[chickenfeed]

I don't want to totally neg on web dev. But it does suck donkey balls. I've been doing it for years. From writing raw html,to using scripting langs, frameworks and what not. And the amount of time it takes to do not a lot I figure is just a colossal brain drain. We just went on holiday, and all I wanted to do was look up places to go eat and drink, or visit for the day, and most of the sites sucked. Or were out of date. Not updated or whatnot. There's still lots of fire once and forget sites. Probably because budgets are tight and people can't afford updates. Or the updates are just technically too difficult for people to grok.

The complexity of sites is paralysing. What could be a few simple pages of texts and images is totally over-engineered for no good reason and is burning a stupid amount of CPU cycles. Probably built on a hacked off-the-shelf CMS that could do with security updates.

CMS and frameworks are being used, because there wasn't a good alternative to something as neat as frames.

A site I'm working on at the moment has quite a pretty design, but pull the CSS and it's just a mess.

I was looking at going to the cinema recently and the local picture house made it practically impossible to just scan the handful of films that were playing that week. I realised you could pretty much shove it all in a spreadsheet and it would read better. Heck, I downloaded the JSON from their API, and it was easier to read.

Most of it is all tiresome lipstick on a pig.

Facebook was a success for a few reasons, one was the easy on-boarding (which uses nefarious privacy trade-offs), the other is that you could actually share photos easily. Also see: Whatsapp and Instagram. Publishing needs to be easy. And despite a simple FTP being easy, there's a weird disconnect in the usability process that makes this tricky for mere mortals. People want to drag and drop, or upload, fire and forget and edit easily. And those wanting to consume data, really just want the bare essentials: The data.

[ethbr0]

> And those wanting to consume data, really just want the bare essentials: The data.

I don't think they do. The average HN reader, probably; but not the average person.

What they want is a well styled and usable webpage. Unfortunately, there aren't enough effective and talented UX designers (or stakeholders at companies with decent UX intuition).

This leads to the current situation where the average person would be better served by bare essential data, even if it's not their preference, because it's still better than the kludgy UX average design a company is able to afford.

{bad UX} << {raw data} < {good UX}

The end run around this is what WordPress realized: create professional styles/themes and allow users to purchase and apply them. But that can't solve bad stakeholder taste.

Which brings me back to Facebook, which I would argue succeeded because it standardized and mandated a professional UX.

{data from people} + {professional, standardized UX} = {winning}

You can dislike the original Facebook UX, but I don't think anyone would claim it was amateur level work. Which is what everyone's perception of MySpace/Geocities et al. was.

[mmsimanga]

You hit the nail on the head when you mentioned WhatsApp. In my country in Africa WhatsApp is so popular so much so that mobile network providers even sell WhatsApp data bundles. If I want to find something, like wire fencing I start by asking WhatsApp groups I am in. Family, neighborhood and even high school friends. Typically I get a few numbers and then I WhatsApp the service provider and I get up to date information. The service providers can't afford up to date web sites. WhatsApp also has a feature to include a catalogue in your profile. This is for business accounts which are also free.

[taylodl]

That's why I suggest for most small business to use Wix. Does your site tend to look like everybody else's? Yes - and that's not necessarily a bad thing, and since it's so easy-to-use and update, customers will appreciate having the up-to-date information they need.

What I'd like to see (maybe it exists, I haven't looked in a while) is something I would market as "Wix Widgets." These would be data-connected widgets where there's some customization to wire-in a REST service call and map the data points to the widget display. This would go a long way to handling the needs for internal-facing web sites every company has these days.

We really need simple solutions for the 90%-95% of web pages out there.

[jklinger410]

It's funny how I hear that web platforms are the best and most consistent cross-platform GUI systems, but then building on that system is awful.

So I'm wondering if maybe this is just the nature of GUI. Where you have to give every single instruction, eat up a bunch of cycles, or it simply won't function as cross-platform.

[oneeyedpigeon]

I don't think it's that funny, given that "best" and "most consistent" are both highly subjective.

I am a huge fan of the HTML/CSS/JS stack—it's far, far easier to knock up simple GUI-based apps using those technologies than, for example, the Visual Basic / Delphi tools that we were all using beforehand. And, remember, apps are not really what HTML was ever intended for, so any kind of 'app' support is a big bonus.

[zdimension]

Funny, I grew up making GUI apps on VB (and then VB.NET) using Windows Forms and I've always found it really easy compared to the web stack. You're not fighting against a flow algorithm that was designed for documents, trying to position your widgets in ways NCSA Mosaic wouldn't ever had dreamt of, it just works.

[Technotroll]

Part of this is the ever increasing amount of tags and elements in HTML files. Instead of being a document markup, it's a page markup, and it's difficult to discern where one stops and the other begins, although the W3C has tried with the addition of article and section elements. But then I suppose the raw HTML code was never meant to be read by other than devs in the first place, so there's that.

[chickenfeed]

There was that small window of niceness, where the html diminished in size. Now it's just all pseudo inline styles painted by class names with lashings of scripts. Always surprised when you peek under pretty much a bereft page of nothing and it's a whole heap of code.

I'm one of those annoying people that just uses reader mode anyway - not that it always works. Because I get fed up of zooming in and out, inflating text size etc etc.

[bobajeff]

This is why I want a browser where I can use Reader Mode on everything. Not just articles and blogs but also forums, q&a sites, online stores, image galleries, video sites.

Because of this I don't bet on the web because it's really designed to be an app framework now (admittedly the best one) not for being a simple client that sends and receives data (like XMPP, SIP, IRC, SMTP, IMAP and NNTP).

[jrm4]

I do, and I teach it. It's a lot of ridiculous garbage.

I think an aggressive defense of e.g. what "reader mode" does is incredibly important, to the point that I'd support e.g. legislation.

[OOPMan]

I spent some time recently working on a C++ application for Windows using Qt for the UI and general application framework.

I was surprised at how easy it is to achieve useful things with C++ and Qt in this day and age.

When I used it back in the early 2000s it was a lot more painful but both C++ and Qt have come a looking way.

Honestly, to paraphrase Hayao Miyazaki...the web was a mistake.

It's almost a classic example of worse is better.

[tambourine_man]

Or the updates are just technically too difficult for people to grok.

Or because they forget to. And almost no one visit their site anyway.

Unfortunately, Facebook and Instagram took that place. Where is it, phone number, what time is it open, some pretty pictures. Done.