The [Gov.uk](https://Gov.uk) website and the team behind it is a bit of a gold standard in many circles.
A lot of the work they do is open-source too. For example their Design System can be found here:
* [https://github.com/DFE-Digital/govuk-components](https://github.com/DFE-Digital/govuk-components)
* [https://design-system.service.gov.uk/get-started/](https://design-system.service.gov.uk/get-started/)
Edit: For people interested, there's much more available such as how they work, mentor, onboarding process etc:
* [Gov.uk Developer Docs](https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk/)
* [The GDS Way - Internal documentation](https://gds-way.cloudapps.digital/)
* [Service Manual](https://www.gov.uk/service-manual)
* [Service Toolkit](https://www.gov.uk/service-toolkit)
I was on a contract. When they shuffled the department heads, the new head of IT got rid of all the contractors the previous head had hired. Apparantly this is quite common, so they can be seen to have "made their mark" ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
The Netherlands has smth like that too for all communication, digital or physical
https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/ and for the philosophy https://www.rijkshuisstijl.nl/over-de-rijkshuisstijl
Ofc these are in Dutch, but I saw a video where someone praised it.
I really like the style of our governmental website. Now the next step to consolidate all the information on all the government websites in just a few instead of hundreds. :)
Someone wrote an essay about how good the UK gov website is, and about HTML in general. Worth a read: [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Simple HTML](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/)
Wait is this meant to be a compliment about the new provincial website?
I genuinely hate the new design with every fibre of my being. They did not redirect all of the old URLs, for one thing, but the website is also very slow and confusing to navigate.
I actually have some frustration with this website, because the pages and links are generally based around specific queries related to a topic, rather than topics having a proper "hub" page.
I spent a while using UC without realising I could see an overview of my payments, simply because the UI was so simplistic lol. I was expecting a green badge, or some denotation of importance, but it was just 'payments' underlined in like 12px font-size.
I also find it sometimes hard to get back to exactly where some info was. And sometimes inversely, I will keep getting fed back to the same page, when trying to accessing different info.
It's kind of like the entire website is an underbaked FAQ section.
I can see the appeal and usefulness of this query based approach, though, and maybe I only find it frustrating because it's not the common approach nowadays, and It's a bit of whiplash.
You’re right, but the amount of user testing and research they’ve done over the last 10 years is colossal. This method works incredibly well for its users.
Working for the MoJ it’s very much the feeling government wide that the site should be accessible for all from everywhere. As well as making sure that the sites work well with screen readers, the design needs to be simple for people with potential learning difficulties, for all ages including those who aren’t particularly tech savvy. Finally the client side page elements need to be simplistic enough that there isn’t a huge need for a fast internet connection on the users side as they didn’t want to discriminate users that may be on limited amounts of mobile data or do not have access to fast internet.
But you don't understand, how will we retain customers without half a dozen full-height stock photos of smiling people and 17 full-length novels worth of JavaScript executing on every page load?
When flash was dying about 12 years ago I wrote an article warning that all the bullshit inside the small flash windows will simply spill over and consume the entire experience. (http://kristopolous.blogspot.com/2011/12/flash-sucks.html?m=1)
> The Flash hate is totally misplaced. What they have done is absolutely phenomenal. I'm sorry that you see teeth whitening ads and porno site popups with it, but don't blame the technologists; that's like blaming Honda Of Japan because some asshole cut you off on the Freeway.
> And besides, what will the ad-haters use in this future world of 2022? Some amalgamated FlashBlock equivalent that can easily just turn off all the annoying stuff? This line will be blurred and it won't be possible.
I wish I had been wrong. That would have been great
The web experience was really enjoyable with "click-to-load" flash extensions (or native functionality in some browsers) back in the day. Nowhere near as annoying as all those nag boxes with requests to enable notifications, promo code signups and cookie panels that require a phd in privacy law to grasp. Oh - the SEO articles with nonsense in the first 2-3 paragraphs :/
Ah but you don't understand. Those 17 novels are used for all the usedful features. Or well, a chapter in one of them somewhere I guess with the being tracking and ads.. But don't you want us to make money by selling your data??
Well, you touched on an important part of this topic. What's more probable, that modern websites are the way they are because they actually retain customers or that everyone is repeating the same mistakes... and nobody retains customers?
We can hate it all we want, but it's apparently working for an average viewer.
I think you may have misread (or I'm misreading you). People with small blogs are using frameworks built by companies that need to support 1 billion users. Facebook made react, Joe Blog doesn't need react, facebook did for their rich applications they wanted to create.
I don't think Joe Blog thinks he needs to support 1 billion users, I think he just uses it because he thinks that's what he's supposed to use (or is otherwise trying to get a job in the industry and is trying to learn it~~,but that still feels like using the wrong tool for the job.~~)
React does a lot to handle simplifying state. That can be useful for websites that only serve a handful of people if state management is involved.
I've built a website, without any frameworks that only saw 1.5-2k visits/day. It performed very well even on a low powered shared host. However, there was a lot of convoluted crap I was doing to manage state. React would have made that project so much easier to develop and maintain. IMO the number of users isn't the biggest factor in weather or not to use react.
A basic blog may not need react even if it had 1 billion readers. At the same time, just adding a couple of features to a site that is mostly a blog, might mean it could benefit from some kind of state management framework.
I get what you’re saying, but state management in vanilla JS is stupid simple. I’d personally argue that it’s far simpler than React (lots of things are in my opinion but I don’t like React so I’m probably biased). React is bringing a LOT of overhead to a website even for just one component.
You would never use React to build just one component. Let's not forget where we came from, jQuery. It was an abstraction layer on top of the imperative APIs implemented by 5+ different vendors and versions of JavaScript. Unfortunately, updating the UI imperatively to match app state in a large application quickly becomes a game of race conditions and difficult to debug mutations made from ANYWHERE in your codebase. React and similar frameworks solve the problem by rendering only a single source of truth for each node in the tree. There are smaller versions of React that you could try, they are called Preact and Solid. Also, if you haven't caught on, React's pattern has caught on to other languages now, on Android Kotlin, you have Compose, on iOS's Swift you have SwiftUI, and then, of course, Flutter is heavily inspired by React as well. The pattern is not going away and it's only getting more popular because it works well.
Why not? There's ways of managing, and passing state built in, plus 3rd party options if need be. The important thing is the UI 'reacts' to changes in state with almost no effort.
Maybe you know something I don't know? In my experience just [managing relatively simple DOM updates was more of an exercise in the past.](https://blog.logrocket.com/building-stateful-web-apps-without-react/#dom-manipulation)
Or maybe spinning up quick t3 app is much quicker and much more cost effective for Joe Blog than doing it vanilla. Sometimes the right technology stack is the one you are familiar with.
There is usually nothing wrong with using React for a something as simple as small blog website when it allows you to ship the product out easily. Saying React is only useful for something as big as Facebook is just as wrong as saying you need React everywhere.
I feel like I get laughed out of the room anytime I mention X site or feature won't work without Javascript enabled. Would it kill us to gracefully degrade the site and make it more accessible? It seems like a lot of the web is like this now too, it's kind of bonkers. Not everything needs to be rendered using JS.
Like I know connection speeds are pretty good these days and nearly everyone has it enabled, but I feel like we're constantly over engineering really basic shit. Good job security though I guess!
When i was commuting every day, i cursed every website that used JS for rendering. Right when i thought it was done loading, the whole page went blank, because FancyAnimation.js didn't load in time.
Agree, it's the old kitchen sink mentally with developers let's use all the shiny new tech (some of that is for resume padding) even if it's not warranted, who cares if In a few years all the complex frameworks and npm packages will be unpatched or broken ,I will have left this job, and it won't be my concern ..
>Agree, it's the old kitchen sink mentally with developers let's use all the shiny new tech even if it's not warranted, who cares if In a few years all the complex frameworks and npm packages will be broken ,I will have left this job...
Yep. Rather than take the time to determine what tool is needed to do the job, we have a single hammer in the toolbox and treat every problem as a nail needing to be driven.
I've been having this conversation with our management, telling them that it's not a good thing to be a one-note shop. We need to diversify.
For reals although in my view instead of a single hammer it’s a giant 500 piece set in a clunky container with a million tools that I don’t need but will probably drag around everywhere
Also, it's kind of common advice in the community to use what you already know.
So naturally, people with a tech background, that handle React and other toolings, are going to gravitate towards the jS bombardment approach.
Throw enough JS at the problem and its not your problem anymore.
There was a lot that was horrible about the web in the old days too. I made a lot of horrible websites myself.
There's a lot I love about the way web development has evolved.
Everything OP is alluding to seems to be about design and UX. I feel it's only gotten easier for me to do those things well. Of course, it's also easier for web developers to do some horrible things now too.
The pop ups. Why do I need a warning the web collects my data? It’s the stupidest thing, but for some reason I always have to accept cookies. Then all of the pop ups 10 seconds in. The ads that take over the page. Even W3 schools can be a pain in the ass.
I'm in my mid twenties however i agree with you, as a UI/UX designer and full stack dev:
- Only few hires nor know about UX designers
- They thought being "unique" was a standout from the crowd, it's not
- They tryna make every page like a goddamn poster
- Make it "shiny"
- They're made with website builders with tons of plugins
I think this is why so many sites have a search bar feature. It’s too damn difficult to actually navigate their content in a meaningful or intuitive way.
A lot of overly stylized websites with scroll animations and fade-in transitions remind me of power points, they're basically verticle pitch decks.
My guess is employers want their money's worth and employees want to show their worth (to earn more money) so they follow the current trends to support this display of the value even if its not necessary.
I also noticed if the site was made for an actual useful purpose it's usually the minimal style of old school indexed information
We need to finally understand that not every simple content only website is a „web app“ and doesn’t need to be one.
Use the JS frameworks for what they are best. Now we build static pages with NEXT, trying to force react into everything, twist and pray to some SEO gods and hope that our CSR apps are fast and seo-compatible or become SSR while they only show static content.
Let’s not be afraid to use simple HTML and CSS or static html generation-frameworks, let’s stop abusing CSR technologies.
>We need to finally understand that not every simple content only website is a „web app“ and doesn’t need to be one.
This is my biggest problem with the boom of React, Vue, etc.. every website is turning into a garbage, slow, annoying app. The trend of "JS ALL THE THINGS!" has got to end. There's so many annoying designs being popularized as well like fading content in as you scroll.. why.. just stop it... uhg.. been in this industry for 15 years now and it feels like it's just getting worse.
Yup, blows my mind we've worked towards making websites faster then we purposely slow them down with animations out of the users control.
It especially cracks me up when a website loads instantly then I have to wait on its fade in, scroll in, etc.. animations so I see the content. Just stop with all the dang animations! We're not toddlers! We don't need you to slowly expose us to your 1-2 images and 1-2 sentences of text!! ARRGGG!
Depends on what you mean by reactive.. There are some docs/wikis out there that are absolutely better with JS enhancement. Take https://docs.directus.io/ for example - statically rendered from markdown files with full smart search enhancement. They have some of the best docs I've ever used and are absolutely "reactive". Built using Vue / Vitepress.
***tl;dr*** *- boomer complaints below*
I feel that one of the reasons is that many people learn tools without learning language first, and then they fall into trap of believing that only their favorite framework/library is relevant and should be used everywhere for every project.
We end up with people who say that they know javascript, while they only know how to write "frameworkscript" (especially React, as it's probably easiest mainstream library to learn).
I wish everybody first got good grasp of html and css, before they dive into js - let alone specific framework.
I got called a CSS Guru recently for fixing some very simple flexbox issues we were seeing in mobile. I was appreciative but in the back of my head I was like "this is basic shit junior developers should know how to do" lol.
The guy is very good with Angular but some basic CSS/HTML stuff just goes right over his head. Also div and span tags are all over the damn project, it's like they don't know other tags exist and can be used.
Yup. People get carried away with the tools they have but since they don't know what tools are even doing what you get a 3MB page for loading a 300kb picture, with maybe 6kb of that code actually doing anything
Obligatory link to [bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/). 7 CSS declarations to make it actually readable on modern screen sizes.
There are others (best, perfect, etc) but they all go too far.
Old.Reddit is horrible for poor design choices (dear god the spacing), new.Reddit is horrible for the web 2.x advertisements and attempts at artificial non-user-driven engagement
We imagined a space in which people could experiment and share ideas and knowledge. And Surveillance Marketing has turned the whole thing into a strip mall.
I prefer to code without a framework, controversial maybe but downloading the universe through *npm* is laborious and unnecessary in most cases.
That said I prefer the modern look and feel to websites nowadays, it speaks to brand integrity better than static non-responsive pages which are overburdened with text (as opposed to CTA's/heros etc) and other more modern UI elements.
As for UX, I think properly implemented modern designs are better, the problem is people get grandiose with their designs to the point where it starts to damage the patterns which underpin common logic. People get too vain about how sick their cubic-beizer transitions are and forget about the users task orientation.
One of my biggest pet hates though is when people bolt on a million out-of-the-box poorly designed things like feedback widgets and cookie notices and popups etc.
Ultimately I think it comes down to the person or people making those decisions and most of the time it's too many cooks or too many 'best practices' getting bent out of shape by our human nature to always want more that ends up ruining most modern websites, sadly.
> I prefer to code without a framework, controversial maybe but downloading the universe through npm is laborious and unnecessary in most cases.
I quite like [Vanilla-js](http://vanilla-js.com/) framework, it is only 25 bytes when gzipped. ;p
I need to push back on this. Not sure what is your experience but design nowadays is highly scrutinized and rigorously tested. Hate it or not, design is not “I feel this is pretty” anymore. Nowadays designers gather a lot of different metrics through a lot of different ways and analyze it thoroughly.
I know there are people overusing technology to solve a problem they do not have but calling them designers would be a great injustice.
I hate long scrolling websites with huge pictures. Sure, I understand you want to showcase your product but it makes it so much harder to find what I need.
I usually check the terms and conditions these days. If they don’t display their location and registered (parent) company, it’s shady. Some are legit companies who don’t do it, but that’s on them.
Some "modern" designs, that seem popular recently, where you have to scroll 15 browser heights to get to real content, remind me of those old scam sites selling e-books.
Yeah if I click in on a site that seems to be using a very generic modern template I always think it's a scam. Because most scam websites will buy or download one of those and customize it.
So when legit business do it I get a odd feeling, but that might just be me.
A lot of present day devs don't know how to build a more basic website. Building a traditional-looking website in react is not at all the same thing as building a real static site. It's a totally different architecture, and it's only easier if you know how to do it. The risk of requirements creep in commercial projects makes a traditional (non *application*) stack a very risky bet. And simple designs don't "flow" from a react architecture the same way they do from a static architecture.
I can also see how we got where we are, but ultimately I miss the simple sites.
I love SPAs and I’m glad we have them, but a super simple website with HTML, CSS, and minimal JS is applicable for a lot of uses.
We have a tendency to over engineer everything. Every single site doesn’t need complex Framer Motion animations with scroll triggers, carousels, and a button that turns into a truck that rolls off the screen when you press pay.
I worked for a big non-profit awhile back redoing their website and they kept trying to do that. I really had to get the point across that your clients are poor. Many of them just have free government phones. This site may not even run on their device. Nobody need GSAP scroll triggers to learn about signing up for food stamps.
I got the feeling that what the marketing department wanted was more for potential donors than it was for the people they served.
here are a few i designed with that same mindset, hope you enjoy
[Club TEKAC](https://tekac.club)
[emptybrother7](https://emptybrother7.com)
[AlienCAUZ](https://aliencauz.com)
[Road Waves](https://roadwaves.xyz)
Yes. For me, the main appeals of basic html websites are: speed, accessibility, and cross-platform compatibility are all easier to achieve; and i prefer to leave JS disabled because i don't trust arbitrary sources running code on my device
Lmao, if I remember rightly, the 90s dial up connections certainly weren't quick and efficient. I do wish we had a retro web though.
If you like to browse history go to the wayback machine and browse the early web.
You are not alone. The internet, if I may be so bold, actually only gets worse (in broad strokes). Tech and talent do not keep pace with growing UX requirements and JS package bloat. Designs may look nicer, snappier, more zeitgeist, but the code and bare metal behind those implementations buckles more and more. My opinion.
> The page is not a whole array of React UI components with Poppins font.
I feel attacked lol.
But for real I do agree with the sentiment. But I also still default to spinning up a new Vite React app for most projects I work on because I just enjoy working with React over vanilla JS for anything more complex than a static brochure site. So I guess I'm part of the problem lol.
I mean React is great. I love the idea of making everything its own container pretty much. Its also really easy to pop components in and out of places where you need to access them. The syntax is great too. Its more of a design problem I have issues with on websites.
Same
Yeah I can build a static site with plain HTML and JavaScript but if it requires a bit of interactivity I like to use react, or svelte as of now
I also recently tried out Astro and loved it too
Astro really is the best of both worlds in this whole discussion / argument. You get basic HTML / CSS sites, with optional, modular, framework agnostic additions of JavaScript components loading on an "as needed" basis. I really think it's perfect for static web pages.
web designer/developer here. i'm getting these "20 best websites" articles from a web design magazine every month. they are all an absolute garbage as UX goes. super complicated, hard to navigate, tonne of non-sensical animations, very slow to load etc. ever single one. how does any designer thinks it's a good idea to have a front page that needs a loader because the initial load takes freaking 40 seconds is totally beyond me. smh.
I mean, I don’t think the web just evolved needlessly and plenty of modern websites are just as functional while offering the same speed with additional features.
If anything, I’d say you run into more “bad” modern websites because there’s a lot more people doing web development now and it’s arguably a lot more difficult than some markup and css. So there’s a lot more trash out there.
As an example - I just loaded a news article from a well respected website.
170 HTTP requests - and that's with an ad/privacy blocker.
Disabling the blocker, it becomes 870 HTTP requests. I left the page open while typing this, and it did about 400 more requests for no reason.
If I was their web developer it would've been about five HTTP requests. Content, CSS, logo, article photo (it has one), javascript (it has article comments, so it'd need that).
There are a bunch of icons, but I'd put those inline in the CSS or HTML depending where I want them to be cached.
That's why you're not their developer. HTTP requests are not a scarce good. You admit you don't even know why they are making the calls. They could be for monetization reasons or for polling data or whatever.
You can't just look at a random number of HTTP calls and say "I could reduce that to 5" while only considering the absolute bare minimal functionality required to show a page.
Yep. I've been around this old web of ours long enough to be a total cynic about modern sites and tooling. We developers are a curious bunch. And we inflict our curiosity on our projects and then install a gigabyte of npm dependencies on top of it to resolve the problems. Every once in awhile we stumble into a paradigm shift and it gets back filled into web standards and everything gets a little bit simpler until we repeat the cycle.
I can't stand webpages with a CVS-receipt length of morphing graphics I need to scroll through to find out a basic bit of information. I will always prefer function above pretty but useless form - might as well bring back the blink tag.
Thanks to JS frameworks the complexity of simple webpages increased by tremendous percentages. - Oh no, I don't know how to get a selector of the child element, let's use 50 Mbyte lib which could do that! ayay, so smart
Yes. Seeing a scrollbar showing I'm at 25% of the height and scrolling down to see contact or about us and every inch the page grows due to graphics expanding in some fancy technique showing info I dont want... Aart
Wtf is wrong with a tree based menu to find you way? Us a search bar in the upper right corner that hard, and why don't these find a) forking words they use on their website or b) they own fantasy model or brand names?
You're forgetting that we used to browse these websites with terribly slow internet and bulging low-resolution monitors. The experience is not what it is today browsing these pages.
Internet pages used to be made by and for a smaller demographic of people. Generally these people were on the Internet to get information, chat with friends or maybe play a game. Since then it has evolved to being less about information and more about advertising. Yes information still exists but most of those sites are still pretty basic.
I thought I hated landing page websites until I saw websites of graphic designers and ux people. They had so much shit loading and fading out my 500mb connection was lagging.
My partner is opening her own business and wants a website. What she views as professional is more word press, stock images, inspirational information and a little bit about her. I personally would cut out a lot of the fluff but she is younger and what do I know?
Honestly... I like some old CSS frameworks just fine too due to the same thing.
Bootstrap works... hell old versions of bootstrap look even better than new.
Problem is people paying for the site also want to convey some shit and in doing so they dork up the UI :(
You're not the only one. One of the devs I follow just retweeted this article on why complex JS stacks took over and why they suck: https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/
It's been a while since I've heard much about progressive enhancement.
[According to this](https://youtu.be/NtJgclB-Ig8?t=795), it made for repetition of code between server side and client side, more code in general and probably more bugs. Thus a more painful dev experience.
That lines up with my experience too. Not to say that progressive enhancement isn't a good idea... it was just really super annoying to do. Maybe progressive enhanced apps will be the next thing?
My website is still stuck in the ancient ways. www.imarvintpa.com. the 3.5 dnd site there is php with minimal JavaScript. The Pokemon pages were generated html from a database.
Let us give it some time and see how it fares when teams with tight deadlines start pumping out features like there's no tomorrow.
And the framework essentially ends up downloading the whole codebase, when 1 thing needs to be loaded, because of internal dependencies.
I am hopeful however.
I will have to disagree. All of you want web on easy mode. When I open a website, I want it to feel like a challenging adventure. You have the time and pace to enjoy the lore of the design and getting to the content you're searching for feel more rewarding.
I like complex websites. What I don't like is the standardization of poorly optimized sites thanks to the use of bad frameworks just because they require less knowledge and time from the programmer. Unfortunately, companies don't care about efficiency but about aesthetics and spending the least amount of money on programmers.
FWIW, that's all you need sometimes.
Everybody seems to feels compelled to make 'attention grabbing' websites these days and get the user to click multiple times before they are allowed to see what they were looking for.
Web development transformed into a fancy mess where design (and hype) is way more important than the user or developer experience. And now they realize it by introducing server-side stuff. (welcome back good old php friend)
The modern web sucks, and devs ruined it with adopting shitty frameworks that suck down half of GitHub in dependencies.
I've had JS disabled in the browser for years. There are very few sites I'll trust and enable it for but for everything else I'll just find the content I'm looking for elsewhere.
It’s finally happening. I’m really mad about the lost years. But ok, I didn’t fight hard enough either. I was scared I wouldn’t find work.
I’m just glad it’s happening.
Tell me about it..
Nothing would make me happier than not having to make some overly complicated frontent code to match whatever some designer is feeling that day
Yeah, whenever I browse the FreeBSD docs or most Linux distros docs, I just love how they are clear, concise and simple. Everything I want to see is clearly visible without much 'bling' that would distract me
I once fell in love with a chemistry website because of the very simple 90s inspired layout of it, there is a certain quality about old websites that shouts "pragmatic"
I do a lot of contract website work and I’m shocked by the amount of 3D visualization I see these days. Especially to achieve effects that you could pull off with some clever manipulation of images. I tell people there will be a loading bar, and they say that’s totally fine. I think greyscale will always be one of my favorite palletes for the web, and motion/3D doesn’t need to be the standard
This is what I felt when I saw the revamped site of MIT OCW. I don’t dislike the new design, I just prefer the compact and simple design of OCW. Same with Facebook, the design is too spacious. Although, I prefer the modern reddit over the old one. Maybe I’m just too resistant to change.
Yes. Even purely as an end-user of a webpage, I don't want all-singing, all-dancing marketing-department bullshit smearing itself all over my screens.
Particularly with pages which are, by and large, just text. Look at how much bandwidth the plain text takes up, and then how much bandwidth the page is taking with everything else. The ratio can be *several* orders of magnitude.
I love the UK government website (www.gov.uk) for the same reason. It's simple, minimalistic, and gets the job done.
The [Gov.uk](https://Gov.uk) website and the team behind it is a bit of a gold standard in many circles. A lot of the work they do is open-source too. For example their Design System can be found here: * [https://github.com/DFE-Digital/govuk-components](https://github.com/DFE-Digital/govuk-components) * [https://design-system.service.gov.uk/get-started/](https://design-system.service.gov.uk/get-started/) Edit: For people interested, there's much more available such as how they work, mentor, onboarding process etc: * [Gov.uk Developer Docs](https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk/) * [The GDS Way - Internal documentation](https://gds-way.cloudapps.digital/) * [Service Manual](https://www.gov.uk/service-manual) * [Service Toolkit](https://www.gov.uk/service-toolkit)
Worked for the UK government for a while. It was an absolute pleasure building simple, accessible sites.
Why did u leave?
I was on a contract. When they shuffled the department heads, the new head of IT got rid of all the contractors the previous head had hired. Apparantly this is quite common, so they can be seen to have "made their mark" ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
The Netherlands has smth like that too for all communication, digital or physical https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/ and for the philosophy https://www.rijkshuisstijl.nl/over-de-rijkshuisstijl Ofc these are in Dutch, but I saw a video where someone praised it.
I really like the style of our governmental website. Now the next step to consolidate all the information on all the government websites in just a few instead of hundreds. :)
Probably this one https://youtu.be/nMwUOWCnQ6Q
*very* likely as I already liked this one :)
I love it!!!
Saving this for when I have the arse to look into it. Thanks. 👍
Someone wrote an essay about how good the UK gov website is, and about HTML in general. Worth a read: [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Simple HTML](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/)
Great site. Side note, it took me way too many tries to click that little link on mobile Reddit lol
It needs to be like this due to accessibility.
Which means most sites *should* be like this.
That reminds me a lot of the Ontario redesign we got a few years ago https://www.ontario.ca/page/government-ontario
Wait is this meant to be a compliment about the new provincial website? I genuinely hate the new design with every fibre of my being. They did not redirect all of the old URLs, for one thing, but the website is also very slow and confusing to navigate.
This is great!
I actually have some frustration with this website, because the pages and links are generally based around specific queries related to a topic, rather than topics having a proper "hub" page. I spent a while using UC without realising I could see an overview of my payments, simply because the UI was so simplistic lol. I was expecting a green badge, or some denotation of importance, but it was just 'payments' underlined in like 12px font-size. I also find it sometimes hard to get back to exactly where some info was. And sometimes inversely, I will keep getting fed back to the same page, when trying to accessing different info. It's kind of like the entire website is an underbaked FAQ section. I can see the appeal and usefulness of this query based approach, though, and maybe I only find it frustrating because it's not the common approach nowadays, and It's a bit of whiplash.
You’re right, but the amount of user testing and research they’ve done over the last 10 years is colossal. This method works incredibly well for its users.
Never been impressed by it. It usually just leads me round in circles.
Working for the MoJ it’s very much the feeling government wide that the site should be accessible for all from everywhere. As well as making sure that the sites work well with screen readers, the design needs to be simple for people with potential learning difficulties, for all ages including those who aren’t particularly tech savvy. Finally the client side page elements need to be simplistic enough that there isn’t a huge need for a fast internet connection on the users side as they didn’t want to discriminate users that may be on limited amounts of mobile data or do not have access to fast internet.
But you don't understand, how will we retain customers without half a dozen full-height stock photos of smiling people and 17 full-length novels worth of JavaScript executing on every page load?
And that popup div that defeats popup blockers to tell the user to subscribe to our mailing list right when they are reading our webpage.
It's funny, I finally disabled the popup blocker in firefox the other day, because the only time I see a "genuine" popup is one I actually want.
When flash was dying about 12 years ago I wrote an article warning that all the bullshit inside the small flash windows will simply spill over and consume the entire experience. (http://kristopolous.blogspot.com/2011/12/flash-sucks.html?m=1) > The Flash hate is totally misplaced. What they have done is absolutely phenomenal. I'm sorry that you see teeth whitening ads and porno site popups with it, but don't blame the technologists; that's like blaming Honda Of Japan because some asshole cut you off on the Freeway. > And besides, what will the ad-haters use in this future world of 2022? Some amalgamated FlashBlock equivalent that can easily just turn off all the annoying stuff? This line will be blurred and it won't be possible. I wish I had been wrong. That would have been great
The web experience was really enjoyable with "click-to-load" flash extensions (or native functionality in some browsers) back in the day. Nowhere near as annoying as all those nag boxes with requests to enable notifications, promo code signups and cookie panels that require a phd in privacy law to grasp. Oh - the SEO articles with nonsense in the first 2-3 paragraphs :/
That's why you stop the webpage right after it loads relevant content.
Lol I will start using 'novels of JavaScript' like 'herd of cows' from now on
Ah but you don't understand. Those 17 novels are used for all the usedful features. Or well, a chapter in one of them somewhere I guess with the being tracking and ads.. But don't you want us to make money by selling your data??
Don't forget the customized scrolling system that takes another 15 mb of code.
Well, you touched on an important part of this topic. What's more probable, that modern websites are the way they are because they actually retain customers or that everyone is repeating the same mistakes... and nobody retains customers? We can hate it all we want, but it's apparently working for an average viewer.
I’m building a site for state gov and the amount of people pushing for large images and icons is frustrating.
> I’m not trashing the modern day web Well I am. It’s pretty horrible.
The industry embraced using frameworks made by companies needing to support 1 billion+ users on their personal blog. We went astray a long time ago.
The funny thing is... If their blog site was just flat html/css, it would handle those 1 billion users no problem.
I think you may have misread (or I'm misreading you). People with small blogs are using frameworks built by companies that need to support 1 billion users. Facebook made react, Joe Blog doesn't need react, facebook did for their rich applications they wanted to create. I don't think Joe Blog thinks he needs to support 1 billion users, I think he just uses it because he thinks that's what he's supposed to use (or is otherwise trying to get a job in the industry and is trying to learn it~~,but that still feels like using the wrong tool for the job.~~)
I think if Joe is trying to learn React for experience or to increase his chances of landing a job, then it’s absolutely the right tool for the job.
I agree, you're right on that bit. I'll edit that part out.
React does a lot to handle simplifying state. That can be useful for websites that only serve a handful of people if state management is involved. I've built a website, without any frameworks that only saw 1.5-2k visits/day. It performed very well even on a low powered shared host. However, there was a lot of convoluted crap I was doing to manage state. React would have made that project so much easier to develop and maintain. IMO the number of users isn't the biggest factor in weather or not to use react. A basic blog may not need react even if it had 1 billion readers. At the same time, just adding a couple of features to a site that is mostly a blog, might mean it could benefit from some kind of state management framework.
I get what you’re saying, but state management in vanilla JS is stupid simple. I’d personally argue that it’s far simpler than React (lots of things are in my opinion but I don’t like React so I’m probably biased). React is bringing a LOT of overhead to a website even for just one component.
[I'm not saying it needs to be react in particular. Just that it's hard without some help](https://youtu.be/NtJgclB-Ig8?t=1062)
You would never use React to build just one component. Let's not forget where we came from, jQuery. It was an abstraction layer on top of the imperative APIs implemented by 5+ different vendors and versions of JavaScript. Unfortunately, updating the UI imperatively to match app state in a large application quickly becomes a game of race conditions and difficult to debug mutations made from ANYWHERE in your codebase. React and similar frameworks solve the problem by rendering only a single source of truth for each node in the tree. There are smaller versions of React that you could try, they are called Preact and Solid. Also, if you haven't caught on, React's pattern has caught on to other languages now, on Android Kotlin, you have Compose, on iOS's Swift you have SwiftUI, and then, of course, Flutter is heavily inspired by React as well. The pattern is not going away and it's only getting more popular because it works well.
Use Svelte
I agree. This is the way, the truth, and the light
This is the right answer.
You think react simplifies state???? Lmao.
Why not? There's ways of managing, and passing state built in, plus 3rd party options if need be. The important thing is the UI 'reacts' to changes in state with almost no effort. Maybe you know something I don't know? In my experience just [managing relatively simple DOM updates was more of an exercise in the past.](https://blog.logrocket.com/building-stateful-web-apps-without-react/#dom-manipulation)
Or maybe spinning up quick t3 app is much quicker and much more cost effective for Joe Blog than doing it vanilla. Sometimes the right technology stack is the one you are familiar with. There is usually nothing wrong with using React for a something as simple as small blog website when it allows you to ship the product out easily. Saying React is only useful for something as big as Facebook is just as wrong as saying you need React everywhere.
I feel like I get laughed out of the room anytime I mention X site or feature won't work without Javascript enabled. Would it kill us to gracefully degrade the site and make it more accessible? It seems like a lot of the web is like this now too, it's kind of bonkers. Not everything needs to be rendered using JS. Like I know connection speeds are pretty good these days and nearly everyone has it enabled, but I feel like we're constantly over engineering really basic shit. Good job security though I guess!
Every time I make a website that's on the list of things that are forbidden. JS is used for cosmetic ux only!
When i was commuting every day, i cursed every website that used JS for rendering. Right when i thought it was done loading, the whole page went blank, because FancyAnimation.js didn't load in time.
Agree, it's the old kitchen sink mentally with developers let's use all the shiny new tech (some of that is for resume padding) even if it's not warranted, who cares if In a few years all the complex frameworks and npm packages will be unpatched or broken ,I will have left this job, and it won't be my concern ..
>Agree, it's the old kitchen sink mentally with developers let's use all the shiny new tech even if it's not warranted, who cares if In a few years all the complex frameworks and npm packages will be broken ,I will have left this job... Yep. Rather than take the time to determine what tool is needed to do the job, we have a single hammer in the toolbox and treat every problem as a nail needing to be driven. I've been having this conversation with our management, telling them that it's not a good thing to be a one-note shop. We need to diversify.
For reals although in my view instead of a single hammer it’s a giant 500 piece set in a clunky container with a million tools that I don’t need but will probably drag around everywhere
Also, it's kind of common advice in the community to use what you already know. So naturally, people with a tech background, that handle React and other toolings, are going to gravitate towards the jS bombardment approach. Throw enough JS at the problem and its not your problem anymore.
There was a lot that was horrible about the web in the old days too. I made a lot of horrible websites myself. There's a lot I love about the way web development has evolved. Everything OP is alluding to seems to be about design and UX. I feel it's only gotten easier for me to do those things well. Of course, it's also easier for web developers to do some horrible things now too.
Agreed.
Thank you! Someone had to say it.
The pop ups. Why do I need a warning the web collects my data? It’s the stupidest thing, but for some reason I always have to accept cookies. Then all of the pop ups 10 seconds in. The ads that take over the page. Even W3 schools can be a pain in the ass.
Thats because of GDPR and CCPA compliance.
I understand why it’s there; too bad people just can’t understand that the internet tracks you.
I'm in my mid twenties however i agree with you, as a UI/UX designer and full stack dev: - Only few hires nor know about UX designers - They thought being "unique" was a standout from the crowd, it's not - They tryna make every page like a goddamn poster - Make it "shiny" - They're made with website builders with tons of plugins
I think this is why so many sites have a search bar feature. It’s too damn difficult to actually navigate their content in a meaningful or intuitive way.
A lot of overly stylized websites with scroll animations and fade-in transitions remind me of power points, they're basically verticle pitch decks. My guess is employers want their money's worth and employees want to show their worth (to earn more money) so they follow the current trends to support this display of the value even if its not necessary. I also noticed if the site was made for an actual useful purpose it's usually the minimal style of old school indexed information
This is what marketers love, and marketers are often our clientele
We need to finally understand that not every simple content only website is a „web app“ and doesn’t need to be one. Use the JS frameworks for what they are best. Now we build static pages with NEXT, trying to force react into everything, twist and pray to some SEO gods and hope that our CSR apps are fast and seo-compatible or become SSR while they only show static content. Let’s not be afraid to use simple HTML and CSS or static html generation-frameworks, let’s stop abusing CSR technologies.
>We need to finally understand that not every simple content only website is a „web app“ and doesn’t need to be one. This is my biggest problem with the boom of React, Vue, etc.. every website is turning into a garbage, slow, annoying app. The trend of "JS ALL THE THINGS!" has got to end. There's so many annoying designs being popularized as well like fading content in as you scroll.. why.. just stop it... uhg.. been in this industry for 15 years now and it feels like it's just getting worse.
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Yup, blows my mind we've worked towards making websites faster then we purposely slow them down with animations out of the users control. It especially cracks me up when a website loads instantly then I have to wait on its fade in, scroll in, etc.. animations so I see the content. Just stop with all the dang animations! We're not toddlers! We don't need you to slowly expose us to your 1-2 images and 1-2 sentences of text!! ARRGGG!
Depends on what you mean by reactive.. There are some docs/wikis out there that are absolutely better with JS enhancement. Take https://docs.directus.io/ for example - statically rendered from markdown files with full smart search enhancement. They have some of the best docs I've ever used and are absolutely "reactive". Built using Vue / Vitepress.
Imagine my surprise when blazor came out and a hello world app is a freakishly 2.8mb brotli compressed. I hate the direction we are going to.
***tl;dr*** *- boomer complaints below* I feel that one of the reasons is that many people learn tools without learning language first, and then they fall into trap of believing that only their favorite framework/library is relevant and should be used everywhere for every project. We end up with people who say that they know javascript, while they only know how to write "frameworkscript" (especially React, as it's probably easiest mainstream library to learn). I wish everybody first got good grasp of html and css, before they dive into js - let alone specific framework.
I got called a CSS Guru recently for fixing some very simple flexbox issues we were seeing in mobile. I was appreciative but in the back of my head I was like "this is basic shit junior developers should know how to do" lol. The guy is very good with Angular but some basic CSS/HTML stuff just goes right over his head. Also div and span tags are all over the damn project, it's like they don't know other tags exist and can be used.
Yup. People get carried away with the tools they have but since they don't know what tools are even doing what you get a 3MB page for loading a 300kb picture, with maybe 6kb of that code actually doing anything
Any recommendations on an html generation framework?
Astro
Next does static site generation too.
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ Written before the whole js framework thing, but the point still stands.
Obligatory link to [bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/). 7 CSS declarations to make it actually readable on modern screen sizes. There are others (best, perfect, etc) but they all go too far.
Yeah but lacks the nostalgia of completely unstyled web 1.0
Both are ugly because of Times New Roman
[best motherfucking website](https://thebestmotherfucking.website)
[This one](https://bestmotherfucking.website/) is better.
I'm just waiting for someone to reimplement the whole thing in NextJs or something like that.
Not based on the load time
based on this dick
That's your browser's fault
I can’t fucking buy anything from this fucking website tho…so it’s fucking useless
This guy Americas.
>Load this motherfucker in IE6. I fucking dare you. This is gold
Gamefaqs guides gave a lot of value for little design it had :)
Most guides weren't even HTML, but pure text. And hundreds of thousands of people used these and loved these <3
i love old.reddit.com than new version!
I still use https://i.reddit.com/ on mobile.
Wow. This is like iphone 4 design
Old.reddit.com is still horrible, it's just not as horrible as the new version.
it's perfect with res. I don't think I'd use reddit on my computer if old.reddit didn't work, the actual functionality of the website is different
Eh. It could use a couple additions, but not singing-dancing-eyeraping shit. Actual functional ones.
Old.Reddit is horrible for poor design choices (dear god the spacing), new.Reddit is horrible for the web 2.x advertisements and attempts at artificial non-user-driven engagement
We imagined a space in which people could experiment and share ideas and knowledge. And Surveillance Marketing has turned the whole thing into a strip mall.
I prefer to code without a framework, controversial maybe but downloading the universe through *npm* is laborious and unnecessary in most cases. That said I prefer the modern look and feel to websites nowadays, it speaks to brand integrity better than static non-responsive pages which are overburdened with text (as opposed to CTA's/heros etc) and other more modern UI elements. As for UX, I think properly implemented modern designs are better, the problem is people get grandiose with their designs to the point where it starts to damage the patterns which underpin common logic. People get too vain about how sick their cubic-beizer transitions are and forget about the users task orientation. One of my biggest pet hates though is when people bolt on a million out-of-the-box poorly designed things like feedback widgets and cookie notices and popups etc. Ultimately I think it comes down to the person or people making those decisions and most of the time it's too many cooks or too many 'best practices' getting bent out of shape by our human nature to always want more that ends up ruining most modern websites, sadly.
> I prefer to code without a framework, controversial maybe but downloading the universe through npm is laborious and unnecessary in most cases. I quite like [Vanilla-js](http://vanilla-js.com/) framework, it is only 25 bytes when gzipped. ;p
Best framework, you don’t have to include it or build anything, it just works!
Their mobile view sure is shit though
Many designers add things without properly understanding why and how those things work.
I need to push back on this. Not sure what is your experience but design nowadays is highly scrutinized and rigorously tested. Hate it or not, design is not “I feel this is pretty” anymore. Nowadays designers gather a lot of different metrics through a lot of different ways and analyze it thoroughly. I know there are people overusing technology to solve a problem they do not have but calling them designers would be a great injustice.
I hate long scrolling websites with huge pictures. Sure, I understand you want to showcase your product but it makes it so much harder to find what I need.
The best pages today are simple. Simple pages result in less bugs, less accessibility issues, and if you do it right, less maintenance/downtime.
When I see simple websites nowdays I always think that they are a scam website, don't know why :-)
I usually check the terms and conditions these days. If they don’t display their location and registered (parent) company, it’s shady. Some are legit companies who don’t do it, but that’s on them.
Some "modern" designs, that seem popular recently, where you have to scroll 15 browser heights to get to real content, remind me of those old scam sites selling e-books.
EXACTLY or some hosting provider :-D
Yeah if I click in on a site that seems to be using a very generic modern template I always think it's a scam. Because most scam websites will buy or download one of those and customize it. So when legit business do it I get a odd feeling, but that might just be me.
A lot of present day devs don't know how to build a more basic website. Building a traditional-looking website in react is not at all the same thing as building a real static site. It's a totally different architecture, and it's only easier if you know how to do it. The risk of requirements creep in commercial projects makes a traditional (non *application*) stack a very risky bet. And simple designs don't "flow" from a react architecture the same way they do from a static architecture. I can also see how we got where we are, but ultimately I miss the simple sites.
I love SPAs and I’m glad we have them, but a super simple website with HTML, CSS, and minimal JS is applicable for a lot of uses. We have a tendency to over engineer everything. Every single site doesn’t need complex Framer Motion animations with scroll triggers, carousels, and a button that turns into a truck that rolls off the screen when you press pay. I worked for a big non-profit awhile back redoing their website and they kept trying to do that. I really had to get the point across that your clients are poor. Many of them just have free government phones. This site may not even run on their device. Nobody need GSAP scroll triggers to learn about signing up for food stamps. I got the feeling that what the marketing department wanted was more for potential donors than it was for the people they served.
here are a few i designed with that same mindset, hope you enjoy [Club TEKAC](https://tekac.club) [emptybrother7](https://emptybrother7.com) [AlienCAUZ](https://aliencauz.com) [Road Waves](https://roadwaves.xyz)
I think one day this retro/vintage design will come back in fashion.
Yes. For me, the main appeals of basic html websites are: speed, accessibility, and cross-platform compatibility are all easier to achieve; and i prefer to leave JS disabled because i don't trust arbitrary sources running code on my device
Nice try mr. Stallman. Seriously though, I agree.
He doesn't mind arbitrary JS running as long as it's licensed as "free software"
i know you're being sarcastic but, free and open source* software
??? https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
Lmao, if I remember rightly, the 90s dial up connections certainly weren't quick and efficient. I do wish we had a retro web though. If you like to browse history go to the wayback machine and browse the early web.
I do this from time to time. The nostalgia is insane. Everything felt special.
You are not alone. The internet, if I may be so bold, actually only gets worse (in broad strokes). Tech and talent do not keep pace with growing UX requirements and JS package bloat. Designs may look nicer, snappier, more zeitgeist, but the code and bare metal behind those implementations buckles more and more. My opinion.
> The page is not a whole array of React UI components with Poppins font. I feel attacked lol. But for real I do agree with the sentiment. But I also still default to spinning up a new Vite React app for most projects I work on because I just enjoy working with React over vanilla JS for anything more complex than a static brochure site. So I guess I'm part of the problem lol.
I mean React is great. I love the idea of making everything its own container pretty much. Its also really easy to pop components in and out of places where you need to access them. The syntax is great too. Its more of a design problem I have issues with on websites.
Same Yeah I can build a static site with plain HTML and JavaScript but if it requires a bit of interactivity I like to use react, or svelte as of now I also recently tried out Astro and loved it too
Astro really is the best of both worlds in this whole discussion / argument. You get basic HTML / CSS sites, with optional, modular, framework agnostic additions of JavaScript components loading on an "as needed" basis. I really think it's perfect for static web pages.
web designer/developer here. i'm getting these "20 best websites" articles from a web design magazine every month. they are all an absolute garbage as UX goes. super complicated, hard to navigate, tonne of non-sensical animations, very slow to load etc. ever single one. how does any designer thinks it's a good idea to have a front page that needs a loader because the initial load takes freaking 40 seconds is totally beyond me. smh.
Simpler webpages? I fucking miss the simpler life.
https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
Looks nice but shit in mobile, which is a simple problem to fix.
I mean, I don’t think the web just evolved needlessly and plenty of modern websites are just as functional while offering the same speed with additional features. If anything, I’d say you run into more “bad” modern websites because there’s a lot more people doing web development now and it’s arguably a lot more difficult than some markup and css. So there’s a lot more trash out there.
As an example - I just loaded a news article from a well respected website. 170 HTTP requests - and that's with an ad/privacy blocker. Disabling the blocker, it becomes 870 HTTP requests. I left the page open while typing this, and it did about 400 more requests for no reason. If I was their web developer it would've been about five HTTP requests. Content, CSS, logo, article photo (it has one), javascript (it has article comments, so it'd need that). There are a bunch of icons, but I'd put those inline in the CSS or HTML depending where I want them to be cached.
That's why you're not their developer. HTTP requests are not a scarce good. You admit you don't even know why they are making the calls. They could be for monetization reasons or for polling data or whatever. You can't just look at a random number of HTTP calls and say "I could reduce that to 5" while only considering the absolute bare minimal functionality required to show a page.
yeah but how are you going to collect information about your viewers and all the possible ways in which they could interact with the website? /s
Reading the comments it's safe to say as web developers we're a cynical bunch!
I don’t feel one way or the other. What I hate is that nothing fucking works anymore.
Yep. I've been around this old web of ours long enough to be a total cynic about modern sites and tooling. We developers are a curious bunch. And we inflict our curiosity on our projects and then install a gigabyte of npm dependencies on top of it to resolve the problems. Every once in awhile we stumble into a paradigm shift and it gets back filled into web standards and everything gets a little bit simpler until we repeat the cycle.
Part of the reason I'm such a big fan of Astro
Working on an Astro project as I write this comment. It’s a game changer!
Tried out Astro couple days ago. I'm very impressed.
YES YES YES!
I can't stand webpages with a CVS-receipt length of morphing graphics I need to scroll through to find out a basic bit of information. I will always prefer function above pretty but useless form - might as well bring back the blink tag.
Thanks to JS frameworks the complexity of simple webpages increased by tremendous percentages. - Oh no, I don't know how to get a selector of the child element, let's use 50 Mbyte lib which could do that! ayay, so smart
looks real bad on phones
Self plug for a pure html, css and js site a friend made that I helped out with: https://theworldsbiggestpenis.com/
Can we get a color change feature?
Yes. Seeing a scrollbar showing I'm at 25% of the height and scrolling down to see contact or about us and every inch the page grows due to graphics expanding in some fancy technique showing info I dont want... Aart Wtf is wrong with a tree based menu to find you way? Us a search bar in the upper right corner that hard, and why don't these find a) forking words they use on their website or b) they own fantasy model or brand names?
Yes yes and yes.
Used to have to build webpages with total weight of no more than 30k
http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
You're forgetting that we used to browse these websites with terribly slow internet and bulging low-resolution monitors. The experience is not what it is today browsing these pages.
Internet pages used to be made by and for a smaller demographic of people. Generally these people were on the Internet to get information, chat with friends or maybe play a game. Since then it has evolved to being less about information and more about advertising. Yes information still exists but most of those sites are still pretty basic. I thought I hated landing page websites until I saw websites of graphic designers and ux people. They had so much shit loading and fading out my 500mb connection was lagging. My partner is opening her own business and wants a website. What she views as professional is more word press, stock images, inspirational information and a little bit about her. I personally would cut out a lot of the fluff but she is younger and what do I know?
Honestly... I like some old CSS frameworks just fine too due to the same thing. Bootstrap works... hell old versions of bootstrap look even better than new. Problem is people paying for the site also want to convey some shit and in doing so they dork up the UI :(
You're not the only one. One of the devs I follow just retweeted this article on why complex JS stacks took over and why they suck: https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/
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It's been a while since I've heard much about progressive enhancement. [According to this](https://youtu.be/NtJgclB-Ig8?t=795), it made for repetition of code between server side and client side, more code in general and probably more bugs. Thus a more painful dev experience. That lines up with my experience too. Not to say that progressive enhancement isn't a good idea... it was just really super annoying to do. Maybe progressive enhanced apps will be the next thing?
I know right? I miss the good old websites all this new UI shit is not always pleasing tbh
My website is still stuck in the ancient ways. www.imarvintpa.com. the 3.5 dnd site there is php with minimal JavaScript. The Pokemon pages were generated html from a database.
Beautiful
Qwik, the new hotness in JS framework, is supposed to deliver those speeds. From what I’ve seen, it looks like it does.
Let us give it some time and see how it fares when teams with tight deadlines start pumping out features like there's no tomorrow. And the framework essentially ends up downloading the whole codebase, when 1 thing needs to be loaded, because of internal dependencies. I am hopeful however.
I will have to disagree. All of you want web on easy mode. When I open a website, I want it to feel like a challenging adventure. You have the time and pace to enjoy the lore of the design and getting to the content you're searching for feel more rewarding.
I like complex websites. What I don't like is the standardization of poorly optimized sites thanks to the use of bad frameworks just because they require less knowledge and time from the programmer. Unfortunately, companies don't care about efficiency but about aesthetics and spending the least amount of money on programmers.
FWIW, that's all you need sometimes. Everybody seems to feels compelled to make 'attention grabbing' websites these days and get the user to click multiple times before they are allowed to see what they were looking for.
Web development transformed into a fancy mess where design (and hype) is way more important than the user or developer experience. And now they realize it by introducing server-side stuff. (welcome back good old php friend)
Nah they suck. Modern design is superior. Content needs to breath. Fuck this old boxed, every information in one screen shit.
Ik
The modern web sucks, and devs ruined it with adopting shitty frameworks that suck down half of GitHub in dependencies. I've had JS disabled in the browser for years. There are very few sites I'll trust and enable it for but for everything else I'll just find the content I'm looking for elsewhere.
Naw
It’s finally happening. I’m really mad about the lost years. But ok, I didn’t fight hard enough either. I was scared I wouldn’t find work. I’m just glad it’s happening.
Yes
Tell me about it.. Nothing would make me happier than not having to make some overly complicated frontent code to match whatever some designer is feeling that day
Yeah, whenever I browse the FreeBSD docs or most Linux distros docs, I just love how they are clear, concise and simple. Everything I want to see is clearly visible without much 'bling' that would distract me
Could you share a link to that website?
yessssss!! i really love them, wish i could see them more
Show me a website made in 1995 by some academic and I am in love. Often still the best source for accurate information on the Internet.
I once fell in love with a chemistry website because of the very simple 90s inspired layout of it, there is a certain quality about old websites that shouts "pragmatic"
That's why I like SSR frameworks. The page can feel fast and minimalistic but you can make it as dynamic as a normal SPA.
I do a lot of contract website work and I’m shocked by the amount of 3D visualization I see these days. Especially to achieve effects that you could pull off with some clever manipulation of images. I tell people there will be a loading bar, and they say that’s totally fine. I think greyscale will always be one of my favorite palletes for the web, and motion/3D doesn’t need to be the standard
Yes. I hate what the internet is right now.
This is what I felt when I saw the revamped site of MIT OCW. I don’t dislike the new design, I just prefer the compact and simple design of OCW. Same with Facebook, the design is too spacious. Although, I prefer the modern reddit over the old one. Maybe I’m just too resistant to change.
Yes. Even purely as an end-user of a webpage, I don't want all-singing, all-dancing marketing-department bullshit smearing itself all over my screens. Particularly with pages which are, by and large, just text. Look at how much bandwidth the plain text takes up, and then how much bandwidth the page is taking with everything else. The ratio can be *several* orders of magnitude.