from Hacker News

The web is mostly links and forms

by kuba-orlik on 2/7/24, 4:22 PM with 20 comments

  • by ndriscoll on 2/7/24, 5:18 PM

    Back in the 90s chat was a separate program you ran, not a web page with a form. Largely this still makes sense. I don't want web pages to even theoretically be capable of getting presence information or popping up notifications just to support this single narrow ill-fitted use case. Older chat apps also knew how to use more than 1 window so you could have 2+ chats open at once, which is apparently beyond the capabilities of modern web UIs.

    Many things on the web are not interactive at all (news, blogs, shopping) or have almost no interactivity (forums). These things could just be HTML with a sprinkle of JavaScript for some flair like it's 2002. Ironically Facebook falls into this category; almost nothing on their site needs to "react" to anything (except to spy on every mouse movement you make, obviously).

    Something like tax forms should probably be xforms in a better universe. It's literally a form, but some fields might be calculated from other fields.

    A word processor as a web page is a funny technical demo, but it's mostly an artifact of how Windows and Mac didn't have app repositories for 20 years (still basically don't? Idk). There's no way in hell that it was easier to use JavaScript and CSS to make a cross platform UI than something like Qt, especially at the time.

    I get a chuckle whenever people talk about "supporting dark mode" like that's a modern feature. You used to be able to set your color palette in the OS settings, and every program had dark mode by default (this still works with native apps on KDE at least). It would be a lot less work for web developers and make for a better experience if the browser just respected that preference for default page styles, and then web pages/apps used canonical style names to access that palette, but here we are.

  • by blackoil on 2/7/24, 5:08 PM

    This is most fluff article I read in recent times. Take one line, repeat it differently 8 times without adding anything and you have the article.

  • by rideontime on 2/7/24, 6:05 PM

    Non-article teasing an HTMX tutorial if you sign up to their newsletter?

  • by gilbraithVO on 2/7/24, 5:03 PM

    dog, Google Docs is not a website, its core functionality requires javascript

  • by joenot443 on 2/7/24, 6:02 PM

    > Google Docs? A website

    > Every single core function of these apps could work—and work well!—without a single drop of JavaScript.

    ...what? I'd really love to live in a world where we could deploy an app like Google Docs or Discord without JS but that's just not the reality.

    > Most of what we build is links from one page to another, and form submissions that send data from the browser to the server.

    I'm not sure who the "we" being described here is, but it doesn't really describe the day to day of the web engineers in my circle.

    My cynical guess is the motivation for this piece is more rooted in advertising Chris' bootcamp and consulting services than it is sharing earnest expertise.

    >Discord-like apps have existed since before JavaScript did. Back in the 90’s, chat rooms where literally form elements that you typed into. You’d submit to the server, the page would update, and your post would be displayed. If you wanted to see new posts, you’d refresh the browser.

    I don't think this is the kind of thing I'd want to hear from someone I paid to improve my website :)

  • by jimberlage on 2/7/24, 6:05 PM

    I agree, with one caveat - the web is links, forms, and styled components.

    It’s the styled components bit that makes everyone reach for react over ERB/HTMX/whatever. Web components wants to solve this but the API is just not there yet for smaller teams.

    I think people who want simplicity are on a great path, but without addressing how bad the intersection of CSS and HTML frameworks is compared to React & friends, it’s an uphill battle.

  • by gmuslera on 2/7/24, 5:56 PM

    Life is mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. The arrangement and the bits of other elements turns it into much more than the isolated components.

  • by tipiirai on 2/7/24, 5:00 PM

    > Google Docs? A website. Accounting software like QuickBooks? A website. Discord and Slack? Websites. Apple Maps? A website.

    Can you expand this sentence a bit? Thanks

  • by mediumsmart on 2/8/24, 6:22 AM

    The web is mostly we care for your privacy form modals concealing the buy me a coffee link buttons.

  • by from-nibly on 2/7/24, 7:46 PM

    I did a cartoon double take when they said (paraphrasing) "Google docs can be run without JavaScript"

    Right with that well known html tag built into all browsers.

    <MultiUserRealTimeOfflineCloudSyncDocumentEditorWithPDFAndDocxSupport />

    It's been in the browser for years. Wake up sheeple.

  • by iceboxic on 2/7/24, 6:06 PM

    Let me summarize the web for you. You have static websites and dynamic ones. It's a UI for the filesystems of every computer with a domain (abstracted ofc so people can make sense of it). Lately, there is this trend where you have a way to interact with dynamic websites (usually a database, [still a file]) using forms tables and routing (links). Code?! Still files. The end.

  • by LegitShady on 2/7/24, 6:34 PM

    and porn