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I've never been a subscriber of this page and I don't think I am their real target audience. But I'm a professional programmer and I have been using Linux for a

• bflesch 10y ago
  For the person downvoting me: Let's look at the article's comments. It is so hard to actually follow the conversation between the users. The article's title is repeated multiple times and has a red background. Underneath each comment's title is a full-height line with a font stating the UTC timestamp, and in the next line we can finally read the actual comment. I can't be the first person to criticise those issues, and from the fact that they haven't changed it already I think they actually don't care about these kind of things.
  • StevePerkins 10y ago
    Hacker News is a partially about deep, "real" tech (i.e. the old school Slashdot crowd)... and more largely about "tech fashion", entrepreneurial topics, and mildly interesting articles from The Atlantic in 2009. I didn't downvote your post... but I relate to the frustration that when we DO get content in the former category, the top comment is always a critique of website layout or font kerning or something else that tries to pull it into the second category. Can you just... not?
    • sp332 10y ago
      The point of an in-depth site like LWN is to communicate information to the readers. If the article and table layout make the information confusing and hard to access, that's not "fashion".
      • deleted 10y ago
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      • StevePerkins 10y ago
        > that's not "fashion" It most certainly is. You acknowledge in your parent comment that you are not the target audience for this site. I assure you that the sort of crowd that's into Linux kernel development by and large prefers web design that other audiences would find archaic. Conversely, were LWN to have switched to Bootstrap five years ago, or some Medium-like look today, or whatever the next transient fad will be five years from now... their audience would by and large viscerally hate it. Designer types indulge too much in the fantasy of OBJECTIVE standards for "organized", "hard to access", etc. It's all subjective. Hence, fashion. For people who enjoy working on green-screen terminal applications, switching to a web app version is like giving their workflow a lobotomy. For people who prefer mobile-first minimalist web apps, the reverse is true. LWN, and it's related subculture, happens to not be your scene. That's okay. But it's perfectly fine to just, well, not comment. Because it is so painfully lame how whenever a deep technical topic comes up on HN, half of the comment section deals with website aesthetics. Hey guys, if some topics just aren't for you, then it's... just... not... for... you... and... that's... okay.
        • sp332 10y ago
          That's not my comment, you're arguing with multiple people. But you're the only one to mention Bootstrap or switching to web apps - literally no one has suggested these things. The only tips in this thread are: unbreak the mobile site, use better spacing around elerments, don't mix center-aligned with left-aligned, and don't put the article title in front of every comment.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • sdkmvx 10y ago
    I like that. It helps me to see where one comment ends and another begins. I can't stand these modern sites which have no borders at all, making it very hard to visually distinguish separate posts.
• pubby 10y ago
  > this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements Really? I've always viewed plain HTML sites in the complete opposite way. They tend to have really good, well thought-out content. There's no filler or clickbait with them.
  • pasiaj 10y ago
    Compare LWN and Hacker News. Both are very simple, but the comment section of Hacker News has an emphasis on content, and metadata is showed in a very simple and toned down way. ("7 minutes ago" vs TIMESTAMP). On LWN there is unnecessary and redundant metadata accentuated! Everything on HN is clearly thought out, and almost nothing on LWN is.
    • 1_2__3 10y ago
      Some of us vastly prefer a time stamp to an utterly useless relative measurement displayed.
      • zeveb 10y ago
        > Some of us vastly prefer a time stamp to an utterly useless relative measurement displayed. Ditto. Maybe I loaded the page yesterday. What does '1 hour ago' mean? Was it updated by JavaScript? Is it an hour from now, or from yesterday, or what? Give me a timestamp, and I know.
        • sdkmvx 10y ago
          It gets even less useful as time goes on. Eventually it'll say one year ago. A timestamp would give the exact time rather than a huge range.
      • hehheh 10y ago
        I find most timestamps useless. It's rare that they include the time zone, so I'm always left wondering if they mean my browser detected time zone (through some JS), the TZ that the server uses, UTC, or whatever. "N minutes ago" is compact and does not require any client-side JS to provide an unambiguous value. At least LWN includes the timezone, which is a step ahead of most of the sites I've used.
• paganel 10y ago
  > Also it seems like they don't use CSS to enhance the site's UX at all. For me that's a feature, not a bug. I'm interested about the content itself, not about with what color or what font that content is presented as.
  • pluma 10y ago
    Sure, but the design is objectively bad. The article's title is repeated throughout the comments list and emphasized. The other comment metadata has the same visual emphasis as the actual comments (except the link and author jump out more than the comment itself). The articles themselves expand to the full width of the window.
    • hueving 10y ago
      I think you mean subjectively. "it's not in the format I'm accustomed to" is not objective in any way.
      • pluma 10y ago
        No, objectively. Unless you're saying it's intended to emphasize the metadata over the content. I'm talking about factors that are measurably detrimental to readability -- not fashion. Visual emphasis isn't new, it's been around for centuries -- it's not just a fad. There is plenty of introductory material on visual emphasis around, not just covering emphasis in textual media, e.g.: http://daphne.palomar.edu/design/emphasis.html http://daphne.palomar.edu/design/emphasis.html I agree that line length according to more recent studies seems to be less consistent (some recent studies say speed actually increases with longer lines but there doesn't seem to be any data on comprehension/retention and preference seems to be biased towards shorter lines -- again all of these factors may be cultural). But visual emphasis is a thing -- it's hard-wired into how human visual perception works.
        • lukeschlather 10y ago
          It doesn't emphasize the metadata over the content - they are equal peers. Most techniques for making metadata less emphasized make the metadata objectively less readable. I like having the metadata there. I like being able to read it. I have no trouble reading the text (because it's a decent size and the layout handles zooming without issue.)
• wtbob 10y ago
  > I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font). Say what? On the contrary, I think that it's splendidly simple to read LWN, because there's no distraction. It's a good, clean site; it respects the styling I instruct my browser to apply to it; it displays just fine in links, lynx, elinks, ewww, emacs-w3m, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Edge — if that's not professional, then what is? The HTML is very clean and readable. They do use CSS. Granted, it doesn't look trendy. Indeed, it looks like something from the 90s/00s. But once one updates to a20`6 style, one then has to spend money in 2017, 2018, spring 2019, summer 2019, fall 2019, winter 2019, January 2020, February 2020 — one will be paying designers and artists until the end of time. Would I appreciate a somewhat more current look? Sure. Would I trade good HTML and universal readability for a more current look? Hell no.
  • happyslobro 10y ago
    Also, things that should be rock solid and dirt simple by now have actually gotten more fragile over time. Heck, just look what happened when the parent tried to write the current year, after successfully expressing an older two decade range ;) 2016 was a total mistake. Let's just revert, and then wait for 2020-LTS.
    • wtbob 10y ago
      > Heck, just look what happened when the parent tried to write the current year, after successfully expressing an older two decade range ;) Argh, I blame an unfamiliar keyboard. And being half-asleep. Sigh
  • tehmillhouse 10y ago
    As a reader of a website, I usually primarily care about what the page looks like when it's rendered, as opposed to how clean the HTML is. Granted, the current trend to make everything feel like a shitty JavaScript application would be taking it too far, but lwn.net is definitely not a pleasure to read. Yes, it displays "just fine" in links, lynx, elinks, etc., if your definition of "just fine" is Fefe's Blog.
• grokys 10y ago
  >I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font) > Nathan Willis, who has been an LWN contributor for many years and an employee since 2012, will be stepping down at the end of September to pursue an unmissable opportunity to study one of his non-journalistic passions: fonts and type design. Related?
  • seesomesense 10y ago
    "Nate will continue to contribute articles... [but] the intricacies of Béziers, brush strokes, and kerning are going to take a lot of time and attention" Nate is not going to be working on the fluffy parts of typography.
• eumoria 10y ago
  Interesting backlash on this comment considering the issue in the post of subscriber drops. Not saying this is the case but younger readers who may be extremely interested in the sites content visit or are linked to the page and quickly leave because it looks like it hasn't been touched since 2000 (outside the content). I don't personally view any annoying layout issues but I believe this is a valid (if small) point.
• josteink 10y ago
  > I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content And you're commenting this on Hacker News. A site built up on tables, inline style-definitions, and where it for half a decade refused to add a simple... <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"> ...HTML header which made it usable on a mobile. I'm not saying it's not a factor, but clearly this seems to be an issue you're able to overcome, given the right circumstances and content. Also, I'd like to think of LWNs look and feel as a "solid" and clean web-page, the way they used to look and work back in the days when HTML was simple. Nothing excessive, and no overdone CSS/JS madness, which increasingly seems to be the norm. You just point your browser at the page, the browser retrieves the HTML, the HTML contains the content, and the overall wastefulness of network bandwidth is way below 10%. It's the way I wished the web still worked.
  • ramblenode 10y ago
    This ^ I have never thought much about the design of the site and that's a good thing. It succeeds in delivering information quickly and efficiently, which I imagine is the most important thing for LVN's readers. I would consider almost any new UX feature a regression if there is even a small chance it breaks my browser or slows down page loads.
• GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  You can't seriously expect a site that used to be named "Linux Weekly News" to have decent UI/UX.
• bloatisgood 10y ago
  [X] site loads instantly [X] doesn't download dozens of frameworks or ads [X] puts focus on content rather than appearance You're right the LWN site is utter trash. It's 2016, why aren't they embarrassed of their own incompetence? What comes next? Are they going to tell me to read a book?
• csense 10y ago
  > design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content For me, "design elements" tend to make content harder to consume. > it just feels clunky Pages that load megabytes of JavaScript to display kilobytes of text feel clunky. The modern trend toward large icons, large fonts, wide margins, and slow response times because everything has to go through JS/XHR makes websites that keep with today's design fads feel like toys, while websites that present information without a ton of JS and CSS baggage feel like tools. I feel like design fads are partly a clever marketing ploy to keep web designers in business -- "it doesn't look modern" shouldn't be a justification to plop down the big bucks to redesign a perfectly functioning website every 3-5 years, but it is.
  • oblio 10y ago
    You're mixing up design "fads" with solid principles. > large icons, large fonts, wide margins I have 20/20 vision but even for me, all these are boons. It's the "design types" that want small fonts because they look cool. But for reading, give me a 14 or 16 font any day of the week, much more relaxing on the eyes. All those things you're complaining about improve readability and discoverability. I can't even imagine how people with bad eyesight think about this topic... > and slow response times because everything has to go through JS/XHR This does, indeed, look like a (software) design fad.
    • CaptSpify 10y ago
      I feel like I'm not understanding what your saying. Zooming is easy. I have bad eyes and zoom in on websites all the time. Simple sites like LWN work great, but every "magically interactive overly-designed" site breaks immediately. Large icons start overlapping/fighting with each other and the text. Wide-margins end up squishing the site to one or two word columns
    • Grishnakh 10y ago
      If you like gigantic fonts, feel free to press "Ctrl +" in your browser. I'm sure there's also a setting you can change to make the fonts larger by default if you're having problems with your eyesight.
• zeveb 10y ago
  In fairness, I see your point, and it's not a bad one. I do appreciate the fact that LWN works in any browser, and doesn't require JavaScript to function. I wouldn't say that it comes across as unprofessional, though — rather the opposite. To me, LWN appears to be professional: no-frills, focused on substance over form.
  • vacri 10y ago
    LWN's primary audience is also people who communicate professionally via mailing lists. They just don't go for flashy sites, and prefer stability and consistency to whizz-bang prettiness - which is why there's an article warning folks to expect some changes and describing the reason why. But the kicker is, whether or not someone thinks the site looks professional, it's a subscriber-based service that's been running for nearly two decades, that has hardcore professionals subscribing to it. It's not FOTM.
• lil1729 10y ago
  "unprofessional"? really? I have been reading lwn since 2000 and it is the single most important site when it comes to general Free Software news and in depth information. Jon is a kernel developer and not a web programmer, still the site works on every browser I have tried in a consistent way. While the look and feel can "improve", the current or past forms have never been anywhere close to unprofessional. LWN gets me what I want. It is the most important resource for a linux kernel or in general Free Software enthusiast. Average HN crowd perhaps does not fit into that stereotype.
• keyboardhitter 10y ago
  If you are a designer, maybe consider making some CSS changes or additions with Stylebot or another similar browser plugin? You could then share more "trendy themes" with others who are looking for a different design.
• pnathan 10y ago
  Really? Designer zing connotes to me a focus on the superficial... the shinier the website, the less useful the content, IME :-/