8 ms·
Just use HTML
- kyrylo 1y agoStop reinventing the wheel. The web was doing just fine before your bloated frameworks crawled out of the sewer.
- nartho 1y agoThis link has been posted a million times, and I'm always surprised by the reactions. Yes, for anything that is data driven, plain HTML is great. Maybe sprinkle some markdown on top of it but that's all you really need. But is that the only use for the web ? Are we pretending that the internet is only a collection of articles ? How do you end up with Figma, Soundation or Tinkercad with just plain html ? No you (probably) don't need nextjs with greensocks for your blog, but there are valid reasons why fancy frameworks or javascript might be needed. I think saying that plain HTML is all you need is as silly as saying that you should always use the latest framework in your project.
- pixxel 1y ago[dead]
- fithisux 1y agoI love it. A million thumbs ups. I am a data engineer and coming from scientific background. And guess what works most of the time, the simplest (not naive or buggy) solution to your problem that takes into account the human factor, the consumer of your solution. That poor being currently being ousted from the binary garden of Eden by AI cops.
- rad_gruchalski 1y ago> Hey, dipshit! I couldn’t care less but… good luck convincing people with this attitude.
- pier25 1y agoIt's satire...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ninetyninenine 1y agoThis is non fiction, not satire.
- Philpax 1y agoThis is inherited from the websites [0][1][2][3] it was inspired by. [0]: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ [1]: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ [2]: https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/ https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/ [3]: https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
- kyrylo 1y agoCorrect! The footer includes a link to the first one
- rad_gruchalski 1y agoI see a “Hey, dipshit”, I press back button, not look for a footer.
- kyrylo 1y agoNot for everyone, I get it. Just move along.
- rad_gruchalski 1y agoIf you have to explain your joke, it didn’t work.
- AlecSwanky 1y agofunny
- xnorswap 1y agoSomehow this site is both plain HTML yet also blocks the Firefox reader button, rendering it unreadable. ( Edit: Browsing to https://justfuckingusehtml.com/index.html https://justfuckingusehtml.com/index.html shows the reader button, I guess Firefox has a really dumb heuristic for when it shows. )
- Retr0id 1y agoI was having trouble getting reader mode to "detect" my blog posts a while back, I was never able to find documentation on how it decides to show the button or not.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- uallo 1y agoYou may be able to debug it with https://github.com/mozilla/readability https://github.com/mozilla/readability
- frizlab 1y agoReader works in Safari
- throwanem 1y agoReadability's heuristic is intentionally opaque as a defense against targeting by advertisers and others who abuse the web.
- icameron 1y ago* Except in email clients.
- 123sereusername 1y ago[dead]
- InMice 1y agoYou don't need to swear at me about it, thanks.
- Tade0 1y agoI think this style of writing tries to emulate what passed as "cool" in the early 2010s or so. Matthew Inman of "The Oatmeal" is to me a leading representative of it.
- throwanem 1y agoIt's an extremely intentional and all but plagiaristic take on a Zed Shaw piece from the late oughts. Tastelessly slavish imitation, at absolute minimum. At least the original is linked in tiny print at the bottom, below the advertisement.
- Tade0 1y agoAh, of course, how could I forget the pioneer of this style in tech and his work? I didn't notice that link as I found the Telebugs ad off-putting and closed the tab. I believe he mellowed out since.
- throwanem 1y agoA great deal, I hear, but he was young then too, and deeply frustrated with a poisonous Boston in-crowd. The methylphenidate style has not come back into vogue in the meanwhile, no more than Rails ever has or will.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- incoming1211 1y agoBoo fucking hoo. You wouldn't survive long in Australia or New Zealand where swearing is common in the work place.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoI could live with it ... if only there was a significant left margin.
- lostmsu 1y agoSome paragraphing wouldn't hurt either.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- LetsGetTechnicl 1y agoI mean yeah I guess, but does this person really think people carry groceries in Gucci bags?
- Retr0id 1y agoWhat percentage of this was written by an LLM? (Asking out of genuine curiosity, parts of it are triggering my LLM-detector while others feel human)
- ninetyninenine 1y agoI wish html would just look good from the get go.
- squidbeak 1y ago"HTML needs to require bigger CSS resets."
- DaSHacka 1y agoTheoretically if pure-HTML documents without CSS/JS got more common, end-users could just apply ther own 'themes' to HTML documents through their browser.
- keyringlight 1y agoHow much of that is down to browser bare-bones defaults before the page defines its own styles, IIRC bare HTML doesn't define what the client must do because at that level it's not defining a presentation. I could see a browser making a change to have their defaults for an undefined style to something else, other colors and fonts or closer to reader mode, with an options toggle or flag to restore old behavior. I doubt many browsers would bother as unstyled pages are so rare for most of the web.
- reconnecting 1y agoWe made tirreno website [1] with only HTML 4.01 and 1 transparent pixel, no CSS or JS. Works well on any device. Easy to update. Highly recommended. [1] https://www.tirreno.com/ https://www.tirreno.com/
- bambax 1y ago| <font size="5" face="Helvetica">Monitor and protect your web app from cyberfraud, account threats, bots and abuse with a single security platform.</font> Sure but how is this better than setting up the font in CSS? There may be an advantage to not having an external CSS file, but setting up CSS rules inside the HTML file works perfectly well and is much more maintainable than this IMHO.
- reconnecting 1y agoThe short answer: Because anyone can do this using in-line or in-file CSS. The long answer: Technologies are a blend of humans and machines. Typing HTML code by yourself, especially in 2025, gives another level of meaning and human touch. It's more like modern art in some way.
- Mashimo 1y agoMight be art, might be fun. But you also claimed it's easy to update. But now you have to write <font size="5" face="Helvetica"> every time you create another one of those elements. And if you want to change the font you would need to search and replace in different .html files. It does not seem easy to update.
- reconnecting 1y agoEasy to update means you only need a text editor and source code to maintain it. Regarding the effort to write `<font size="5" face="Helvetica">` (I'm just typing this again), it's fairly easy, and taking into account the meaning of the text inside those tags, it is worth spending the time for typing.
- 1y ago
- baal80spam 1y agoI loved web 1.0, but try to sell it to a customer.
- cheschire 1y agoI’m not entirely sure this form of satire lands the same way it used to now that screaming and insults are considered a normal form of discourse, especially in TV politics.
- untrust 1y agoThis form of banter reminds me of Maddox from the early 2000s, which funnily enough is still active at https://maddox.xmission.com/ https://maddox.xmission.com/ I agree its relatively played out at this point. Really this page is just a showcase of HTML features for web developers who don't have much experience with HTML, and I think the insulting attitude and comedic approach may hold reader's interest than a more dry technical presentation of the content.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- groby_b 1y agoWhile there are some valid points hiding deep in the sewage flowing across the page, it also misses a core point: The web (HTML/CSS/JS) is by now good enough to make actually decent UI that doesn't look like it's escaped from the 90s and is holding Geocities hostage. As is, the page mostly screams "I don't want to learn anything new".
- ksymph 1y agoYeah, if the point they're making is that you can make modern websites with just HTML, the website looking as it does really undermines that. Show off some flair if you want to convince me! I think the site this one is based off [0] argues for simplicity in a much less muddled way. [0] https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
- tiahura 1y agoThe month picker doesn't function in FF 138.0.1 win64.
- pmdulaney 1y ago[flagged]
- roschdal 1y agoYes. Just use HTML.
- obsolete_wagie 1y ago"AI's out here, a gift from the heavens (or at least from Sam Altman's nerd fortress) ready to write your shitty little to-do app in five seconds flat. It can churn out pixel-perfect HTML, debug your fuck-ups, and probably even wipe your ass if you ask nicely. But no, you're still humping your frameworks like they're the last lifeboat on the Titanic." Personal opinion is that AI will reduce the need for higher abstraction software libraries. ORMs for instance could go away. We will see wildly different software paradigms as the need for human understanding drops
- mrkeen 1y agoLLMs reinforce what the majority is already doing, because that's what it's trained on. I'd like ORMs to go away but LLMs aren't going to do that.
- obsolete_wagie 1y agoits more fundamental than this, ai can certainly take an orm and replace it with generated sql. it can do the same for react components into html (still early days for this though).
- woodrowbarlow 1y agoi'm not sure i agree. maybe if you're "vibe-coding", but not if you're using AI as an assistant. a good abstraction makes it hard to write bugs, so telling AI to use a certain library (which i know to be high quality) is a good way to constrain the types of bugs i have to look for when reviewing the code.
- obsolete_wagie 1y agoonce AI reaches a certain level of accuracy, it will seem foolish to make it use abstractions built for humans
- garylkz 1y agoand once the "accurate" AI accidentally wrote bugs, it will seem even more foolish for humans to debug the binaries built by AI.
- c03 1y agoFuck I hate this moronic regressionist mindset. If your project is too insignificant to benefit from a framework, then just don't use it? It has nothing to do with the technology, but everything to do with your piece of shit usecase.
- 000ooo000 1y agoRelax, it's just some 24yo edgelord discovering a world exists outside what they learned at React Bootcamp and turning against The Frameworks to feel clever.
- simonw 1y agoTIL (from "Choose a week to question all your life choices") about: <input type="week"> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/input/week https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... Weird that it's supported by mobile Safari but not desktop Safari (according to the support table). And not in Firefox yet.
- jeroenhd 1y agoSame is true on Firefox: works fine on mobile, but doesn't work at all on desktop. Especially weird as the mobile week picker is just a date picker that ignores the picked day and returns a week it seems; surely the same could've been implemented for desktop.
- wcoenen 1y agoNote that these are ISO 8601 weeks, which may not match the expectations of users everywhere. E.g. the US has a different system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week#Other_week_numbering_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week#Other_week_numbering_syst...
- ratatoskrt 1y agoWhy does this feel like an LLM's attempt at satire?
- mdaniel 1y agoSponsored content via a justfucking website. Bold move Anyway, I am firmly in the "self-hosting modern Sentry is crazypants" camp, but https://telebugs.com/alternatives/glitchtip https://telebugs.com/alternatives/glitchtip reads like a hit piece, and not a serious "but, why?" I'll keep my Rails commentary to myself
- drannex 1y agothis is the best version of any of these I've seen over the years. and if anyones lame fucking corpo filter guard catches this, then let them catch these archived hands: https://web.archive.org/web/20250512141449/https://justfuckingusehtml.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250512141449/https://justfucki...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- drgo 1y agoDid not work on me. I have never used a web framework, but now I want to use one just out of spite.
- mbgerring 1y agoLook — I’m old enough to remember when the “web standards movement” was controversial. I had to argue with my boss about using CSS vs tables. And I remember when you did need javascript to do a lot of things that HTML now does natively. JS frameworks had to exist to push the state of the art, because the state of the art got stuck. The standards bodies and browser vendors got their shit together, and now you can do things you used to need frameworks for in plain HTML. That’s great! But let’s not re-write history, here. Software is in a constant state of revolution and counter-revolution. It’s one of the things that keeps this job interesting.
- ninetyninenine 1y agoSort of but it just builds on top of cruft. CSS and html is poorly designed to do what we are doing with it today. Like I understand the point of not building bloat. But the reason why people build bloated stuff like react is because the primitives are just raw shit. HTML and css is just really bad.
- ffsm8 1y agoOh? All things considered, I believe html and css are both great. Incredibly flexible and very easy to get a basic "framework" started for consistent design Everything else I've used to date (for UIs) was either extremely limited or way more complicated to use in comparison I personally feel like the only thing we're missing is a way more aggressive deprecation policy. Not actually removing the API, just clearly signal that you would probably be better off not using it in 2025.
- agos 1y agoCSS is really great, and I've felt this way since it was introduced - but the lack of tooling around it today is anachronistic
- braebo 1y agoCSS is incredible technology, but holy shit does it feel archaic in a large Typescript project to have a massive design system in a string. Why can’t I click an element and see the css files that apply to it? Why can I get autocomplete for my utility classes and custom properties? I would happily nuke CSS from a project for a typescript library that could marry the two worlds with minimal trade-offs, but I’ve yet to have the time or courage to dive into a library like vanilla-extract: https://vanilla-extract.style https://vanilla-extract.style
- criddell 1y ago> Just fucking use HTML. I shit you not, it actually looks good It can look good.
- cbeach 1y agoCleaning out the wordy, "oh so edgy" embellishment (probably authored by AI, ironically), here's a ChatGPT summary: HTML is simpler, faster, and more reliable The author rails against “bloated, over-engineered” JavaScript frameworks and build tools, pointing out that plain HTML loads instantly and “just fucking works” without constant updates or breaking changes Frameworks add needless complexity and cost You don’t need to manage hundreds of dependencies, CI/CD pipelines, hydration errors or “tree-shaking” when all you really want is a button or a bit of text. HTML has done this flawlessly for decades Native browser features handle interactivity Modern HTML alone supports expandable sections (<details>/<summary>), native dialogs, form controls of every kind (date pickers, sliders, color inputs, file uploads), and even creates global JS variables from element IDs—no framework required Deployment is trivial “Just drag, drop, and you’re done.” No container orchestration, no multi-step build process, no DevOps magic - HTML is ready to serve straight from any web server Universality and longevity Everyone “knows HTML” - from your grandparents’ wartime hand-coded tables to your dog’s Fiverr gig. It’s been powering the web since the beginning and will outlast any trendy framework A call to rethink our tooling addiction With AI able to spit out pixel-perfect HTML in seconds, clinging to heavy frameworks is framed as an outdated habit. The author challenges readers: stop overengineering and embrace the elegance of raw HTML
- 1970-01-01 1y agoThe raw ugliness of their site is reasonable cause to do the exact opposite.
- ryandrake 1y agoThe site is beautiful in that it is fast, flexible across multiple screen shapes, readable, and accessible. If only more web sites would make these choices!
- 1970-01-01 1y agoBack when monitors were 4:3 at 640x480, these plain HTML sites were readable and scrollable. It is 2025. Our ultrawide, ultrasmall, ultraresoultion screens make this a chore to read without playing with zoom levels.
- ryandrake 1y agoWhat’s a real chore to read are all those “modern” sites with dark gray text on light gray background, 8pt font, and text constrained to a tiny 4inch wide column in the middle of the monitor. The fact that browsers had to all go implement a separate “reader mode” so that web sites can even be readable again is damning.
- spudlyo 1y agoEven in a humorous context, cursing and insults land much better if they're used more sparingly. At some point in the essay they became distracting, and by the end I found them tiring.
- throwanem 1y agoYeah, I remember Zed in 2009. Do you think no one else does? What an embarrassing way to advertise.
- danhau 1y agoWow, I had no idea elements with an id attribute are directly accessible in JS. Combine this with Pico CSS or one of those minimal stylesheets (Water.css) to get better typography and spacing and you‘re set. I guess htmx is the extreme version of this no-framework philosophy… kinda.
- throwanem 1y agoWait, this actually says to use the implicit ID mapping on the global object? That hasn't been good advice since about 1999! edit: I checked and wow, it really does. Good grief, did an AI write this? Use getElementById or querySelector or querySelectorAll or any other remotely modern web API method instead.
- joquarky 1y agoIE started this. Now IE is gone and we will remain stuck with it forever.
- throwanem 1y ago"Stuck?" I think it's marvelous.
- gimboland 1y agoGenuinely curious (as someone who didn't know about the implicit ID mapping until today): given that IDs are global, why is doing this any worse (or in any way different) to using getElementById? I.e. why is it bad advice?
- throwanem 1y agoThis SO answer does a good job covering the reasons why, or all the reasons at least that I recall learning it was a bad idea. There may be more, but I'd probably have to go spec diving to find them. Offhand these days I would expect asynchronous loading and rendering both to pose additional concerns. You may not be able even to guarantee whether or not the element you're trying to reference by ID exists at the time of reference. Oh, you can synchronize on DOMContentLoaded or something like that, but that's not going to do anything good for performance. And for that matter, you'd probably have to toggle a TypeScript compiler option I've never heard of, to get this sort of thing to even sort of fly - and there again, the API methods dating from this millennium will be mostly the ones where the type system is able to offer some guarantees. https://stackoverflow.com/a/24606307 https://stackoverflow.com/a/24606307
- iammrpayments 1y agoUnfortunately there is a lot of stuff that can’t match accessibility standards without javascript (e.g. combobox). If you use a framework it’s much easier to implement these components.
- lerp-io 1y agoanother monday, another js framework debate shitpost.
- bgro 1y agoWhat if instead of just using html, instead we use 20 JavaScript frameworks that talk to an electron server to call a series of microservices to determine which sql lite docker instance to call. Then, sql lite returns a connection string to aws to pull XML containers of html that are converted to JSON and sent back to the front end to convert to html and render the page. Maybe we can use lazy loading and some sliding panels on the page that slide in with fully rendered bmp images that are 20MB each despite only appearing in a 16x16 icon. Oh darn this is just the standard webdev JavaScript bro tech flow? Guess I need to keep memorizing leetcode until I get my next genius JavaScript main idea to add another layer to this.
- camcil 1y agoThe complexity justifies the salary.
- radar1310 1y agoHe or she needs to wash their mouth out with some soap.
- sam_lowry_ 1y agoI would have added a section about tab index. Tab indices is lost sacred knowledge. Places like GitHub, GitLab and even Zed homepage break Vimium by adding "shortcuts" without even thinking to implement proper tab indices.
- prakashn27 1y agoToo much swearing and I lost the context midway
- perdomon 1y ago[flagged]
- cadamsdotcom 1y agoWe have great base tech on the web because people loved it when it was part of a trendy js framework, and wanted it in the base platform. If the web wasn’t so amenable to frameworks & polyfills HTML wouldn’t have gained all the nice things in HTML5. We can be grateful for the explosion of ideas & the standards process that (mostly) keeps the best ones.
- daft_pink 1y agowhy is this flagged. it’s f’ing awesome
- smitty1e 1y agoTarantino wept.
- ValveFan6969 1y agoFor those that missed it: the author overzealously uses swear words as a form of comedy.
- brvier 1y agoWhy flagged ?
- saghul 1y agoHa, nice! I created a little static site generator inspired by this "brutalist" style, in order to learn some Swift: https://github.com/saghul/brutalist-blog-generator https://github.com/saghul/brutalist-blog-generator
- incoming1211 1y agoSo some lefty tool got his nickers in a twist and flagged this. Wow.
- namegulf 1y agoThat's a good reset. With Web UI's bloated with frameworks, large CSS, crazy javascript, etc... Go back to basics the way HTML is intended, simple and fast!
- raspyberr 1y agoI would like this if it actually stuck to its own philosophy but for some crazy reason just HTML needs googletag manager and telebugs to look after it. Webdevs just can't leave shit alone can they?
- senfiaj 1y agoHe still used inline styles a couple of times. He also uses the Google Analytics script.