How I built a responsive and semantic “Contact Me” page in under 16KB
In this technical retrospective (2017), @edent shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 60 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 38 comments
``` All CSS and Images are inline - that reduces the number of requests which need to be made to the server.
They are so small, web browsers spend longer connecting to the server than the time taken to download them. So I placed them inline to the HTML - that saved a heap of downloading and rendering time.
``` I'm curious how it would compare to an alternative solution that does not inline anything, but instead relies on HTTP/2 and/or HTTP/2 server push [1]. Go recently added support for the latter in Go 1.8 [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2_Server_Push ↗
[2] https://golang.org/doc/go1.8#h2push ↗
I was looking at the source, and came across this URL:
``` https://gmpg.org/xfn/11 ↗
``` the HTTPS cert isn't signed correctly, and if you accept it, you just get a 404. I decided to see what https://gmpg.org ↗ is, and (to my surprise) was presented with a login page for RBC.
Looks like all of the pages work over non-secure HTTP, though. Looks like they got hacked?
Maybe some sort of malicious redirect?
From wget:
``` WARNING: cannot verify gmpg.org's certificate, issued by ‘CN=online.rbcaccessverifcation.fotomateo.com’: Self-signed certificate encountered. ```
Just for fun, I was able to get your contact page down to 75 bytes. It is now an inline HTML 5 element you can include on any page, for example in the footer. It is semantic, responsive, cross-platform and mobile optimized, and plays well with screen readers. It can be served with a single http request and can be included statically by any web server. It should be served and render in 0.001 seconds plus the single http request latency. Try it:
``` mailto:[email protected]?Subject=web%20contact ```
There was a competition last year for making websites under 10kb. In my opinion there are some truly amazing entries: https://a-k-apart.com/ ↗
About the OP, take into account that repeated markup sum up to little more than just 1 when gzipped; and any non-svg image is going to eat your quota REALLY fast.
This is a demonstration that messaging is really screwed up. It's like email in the 1980s, when people had MCIMail addresses, Usenet addresses, ARPAnet addresses, CompuServ addresses, X.400 addresses, and maybe a cable address. People put all of those on their business cards.
Somebody needs to gateway messaging, whether the vendors like it or not.