4 ms·

I want to hecking scream. The point of the original website in this chain was not that you couldn't do media queries, or that all of your designs had to be uns

I want to hecking scream. The point of the original website in this chain was not that you couldn't do media queries, or that all of your designs had to be unstyled. It was a gosh-darned satire that showed that even if you did literally nothing, your website would still be responsive and readable and load fast. The fact that it did nothing, that it was just a completely unstyled HTML page was the reason that the joke worked. The point was to showcase that often when "native" web features break, those problems can be traced back to things we added to the page, things that are nice, but are not strictly required to view content online. It was not saying that we should get rid of CSS, it was saying that the web, by default, without any technical knowledge or design chops or engineering input, still works to deliver content. So naturally, the first thing the web community does is set up a build chain, add some CSS, mess with the contrast a bit, and start some kind of childish competition about who can make the best minimalist stylesheet and get the best HTTP compression set up on whatever pointless server setup they have and to start arguing about what license they're using. You are missing the point! The point was never to say that you couldn't add media queries to your website. The web community looked at a brilliant satirical piece and instead of sitting down and thinking about it for even just 5 minutes they immediately proved it right by showing that there was literally no context anywhere, even in a joke page, where they wouldn't be overcome with the irresistible urge to fiddle with things.

booleandilemma 6y ago
This one has a dark theme though.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 0xEFF 6y ago
  And a license.
  - DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
    and a lang= attribute
  - danShumway 6y ago
    I took booleandilemma's comment as a joke, but to the broader point, why does a joke page that's smaller than a blog post need a license? Does it add something to the satire, or does it make it funnier? Clearly the original page's lack of a license didn't make it impossible for anyone else to iterate on it. And again, I can't stress this enough, the point of the original page was not that every single addition you could make to a website was bad. It was not that you shouldn't have a dark mode. It used radical minimalism to show that by default websites work, even if you have no clue what you're doing. The lack of niceties is the point. Nobody was unable to read the original page or iterate on it. Could the page have been nicer? Sure. But the point was that even if you did nothing at all, the web still worked.
    - wrycoder 6y ago
      https://github.com/LeoColomb/perfectmotherfuckingwebsite/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/LeoColomb/perfectmotherfuckingwebsite/blo...
      - danShumway 6y ago
        :) The irony here being that the WTFYWPL license is generally not advised for projects that actually care about making it easy for others to use the code, it is itself a little bit of a joke license used to forcefully make the point that the author doesn't care about the copyright and is not interested in suing people or arguing about ownership. So it's appropriate in this context, but also pretty easy to argue that 10 lines of code are not a serious copyright threat anyway, and that it's not clear what code on this page is even subject to copyright in the first place, and that the author might have gone all the way and leaned into the fact that you don't really need an entire Git repo with a license for a single HTML page.
- jrockway 6y ago
  I have stopped waiting for website authors to figure out how to make a dark theme. I just have my user agent do it with https://darkreader.org/ https://darkreader.org/ Like ad blockers, sometimes you have to adjust it, but it usually Just Works. The main innovation from this is that my display has much improved contrast, because I can set the brightness for text on a black background, instead of setting the brightness for an entire screen of white. It is amazing how good a screen looks when it's not running at 1% brightness. (Just don't open a non dark mode app at night, or you won't be sleeping for a week.)
  - DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
    with dark-reader you still have the problem of getting blinded at night for the first second or so until the DOM finished parsing. There were some workarounds with userChrome.css userContent.css that solved this for a while, but they broke in recent builds so I'm back to feeling like a deer staring at the headlights every time a new tab opens on a page. I'm not 100% certain that this should be forced by the browser and IMHO it's the websites owners job to provide properly working dark theme and the UI/UE they think fits best their purpose (and not the browsers). Unless the assumption is that styling across all sites should look 100% identical which may appeal to some, though if I really want that then I can go look for content on gemini:// and no page will ever use their own styling other than what I am telling it to. Maybe it's just me but I like being dazzled and surprised with new design and style that I've not seen before.
    - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
      If rendering was server's concern, you would be served jpegs, not html.
    - jrockway 6y ago
      You're definitely right about being blinded during a startup delay. It's not every site but it does happen. I agree that all websites should give users a dark mode. They don't, so we have to make our own.
  - ksec 6y ago
- dokem 6y ago
  And HTTPS so I can sleep at night knowing noone MITM'd my stupid internet content.
antiterra 6y ago
If someone's attempt at a joke and the open discussion of web design gets you that upset, you might benefit from an extended break from the internet. Unless you get angry at clouds.
- paedubucher 6y ago
  Upset? This is a very accurate and sober analysis.
  - antiterra 6y ago
    “I want to hecking scream,” the italicized emphasis and explanatory interjections seem to indicate otherwise.
fctorial 6y ago
I beg to differ. The first website looks horrible on widescreen displays. A lot of old websites follow the style of first website and their readability could be improved 10 times by adding 10 lines of CSS.
- danShumway 6y ago
  > The first website looks horrible on widescreen displays But you were able to read it, right? You didn't have to go find a separate computer to use to figure out what it was saying. The text didn't get cut off when you resized your browser window. > The first website looks horrible I mean, yes? I'm not sure what you're saying by this though. Nobody (at least nobody worth taking seriously) is telling you that you should follow the style of the first website. You should have max-widths and throw some CSS on your page. To quote the original website: > I'm not actually saying your **** site should look like this. What I'm saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren't broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. There's this argument in all of the followup websites that seems to boil down to "it's easier to make websites look better than the original." And yes? But who is arguing with you that we should deprecate CSS from the browser? Who is arguing that it's a hard task to make something that looks and reads nicer than a completely unstyled page? It's a weirdly oblivious misreading of the original joke.
  - fctorial 6y ago
    The problem is that people do build sites that look like the first website: https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/multiboot/multiboot.html https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/multiboot/multiboot...
    - danShumway 6y ago
      Fair, but using GNU's work as an example almost feels like cheating in a weird way ;). GNU is not building a hard-core minimalist website, they do include CSS on their page -- in fact they include more of it than this website does. So the problem isn't that GNU is too minimal or that they've sworn off of CSS, the problem is that modern GNU increasingly doesn't seem to know how to design anything at all when it comes to UX, and that there's probably somebody somewhere on their chain of authority for this page seriously arguing that line-wrapping is bad design or some other nonsense. But I don't know. To the extent that GNU's design aesthetics actually represent a web design trend, then I do concede that it's a bad trend, and everybody who's following it should add `body { max-width: 40em; margin: auto; }` to the top of their CSS files.
npsimons 6y ago
I felt like the original was definitely taking the piss from websites that were 90% static textual content, but won't even load without Javascript. The sort of sites in search of a solution to a problem that does not exist.
perennate 6y ago
I agree that they might be missing the point, but I also feel that adding a one or two extra CSS lines is really needed to turn something that is very unpleasant to read (the biggest problem being the unlimited width) into something that is really basically perfect. Like, this one is actually pretty much perfect, while the original makes me want to manually add a max-width from the inspector.
- bluetwo 6y ago
  I agree. You could pour 80% of web content into this and it would work.
coldtea 6y ago
>>I want to hecking scream. Overreacting much? >The point of the original website in this chain was not that you couldn't do media queries, or that all of your designs had to be unstyled. It was a gosh-darned satire that showed that even if you did literally nothing, your website would still be responsive and readable and load fast. The fact that it did nothing, that it was just a completely unstyled HTML page was the reason that the joke worked. Yeah, so? Who cares about the point of the original website? As if it was some sacred ultimate truth, that only makes sense in the exact original wording and message? The point of THIS website is that you can improve upon the original "do nothing" website by a lot, and still do almost nothing: just add 10 tiny CSS lines.
- shoto_io 6y ago
  This meme won’t die. Heck, I'm thinking how to build the next version of this site!
- berniemadoff69 6y ago
  'a perfecter motherfucking site' will 'improve' this site adding 10 more tiny CSS lines 'the most perfectest motherfucking site' will improve that site by adding just 6 teeny tiny more CSS lines and maybe like the most little tiny bit of javascript. 'the absolute final most perfectest motherfucking site'.. will improve THAT site, and the feature creep goes on. they're all built off of the concept of the original, so it makes sense to 'care' about the 'point' of the original website. the only sacred ultimate truth was that nice things are possible with HTML only. i disagree that this particular website offers any improvement.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope
  - Eszik 6y ago
    I mean, it might not offer any improvement for you, but it certainly does for someone who uses a screen reader that doesn't default to English.
andrewzah 6y ago
I don't agree with this conclusion. The original could have added ~7 lines of css and made it about 100x more readable, while still making the same point.
xnx 6y ago
Same. Websites are fast, accessible, readable, and decent looking by default. We'd be better off if (like operating systems) more of the presentation preferences were left to the user. I used to use an extension for Firefox that allowed me to disable all styles for a website by hotkey. 9/10 websites were more readable after turning off all styles.

booleandilemma 6y ago

This one has a dark theme though.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
0xEFF 6y ago
And a license.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  and a lang= attribute
- danShumway 6y ago
  I took booleandilemma's comment as a joke, but to the broader point, why does a joke page that's smaller than a blog post need a license? Does it add something to the satire, or does it make it funnier? Clearly the original page's lack of a license didn't make it impossible for anyone else to iterate on it. And again, I can't stress this enough, the point of the original page was not that every single addition you could make to a website was bad. It was not that you shouldn't have a dark mode. It used radical minimalism to show that by default websites work, even if you have no clue what you're doing. The lack of niceties is the point. Nobody was unable to read the original page or iterate on it. Could the page have been nicer? Sure. But the point was that even if you did nothing at all, the web still worked.
  - wrycoder 6y ago
    https://github.com/LeoColomb/perfectmotherfuckingwebsite/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/LeoColomb/perfectmotherfuckingwebsite/blo...
    - danShumway 6y ago
      :) The irony here being that the WTFYWPL license is generally not advised for projects that actually care about making it easy for others to use the code, it is itself a little bit of a joke license used to forcefully make the point that the author doesn't care about the copyright and is not interested in suing people or arguing about ownership. So it's appropriate in this context, but also pretty easy to argue that 10 lines of code are not a serious copyright threat anyway, and that it's not clear what code on this page is even subject to copyright in the first place, and that the author might have gone all the way and leaned into the fact that you don't really need an entire Git repo with a license for a single HTML page.
jrockway 6y ago
I have stopped waiting for website authors to figure out how to make a dark theme. I just have my user agent do it with https://darkreader.org/ https://darkreader.org/ Like ad blockers, sometimes you have to adjust it, but it usually Just Works. The main innovation from this is that my display has much improved contrast, because I can set the brightness for text on a black background, instead of setting the brightness for an entire screen of white. It is amazing how good a screen looks when it's not running at 1% brightness. (Just don't open a non dark mode app at night, or you won't be sleeping for a week.)
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  with dark-reader you still have the problem of getting blinded at night for the first second or so until the DOM finished parsing. There were some workarounds with userChrome.css userContent.css that solved this for a while, but they broke in recent builds so I'm back to feeling like a deer staring at the headlights every time a new tab opens on a page. I'm not 100% certain that this should be forced by the browser and IMHO it's the websites owners job to provide properly working dark theme and the UI/UE they think fits best their purpose (and not the browsers). Unless the assumption is that styling across all sites should look 100% identical which may appeal to some, though if I really want that then I can go look for content on gemini:// and no page will ever use their own styling other than what I am telling it to. Maybe it's just me but I like being dazzled and surprised with new design and style that I've not seen before.
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    If rendering was server's concern, you would be served jpegs, not html.
  - jrockway 6y ago
    You're definitely right about being blinded during a startup delay. It's not every site but it does happen. I agree that all websites should give users a dark mode. They don't, so we have to make our own.
- ksec 6y ago
dokem 6y ago
And HTTPS so I can sleep at night knowing noone MITM'd my stupid internet content.

antiterra 6y ago

If someone's attempt at a joke and the open discussion of web design gets you that upset, you might benefit from an extended break from the internet. Unless you get angry at clouds.

paedubucher 6y ago
Upset? This is a very accurate and sober analysis.
- antiterra 6y ago
  “I want to hecking scream,” the italicized emphasis and explanatory interjections seem to indicate otherwise.

fctorial 6y ago

I beg to differ. The first website looks horrible on widescreen displays. A lot of old websites follow the style of first website and their readability could be improved 10 times by adding 10 lines of CSS.

danShumway 6y ago
> The first website looks horrible on widescreen displays But you were able to read it, right? You didn't have to go find a separate computer to use to figure out what it was saying. The text didn't get cut off when you resized your browser window. > The first website looks horrible I mean, yes? I'm not sure what you're saying by this though. Nobody (at least nobody worth taking seriously) is telling you that you should follow the style of the first website. You should have max-widths and throw some CSS on your page. To quote the original website: > I'm not actually saying your **** site should look like this. What I'm saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren't broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. There's this argument in all of the followup websites that seems to boil down to "it's easier to make websites look better than the original." And yes? But who is arguing with you that we should deprecate CSS from the browser? Who is arguing that it's a hard task to make something that looks and reads nicer than a completely unstyled page? It's a weirdly oblivious misreading of the original joke.
- fctorial 6y ago
  The problem is that people do build sites that look like the first website: https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/multiboot/multiboot.html https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/multiboot/multiboot...
  - danShumway 6y ago
    Fair, but using GNU's work as an example almost feels like cheating in a weird way ;). GNU is not building a hard-core minimalist website, they do include CSS on their page -- in fact they include more of it than this website does. So the problem isn't that GNU is too minimal or that they've sworn off of CSS, the problem is that modern GNU increasingly doesn't seem to know how to design anything at all when it comes to UX, and that there's probably somebody somewhere on their chain of authority for this page seriously arguing that line-wrapping is bad design or some other nonsense. But I don't know. To the extent that GNU's design aesthetics actually represent a web design trend, then I do concede that it's a bad trend, and everybody who's following it should add `body { max-width: 40em; margin: auto; }` to the top of their CSS files.

npsimons 6y ago

I felt like the original was definitely taking the piss from websites that were 90% static textual content, but won't even load without Javascript. The sort of sites in search of a solution to a problem that does not exist.

perennate 6y ago

I agree that they might be missing the point, but I also feel that adding a one or two extra CSS lines is really needed to turn something that is very unpleasant to read (the biggest problem being the unlimited width) into something that is really basically perfect. Like, this one is actually pretty much perfect, while the original makes me want to manually add a max-width from the inspector.

bluetwo 6y ago
I agree. You could pour 80% of web content into this and it would work.

coldtea 6y ago

>>I want to hecking scream. Overreacting much? >The point of the original website in this chain was not that you couldn't do media queries, or that all of your designs had to be unstyled. It was a gosh-darned satire that showed that even if you did literally nothing, your website would still be responsive and readable and load fast. The fact that it did nothing, that it was just a completely unstyled HTML page was the reason that the joke worked. Yeah, so? Who cares about the point of the original website? As if it was some sacred ultimate truth, that only makes sense in the exact original wording and message? The point of THIS website is that you can improve upon the original "do nothing" website by a lot, and still do almost nothing: just add 10 tiny CSS lines.

shoto_io 6y ago
This meme won’t die. Heck, I'm thinking how to build the next version of this site!
berniemadoff69 6y ago
'a perfecter motherfucking site' will 'improve' this site adding 10 more tiny CSS lines 'the most perfectest motherfucking site' will improve that site by adding just 6 teeny tiny more CSS lines and maybe like the most little tiny bit of javascript. 'the absolute final most perfectest motherfucking site'.. will improve THAT site, and the feature creep goes on. they're all built off of the concept of the original, so it makes sense to 'care' about the 'point' of the original website. the only sacred ultimate truth was that nice things are possible with HTML only. i disagree that this particular website offers any improvement.
- coldtea 6y ago
  https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope
- Eszik 6y ago
  I mean, it might not offer any improvement for you, but it certainly does for someone who uses a screen reader that doesn't default to English.

andrewzah 6y ago

I don't agree with this conclusion. The original could have added ~7 lines of css and made it about 100x more readable, while still making the same point.

xnx 6y ago

Same. Websites are fast, accessible, readable, and decent looking by default. We'd be better off if (like operating systems) more of the presentation preferences were left to the user. I used to use an extension for Firefox that allowed me to disable all styles for a website by hotkey. 9/10 websites were more readable after turning off all styles.