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Web & Frontend

The most popular blog posts about web & frontend on Hacker News. 325 posts.

2025
272

Stop crawling my HTML – use the API

One of the (many) depressing things about the "AI" future in which we're living, is that it exposes just how many people are willing to outsource their critical thinking. Brute force is preferred to thinking about how to efficiently tackle a problem. For some reason, my websites are regularly targetted by "scrapers"…

273

Chrome Returns 206 when the Server Returns 403

Chrome Returns 206 when the Server Returns 403 Postmortem It is a feature not a bug! I got detailed explanation from chrome developers which is very helpful. You may find the complete response in the bug ticket. Also this blog post draws a lot of attention after I post it on Hackers News. You may find comments here…

274

Just Use HTML

I’ve worked on so many projects recently that were more complicated than they needed to be because they used JavaScript to generate HTML. JavaScript is… Slower to load Slower to run More prone to breaking Harder to read and reason about Doesn’t actually look like the final output It’s inferior to just using HTML in…

276

Switching to BunnyCDN in Less Than 2 Hours

Update, 2025-04-16: I wrote a follow-up post after about a month of usage, and you can read that here. Given some recent, uh, instability in US politics, and given that everyone likes an underdog, I’ve been looking at European alternatives to my current hosting situation, which is Cloudflare. After looking through…

277

Local First Htmx

Overview Part 2 is now ready There is a common refrain on the internet that things have gotten worse and are continuing to get worse. There is a proliferation of horrible jumpy loading ads on every website, every search engine throws a crappy AI summary in front of your search result, every site/webapp seems to have…

280

Why some DVLA digital services don't work at night

Every few months or so, somebody asks on social media why a particular DVLA digital service is turned off over night. Rather than answering it every time, I’ve decided to write this post, so I can point people at it in future. It’s a great case study to show why making government services digitally native can be quite…

285

Finding Dead Websites

As some of the work planned for Marginalia Search this year has been progressing a bit faster than anticipated, there was time to implement an unplanned change. This post details the implementation of a system for detecting when servers are online, to avoid serving dead links and improve data quality, and for…

294

Move on to ESM-Only

Three years ago, I wrote a post about shipping ESM & CJS in a single package , advocating for dual CJS/ESM formats to ease user migration and trying to make the best of both worlds. Back then, I didn’t fully agree with aggressively shipping ESM-only , as I considered the ecosystem wasn’t ready, especially since the…

296

WWDC25: macOS Tahoe Breaks Decades of Finder History

Something jumped out at me in the macOS Tahoe segment of the WWDC keynote today: the Finder icon is reversed. You can see that in the image below. On the left is macOS Sequoia, and on the right is macOS Tahoe: I know I am going to sound old and fussy, but Apple needs to roll this back. Some History The Finder logo has…

299

A Supermarket Bag and a Truckload of FOMO

The day was nearing to a close. The sun has already set, but that Friday evening in Amsterdam was still warm. Unusually warm, in fact, for those late days in March – as if spring decided to bless my pilgrimage, for that pilgrimage was not jovial. I was sitting at a ramen joint, sipping on the broth. To my left, a…