Just use HTML

Sort of but it just builds on top of cruft. CSS and html is poorly designed to do what we are doing with it today.

Like I understand the point of not building bloat. But the reason why people build bloated stuff like react is because the primitives are just raw shit. HTML and css is just really bad.

I was having trouble getting reader mode to "detect" my blog posts a while back, I was never able to find documentation on how it decides to show the button or not.

Readability's heuristic is intentionally opaque as a defense against targeting by advertisers and others who abuse the web.

Reader works in Safari

| <font size="5" face="Helvetica">Monitor and protect your web app from cyberfraud, account threats, bots and abuse with a single security platform.</font>

Sure but how is this better than setting up the font in CSS? There may be an advantage to not having an external CSS file, but setting up CSS rules inside the HTML file works perfectly well and is much more maintainable than this IMHO.

It's super zoomed out on my phone, it doesn't have a mobile viewport. And if you do want to read text, you have to zoom in more than the width of the full page so you have to constantly scroll left and right.

Impossible to read on mobile unless you pinch zoom way in and then pan back and forth across the page. A bit bold to say that it works well.

> Easy to update.

How does updating the font or color work? Search and replace on multiple HTML files?

Nice! I'm working on a private Recipe bookmarking site that currently has no JavaScript and minimal CSS.

https://github.com/bradly/recipin

I have no idea if this is satire, or if you're a younger developer who "found" the techniques we ran away from screaming 20 years ago.

    <table border="0" width="720" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" align="center">

    <td height="1" width="100%" bgcolor="#575677">
        <img src="spacer.gif" alt="" width="1" height="1" border="0">
    </td>

I think this style of writing tries to emulate what passed as "cool" in the early 2010s or so.

Matthew Inman of "The Oatmeal" is to me a leading representative of it.

It's not sponsored. I'm the author of both sites :)

Or it could make abstractions even more important and useful. If it's able to identify common but nuanced patterns across the entirety of github, it could build libraries and frameworks that satisfy them. Then it would fine tune itself based on those tools, and start using those abstractions going forward.

That would improve the consistency and reduce the complexity of software everywhere in a way that gaggles of human engineers across thousands of computers never could.

It would be beneficial for the AI too, as the fewer things it has to keep track of, the more efficiently and accurately it will be able to generate correct applications on top of it. This would cut costs, hallucinations, and allow smaller local models to perform better.

I don’t think it’s quite that simple. Taken to the logical extreme, everything above pure machine code is “abstraction”, but I don’t expect AIs to produce good machine code any time soon.

Even if you consider trainability (amount of code etc), Python is a higher abstraction than C and I don’t see that going away either.

A more nuanced view is that libraries that exist to reduce boilerplate will likely see less use, whereas libraries that exist to simplify a problem domain or similar (automatic memory management language, crypto libraries, parallelisation abstractions) will stay, at least whilst we are relying on humans to review AI generated code.

i'm not sure i agree. maybe if you're "vibe-coding", but not if you're using AI as an assistant. a good abstraction makes it hard to write bugs, so telling AI to use a certain library (which i know to be high quality) is a good way to constrain the types of bugs i have to look for when reviewing the code.

> Personal opinion is that AI will reduce the need for higher abstraction software libraries.

I'm not sure we should be excited by that. Instead of building more powerful high level abstractions we're giving up and hope to build better software by churning out tons of one-off spaghetti code.

> We will see wildly different software paradigms as the need for human understanding drops

Isn't an LLM basically another abstraction layer? Unlike React or EF Core, it can talk back

LLMs reinforce what the majority is already doing, because that's what it's trained on. I'd like ORMs to go away but LLMs aren't going to do that.

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Unfortunately many sites are little more than web 1.0 inflated with a consulting boondoggle.

You can sell HTML plus CSS in many cases.

This link has been posted a million times, and I'm always surprised by the reactions. Yes, for anything that is data driven, plain HTML is great. Maybe sprinkle some markdown on top of it but that's all you really need.

But is that the only use for the web ? Are we pretending that the internet is only a collection of articles ? How do you end up with Figma, Soundation or Tinkercad with just plain html ?

No you (probably) don't need nextjs with greensocks for your blog, but there are valid reasons why fancy frameworks or javascript might be needed. I think saying that plain HTML is all you need is as silly as saying that you should always use the latest framework in your project.

Note that these are ISO 8601 weeks, which may not match the expectations of users everywhere. E.g. the US has a different system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week#Other_week_numbering_syst...

Same is true on Firefox: works fine on mobile, but doesn't work at all on desktop. Especially weird as the mobile week picker is just a date picker that ignores the picked day and returns a week it seems; surely the same could've been implemented for desktop.