c/webdev · by Aijan@programming.dev · 2y

Back to Basics in Web Apps

https://lackofimagination.org/2024/04/back-to-basics-in-web-apps/

19 points · 7 comments · view on lemmy.world

7 Comments

1996 was the beginning of the chaos. We went from a document that the user's browser parsed and styled to a free-for-all of website designs glued together on construction paper. Accessibility took a step back. You now needed a graphical desktop to view the web. Page content was no longer machine readable and became less portable. Now in a world of dynamic page content generated by javascript you need a v8 browser in crawlers just to index page content.

NostraDavid@programming.dev · 4 pts · 2y (5 replies)

I find it refreshing to write, not generate, HTML and CSS, and then sprinkle some JavaScript for interactivity.

I've found hugo to be rather amazing in generating static HTML and CSS (converting either HTML or Markdown templates into regular HTML).

I started out my personal website as:

static HTML
an SPA (yes, the archived version still works!)
back to static (hand-written) HTML
expanded the hand-written HTML
and expanded some more
until I had to generate the HTML via hugo, because the HTML headers were getting out of sync

PS: Have you ever seen TheNet (1995)?

PPS: All the HTML is pretty much all Semantic HTML, instead of Twitter's div>div>div>div>div

victorz@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 2y (2 replies)

div>div>div>div>div

Ah yes, div soup.

By the way, have you tried different generators and compared them, or tried only Hugo, out of curiosity?

NostraDavid@programming.dev · 2 pts · 2y (1 reply)

Only Hugo; I didn't want to try anything JS based and hugo is faaaaaast in its generation. Sub 1 second fast. It's so nice.

victorz@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 2y

Cool! Very nice. Do you need it to be that fast or is it just nice because faster is better?

Aijan@programming.dev · 3 pts · 2y (1 reply)

Author here. My blog is also generated with Hugo, and it's great. I just prefer not to generate HTML and CSS from JavaScript unless it's necessary.

Sorry, I haven’t seen that movie. Thanks for the recommendation though.

NostraDavid@programming.dev · 1 pts · 2y

Too bad you haven't seen it - my site has a little easter egg from that movie :3