 2y ago
  I make interfaces sometimes and don’t like using “frameworks”. But if I don’t use one, all sorts of issues start to emerge. V-scrolls in single line inputs, my hbox/vboxes start fighting over margins when nested, labels don’t baseline align with input texts and look real ugly, scrollbars suddenly pop up into existence because something is 1px larger than expected. Of course the next thing I “should” do is to “learn css”, which is a steaming pile of crap that makes no sense and is barely generalizable even with a few megabytes of any reasonable “framework”, which usually still uses non-css-compiled-to-css sources and multiple auxiliary tools to add polyfills and browser specifics. No desktop framework I worked with required so much tuning and fixing and adjusting just to look normal-ish. So no. “You wanted 500 bytes? Too bad, here bootstrap.css.” Those responsible for it should fix this effing pile of shit that they call “browser layout and boxing model” then I’ll think about the few-kilobytes range.
  - ndriscoll 2y ago
    It's a payment form for a parking lot, not an art piece. It needs 2 text inputs. The default will just work. Think of all the forms that you've filled out by hand that someone typed up in Word using inconsistent spacing and a random number of underscores. Did you ever care? Of course not. Default HTML styles are literally a step up from that. The thing it's standing in for is a garbage LCD with 2s latency and a crappy keypad where it can only fit "License Plt #" as a prompt. And that's the better experience than the actual web one (which also required me to go fiddle with allowing scripts).
  - tgv 2y ago
    I just checked my login page: bootstrap.min.css is a bit over 20kB (compressed).
- tgv 2y ago
  I agree it's often overdone, but the people have spoken: they want a pretty looking form, and they want it now. Unfortunately, many web devs are absolutely illiterate when it comes to topics such as efficiency, performance, maths, correctness, etc., but the demand for flashy web pages is too great. Be glad your parking garage didn't have its own app.

by tgv 2y ago

ndriscoll 2y ago

The problem is that others are building 2025 web pages. I recently had to pay for parking online (already an annoyance) because the kiosk was broken. That one transaction used like 3% of my data for the month. Why does it take dozens of megabytes to ask for a credit card number, license plate number, and lot id? Please just send me a single 500 byte form with some inputs. I'm not on your site to be entertained. It doesn't need to be a SPA. It needs an "enter your info" page and a "thank you" page.

moralestapia 2y ago
I'm guilty of that. Last week I shipped a few updates to one of my sites and completely ignored @ndriscoll's UI/UX guidelines. Can you believe it? Now, let's say I entertain your idea for 0.001 microseconds, we are going to backtrack on the largest human collaborative platform ever created and severely cripple it, forcing everybody to comply with your demands or else they're out of "the web". Do you even have them written in some document we can easily read/share? Or is going through your entire history of HN comments to figure out your arbitrary preferences expected as well?
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  Sure, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element has a list of off the shelf elements and what they're for. If you're building a form, you can find the relevant bits under "Forms". In this case, they needed 2 pieces of short text, so they would use 2 text inputs, 2 labels, and a submit button. The lotid could've been in the URL so they could display the name on the page and the user wouldn't need to enter it if they used a QR code to navigate to the page. If they're feeling particularly adventurous, they could spend another hundred bytes on the Luhn algorithm in javascript to validate one of the two inputs. Or they could do it only on the server. It doesn't make much difference.
- phkahler 2y ago
  >> Now, let's say I entertain your idea for 0.001 microseconds, we are going to backtrack on the largest human collaborative platform ever created and severely cripple it, forcing everybody to comply with your demands or else they're out of "the web". The problem is that the web designers are the ones "forcing everybody to comply" with their FONT choice and downloading all that font data. Keep the self-centered trait applied to the correct party please ;-)
  - moralestapia 2y ago
    Wait, how come the party that owns the website should not be the one who decides the content in it?
wruza 2y ago
I make interfaces sometimes and don’t like using “frameworks”. But if I don’t use one, all sorts of issues start to emerge. V-scrolls in single line inputs, my hbox/vboxes start fighting over margins when nested, labels don’t baseline align with input texts and look real ugly, scrollbars suddenly pop up into existence because something is 1px larger than expected. Of course the next thing I “should” do is to “learn css”, which is a steaming pile of crap that makes no sense and is barely generalizable even with a few megabytes of any reasonable “framework”, which usually still uses non-css-compiled-to-css sources and multiple auxiliary tools to add polyfills and browser specifics. No desktop framework I worked with required so much tuning and fixing and adjusting just to look normal-ish. So no. “You wanted 500 bytes? Too bad, here bootstrap.css.” Those responsible for it should fix this effing pile of shit that they call “browser layout and boxing model” then I’ll think about the few-kilobytes range.
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  It's a payment form for a parking lot, not an art piece. It needs 2 text inputs. The default will just work. Think of all the forms that you've filled out by hand that someone typed up in Word using inconsistent spacing and a random number of underscores. Did you ever care? Of course not. Default HTML styles are literally a step up from that. The thing it's standing in for is a garbage LCD with 2s latency and a crappy keypad where it can only fit "License Plt #" as a prompt. And that's the better experience than the actual web one (which also required me to go fiddle with allowing scripts).
- tgv 2y ago
  I just checked my login page: bootstrap.min.css is a bit over 20kB (compressed).
tgv 2y ago
I agree it's often overdone, but the people have spoken: they want a pretty looking form, and they want it now. Unfortunately, many web devs are absolutely illiterate when it comes to topics such as efficiency, performance, maths, correctness, etc., but the demand for flashy web pages is too great. Be glad your parking garage didn't have its own app.