87
votes
Accepted
Should you always program server side for a website?
If you don't know whether you need server-side code, you probably don’t*
*Caveat: Server-side code is essential for security, when you want to internally control access to content, data, or ...
- 1,360
56
votes
Should you always program server side for a website?
Read about static site generators. These allow you to create a site in a programmatic manner (using templates, data, etc), and not by hand-crafting HTML. The result is a set of static HTML and CSS ...
- 24.2k
14
votes
Why so many good open source programs have websites that are very poorly managed?
I was reading about gzip program and I found the official website of the gzip software.
No, you didn't. You found the website that used to be the official website back when the original authors were ...
- 102k
13
votes
Is this approach to website design adequate or am I making a mistake?
It appears that this design is based on a CRUD model. This kind of model is good for designing database operations, and might actually work for small website UI, but when you are designing for a user ...
- 199k
6
votes
Should you always program server side for a website?
You can and should use only a static site if it is enough, or use a static site generator. Why? Maintainability. Code has bugs. Every few weeks there is another WordPress security hole found. If you ...
- 297
6
votes
Accepted
Does DNS reply with more information than just IP address?
DNS can respond with some additional data like mail exchange server, but that's not related.
Usually we can't access websites by IP address using web browser, because there are more than one websites ...
- 2,884
6
votes
How to adapt the architecture of a website and have suitable hosting along with it to meet increasing users?
Just a quick note on terminology:
Scaling up refers to improving the hardware.
Scaling out refers to adding more hardware in a load balanced environment.
In the web world, we tend to scale out the ...
- 26.1k
5
votes
Accepted
Why so many good open source programs have websites that are very poorly managed?
Generally, an open source software project has a large(ish) number of contributors, so it can continue even if certain individuals stop contributing either temporarily or permanently.
It is also ...
- 4,131
5
votes
Why would one employ a POST-based search engine on their website?
So, when a GET request is sent over HTTPS, its query parameters are secure in transit. However, it can more easily leak data at the endpoints (browser history, referrer URLs, and server logs notably) ...
- 4,341
5
votes
Is there any situation where there is a good reason to use an anchor <a> element without a href attribute?
In the old days, you used <a name="whatever"> if you wanted another link to jump to a particular point on the screen. Nowadays (for a long time actually) we use the "id" attribute.
- 1,737
5
votes
How to create a cache-preventing link? Using random number? Unix time? or other better options?
It's probably better to use cache-controlling HTTP headers rather than generating lots of unique URLs.
- 3,484
5
votes
Accepted
Secure Admin-pages-only login without HTTPS
You should probably go over to HTTPS for the whole website.
If you really insist on having an insecure main site, the login form should at least be over HTTPS, otherwise an attacker can just read the ...
- 1,561
5
votes
Accepted
Cookie consent and facebook cookies?
Going against the law is not an option: first it might make you loose more visitors (i.e. those who count on you to respect their privacy). Second, GDPR fines calculated as percentage of your global ...
- 74.8k
4
votes
Is there any situation where there is a good reason to use an anchor <a> element without a href attribute?
You could imagine that some Javascript code is dynamically changing the DOM to add that missing href= attribute dynamically at runtime.
- 32.5k
4
votes
Creating a web portal to access multiple databases (security and best practice?)
We do this in a different way. We have a directory based (in our case MS Active Directory) authentication. Access to the databases is given to active directory groups within SQL server. Then the ...
- 141
4
votes
Is it hard to "add" semantic web to your website?
Short answer: Semantic HTML is one element of on-site SEO. It's about using HTML4/5 tags that communicate context and not just data to Google.
Have a look at this article, it's the best beginner ...
- 216
4
votes
Is this approach to website design adequate or am I making a mistake?
Making a total of 51 pages to cover all of ADD, DELETE and UPDATE in the design. In my opinion, this is a considerable amount of pages to design, even if most of them are sufficiently generic in their ...
- 14.3k
3
votes
What happens when I update a page on a live website?
If I just go edit the file with a text editor, or update it with rsync or scp or something, is it possible for a request to get fouled up?
For text editors (at least all the common ones), rsync, or ...
- 102k
3
votes
How would you optimize the rendering of 10,000 elements on a webpage?
I believe what you are looking for is Lazy Loading. It may or may not be what you meant by "virtual" list, but in my years of experience, this is the optimized way to render 10,000 elements into the ...
- 147
3
votes
Should you always program server side for a website?
You only need to do backend programming when you need it.
However even basic features like emailing forms require basic backend programming usually. If it's just a display site then yes, it's fine.
- 139
3
votes
Accepted
What is the different between web site and web application?
Web site is the most generic term for "something visible to people using a web browser and accessible via a URL". This can be just a collection of static HTML files and images, but nowadays that is ...
- 51.1k
3
votes
Accepted
How exactly does someone make money from free software? And how do programs compete with websites?
Here are some common ways that organisations monetise their software:
Advertising - users are shown sponsored content within the context of the software. Often seen on free mobile applications and ...
- 9,137
3
votes
How to manage a multilingual website/blog?
It depends on the readers.
I faced a similar problem when I started my blog. I thought my readers would be mostly from France, but I knew I would also write some articles in English. I decided to ...
- 135k
3
votes
Accepted
Maintaining a static website using an HTML preprocessor
Your web-server itself can do this with Server Side Includes.
Use the include directive in your page to insert a header and/or footer file.
<!--#include virtual="/footer.html" -->
Sadly, this ...
- 147
3
votes
Accepted
How to implement a website with translatable articles?
The question is not so much how the world does it, but how you should do it.
The world is full of websites that are designed with a main language in mind, and that later implemented some extensions to ...
- 74.8k
3
votes
Accepted
Where to store unregistered user data?
If it's a small amount of information, you can store it in cookies on the client's device. If it's more data, you might try web storage or even a database on the client.
There is also the option of ...
- 3,600
3
votes
Accepted
Make modifications to a database resource specific per company
One possible solution is to create N rows in the tasks table for each task - one row for each company.
The tasks table would have the columns:
id (the unique id of the row)
company_id
assignee_id
...
3
votes
Accepted
Preventing parent component re-rendering of a big React component when you "Lift State Up"
I don't think you can do better than path copying. If you ever written a immutable data structure you'll know that you will have to copy the nodes that you touch as you recursively traverse what in ...
- 457
2
votes
Should formatter do validation?
The Single Responsibility Principle applies to classes of objects.
Robert Martin defines a "responsibility" as "a reason for the class to change," which basically means that a class can do more ...
- 199k
2
votes
Accepted
Testing performance of a single page application
It's pretty clear that the main difference, all other things being equal, is related to the number of HTTP requests. For example if your server-generated page uses the right cache control headers and ...
- 3,168
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible