[jameskilton]

I love the point the site is trying to make but I'm confused as to why this is built with a vue.js static site generator requiring node/npm/yarn and an almost 7,000 line yarn.lock file.

Shouldn't this literally be a single page, hand-built HTML file with inline CSS? Is this trying to be self-ironic or something?

[gerdesj]

Shouldn't this literally be a single page, hand-built HTML file with inline CSS? Is this trying to be self-ironic or something?

Yes, I'm going to assume that is a parody. However, signs of FrontPage or Word as an editor would be cool.

[madeofpalk]

Reminds me of the Bloomberg tech site, which had a lot of effort put into its 'brutalist' design to look like a 1995-era web page.

[zeusk]

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/404

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/500

https://www.bloomberg.com/500

Their error pages are still quite funny (and epic shit).

[gchucky]

Just for proper attribution, these pages are the work of Steph Davidson.[1] It's generally believed that these page were created when Richard Turley was working at Bloomberg as their creative director.[2]

[1] http://stephdavidson.com/ [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/richard-turley-2011-4

[thisrod]

Crikey is good too:

https://www.crikey.com.au/zxy

[madeofpalk]

While we’re on it, https://theaustralian.com.au/404

[denverkarma]

These are amazing, thanks for sharing!

[Mahn]

I guess we now have an answer to what comes after material design. Somebody tell the maintainers of Bootstrap so we can have the entire internet updated asap.

[arbie]

You jest, but Material Design is the new standard for approachable UX design. Looking forward to see what topples it.

[madeofpalk]

Eh. This design trend is on the way out - 2016 was its hey day.

[zzzcpan]

This is more like fun old web being reborn as brutalism in web design. Sadly, doesn't have anything to do with hand made html and css, just visuals.

EDIT: An article on brutalism and antidesign: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/brutalism-antidesign/

[mygo]

I don’t really think this qualifies as brutalism. A key element of brutalist design is the lack of the excess.

Web 1.0 was full of excess. We’re talking 3D rotating words on fire when bold would suffice. Lots of drapery, lots of window dressing.

A brutalist site would be more like the sites that have a structure, but the seams are not made seamless, and excesses are avoided... Like craigslist.

[some_account]

It's funny because as humans, we always try to improve things since we are dissatisfied with imperfection.

But we tend to make simple things very complex in order to make them perfect.

The complexity then becomes the problem.

And we are back where we started for another attempt at perfection.

The wheel goes round and round.

[peterwwillis]

To achieve perfection you have to get every little thing just right, and that implies complexity. What it doesn't necessarily imply is complex processes or products, which is the problem with software.

Making the perfect knife, or the perfect cup of tea, can be done by one person with just two or three tools. But you have to know how to get everything just right, and that requires a lot of knowledge and experience.

You can make a machine or abstractions to handle most of these things, but rather than reach perfection, they just reach a reliably satisfactory facsimile. We keep tinkering, like an amateur sculpter carving out a mountain, because we're still hoping for perfection.

[im3w1l]

Except this is ugly AND complicated.

[ry_ry]

Perfect is the enemy of good.

Although i understand Voltaire was using an cracked version of HoTMetaL Pro to make his web pages, so the whole premise is a little questionable.

[aje403]

Plus there's also "I can't understand what your code is doing therefore it sucks I need to write everything from scratch using a more modern language that looks better on my CV"

[jlgaddis]

> ... but I'm confused as to why this is built with a vue.js static site generator requiring node/npm/yarn and an almost 7,000 line yarn.lock file.

> Shouldn't this literally be a single page, hand-built HTML file with inline CSS? Is this trying to be self-ironic or something?

Yes?

I can't be certain but I think that was the point.

[headsoup]

From the linked Github page:

> It's complicated on porpuse btw, I wanted to do it in ReasonML and Graphql but didn't have time as this was done in an afternoon hackathon

And yeah probably the ironic thing. This sort of page should be simple, much as a wide portion of websites out there.

[Finnucane]

Surely if it was good enough for time-cube guy, it should be good enough for us.

[colorint]

That's Dr. Gene Ray, Cubist and Wisest Human to you.

[shams93]

That's not surprising because all the tools we had to make these horrible, ugly sites were pre-css and often browser specific items that would only work on say ie4.

[wmccullough]

I keep seeing this general attitude about frontend, but I have a serious question: What’s the better alternative? I’m not asking this rhetorically because I have an answer, I just keep seeing the same remarks with no decent solutions. Is it time for the way we deliver the web to be rethought? Are we really in the golden age of the frontend but everyone is being too much of a hipster to realize it?

What’s the solution here?

[bunderbunder]

I don't know, either, but it does seem that the latest crop of frontend libraries (React & friends) is optimizing for a very high level of richness that simply isn't needed for most sites. Which is fine, but where it gets worrisome is when that lofty level of complexity is the only thing people know how to use.

I recently got to watch someone spend nearly a full week fiddling with building a React app for filling out a form for submitting a batch job on an intranet site. It's a lot of code, and it's non-trivial to understand how it works, what with all the async methods and clever state management and whatnot. It needs to be built, which is a thing, and building it requires having the right environment setup. (Its build speed reminds me of my C++ days, too.) I wouldn't be surprised if someone's already talking about incorporating Docker into its future.

At least to me, that's a rather arresting amount of time and money to see being sunk into a job that could have been accomplished with a simple HTML form on a static page.

[80386]

I see a lot of frontend devs these days who remind me of the interview horror stories about enterprise C++ guys getting a question like "how would you pull 10,000 phone numbers in NNN-NNN-NNNN format from a gigantic HTML page?" and responding by laying out an architectural plan for a hulking >1kLoC monstrosity, because they'd never heard of (nor could they imagine) grep.

On the other hand, obscene overengineering is probably a good way to build a portfolio. Nobody will get hired for demonstrating that they can build an HTML form on a static page.

[devxpy]

https://github.com/nucleic/enaml

We're just starting. IMO, if we started from a better language than JS, we would take stuff like data-binding in react for Granted, since it would be much easier to this stuff it in other languages.

[JepZ]

Most headlines aren't even bitmaps :-D ;-)

[pietrovismara]

I think your missing the point that it is not about how web sites are built but about the content.

[confounded]

See author’s response in thread.

[ehnto]

They needed to polyfill blink.

[wereHamster]

Hand-build HTML file with inline CSS, that you edit with $YOURFAVOURITETEXTEDITOR which requires an OS that's 50 million lines of code. And you're complaining about 7000 lines in an auto-generated file, which doesn't even have to be touched nor edited by a human?

The tools we use are insignificant, what's important is the result. If the result is a HTML file with inline CSS, who cares how it was created? You can use punchcards and a 20ton 'computer' for all I care.

[about_help]

As someone else said you missed the point.

I will tack on my own opinion that building sites that only function with javascript is a massive disservice to everyone. From disabled people with accessibility needs, to old hardware/software, and even to security/privacy conscious people the JS paradigm is a massive problem. The trend for "new shiny" has become ridiculous and I find most modern websites to be pretty but rather useless. I have to scroll forever past slices with massive images and marketing lingo just to find something that seems potentially helpful but just goes on to more marketing bullshit.

Want to get my buy-in for your tools? Stop making them a hard requirement and make sure you have a non-JS fallback that works.

[TeMPOraL]

Not to mention this all adds up to unnecessary increase of global electricity usage.

(For those who don't care about society in general, consider that this also means your users' batteries last shorter, making their days worse.)

[true_religion]

I could idle I traffic for fifteen minutes and use more power in total. I mean honestly if you're concerned about energy use and environmental issues, then it's more effective to stop using mobile devices all together, and encourage the use of desktop.

[TeMPOraL]

I'm not obsessive about energy use. I just don't like unnecessary waste. The problem here is that wasteful engineering gets popular, and in software, all that waste is multiplied by the numbers of users. Both of those factors add up to significant carbon footprint, and also significant drain on mobile devices. The former is an environmental/social concern, the latter is what makes your devices last less on a single charge, what makes them lag, and what makes you able to run less software in parallel. Computing resources are a commons too.

[wolco]

We've dumbed down sites removed advanced functions to make things appeal to the masses. I understand why but it does make sites more useless.

[mherrmann]

Tools come with overhead and complexity. You're right that only the end results matter. But (eg.) loading time is one aspect of it.

[TobiasA]

Way to miss the point.

[lemonberry]

Indeed. From her twitter post: "We started making websites because it was fun because we wanted to make dumb shit and now everything is so serious and sometimes I feel like we need to go back"

Leave it to an internet forum to get all gripey about something someone did for fun.

Theodor Adorno said about philosophy that, "Philosophy is the most serious of things but then again it is not that serious".

I'm pretty sure we can say the same thing about web development.

https://twitter.com/NikkitaFTW/status/995670345624555520