gushing over the maintainability and simplicity of @jimniels’ menu as a whole dang separate-standalone-HTML-page: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/lots-of-little-html-pages/#example-2-navigation
(via @db)
Also posted to Bluesky.
43 replies
Ok now I'm gushing over this too. Very, very cool!
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I award this both +3 and -2 internet points
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we are all iterating towards html imports
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Wait, we can do that!? 🤩
Bad UX if we're being honest
huh… I find it fascinating that you’ve used “we” here
That's an absolutely fair call-out, no idea why I did that.
_I find it_ bad ux, as it isn't responsive interaction-wise.
yeah, that’s fair. There are some interaction tradeoffs happening, if folks are actively doing some <form> work you would want to warn before navigating away. Might also help to do some clever prefetching too. Looking forward to compression dictionaries which would help here too!
It‘s also all quite unexpected when you‘re following a screen reader, where 'invisible' details like “link menu“, the round-trips and page loads, etc. become more apparent.
That said: All is fair in love and on personal pages. You can just do things!
I've ported this idea over to my icon gallery sites too
I've wanted to write about this more but you know, and I've got a half-written post on how I am doing this on my icon sites, but you know....time!
half written posts can be whole posts with the right attitude (I repeat to myself)
lol, just like any pizza is a personal pizza if you believe in yourself?
it isn’t a pizza (blog post) if you don’t feel a little gross after eating (publishing)
Holy crap thats smart
@erikvorhes @jimniels @db yeah! my personal site just… uh… leaves some things out of the small viewport nav. This is probably a better option for me too
@zachleat @erikvorhes @db any menu can become a mega menu when it's just another webpage :)
@zachleat @erikvorhes @jimniels @db This is so very cool
@erikvorhes @jimniels @db I had assumed history.back but the referrer check is :chefskiss:
@zachleat @jimniels @db — agreed. I was thinking maybe enhancing it a bit, but I haven’t actually tested the change: https://gist.github.com/erikvorhes/91f36bb95f9d2855ccf72b14fcdfd626
Jim says "leveraging the grain of the web."
Oooh, nice. I’d even italicize that nice were it possible. That nice.
I’m all for this simplicity. Like, a form with a method=get and some view transitions goes a long way as well. Basically free niceness.
@armstrong @zachleat @db it's not sticky so you can't click it unless you're at the top of the page (so it's not a problem i tried to solve)
@jimniels fair enough, am only asking because I’d love to explore using this technique but that could be an issue for my scenario. Love that this is even possible though!
@armstrong @jimniels scroll position for freeeeeee as long as bfcache is in play weeeeee https://web.dev/articles/bfcache
@zachleat @armstrong i keep thinking the bfcache has got to be one of the most underrated, least-taken-advantage of web platform features in a long time
@jimniels @armstrong bf stands for best friend
Yup. I used this in a client project, and it worked really well.