6 ms·

We made tirreno website [1] with only HTML 4.01 and 1 transparent pixel, no CSS or JS. Works well on any device. Easy to update. Highly recommended. [1] https:

We made tirreno website [1] with only HTML 4.01 and 1 transparent pixel, no CSS or JS. Works well on any device. Easy to update. Highly recommended. [1] https://www.tirreno.com/ https://www.tirreno.com/

bambax 1y ago
| <font size="5" face="Helvetica">Monitor and protect your web app from cyberfraud, account threats, bots and abuse with a single security platform.</font> Sure but how is this better than setting up the font in CSS? There may be an advantage to not having an external CSS file, but setting up CSS rules inside the HTML file works perfectly well and is much more maintainable than this IMHO.
- reconnecting 1y ago
  The short answer: Because anyone can do this using in-line or in-file CSS. The long answer: Technologies are a blend of humans and machines. Typing HTML code by yourself, especially in 2025, gives another level of meaning and human touch. It's more like modern art in some way.
  - Mashimo 1y ago
    Might be art, might be fun. But you also claimed it's easy to update. But now you have to write <font size="5" face="Helvetica"> every time you create another one of those elements. And if you want to change the font you would need to search and replace in different .html files. It does not seem easy to update.
    - reconnecting 1y ago
      Easy to update means you only need a text editor and source code to maintain it. Regarding the effort to write `<font size="5" face="Helvetica">` (I'm just typing this again), it's fairly easy, and taking into account the meaning of the text inside those tags, it is worth spending the time for typing.
    - 28304283409234 1y ago
      Easy as in 'you do not need to shave a yack, just open a text editor'. As opposed to "install node, sass, webpack, vuex, tailwind" or what have you nowadays. I like that. Few or no dependencies.
      - wartijn_ 1y ago
        But the same can be achieved by using css. Then there's still nothing to install, and it's still something you can change by just opening a text editor. Plus it would be easy to update in the sense your parent poster meant. And with css you're using the right tools to style your website, so you won't have people complaining the website isn't working well on mobile, although you thought it would be. I'm all for using simple tools and web standards, but this website with its layout build with tables is a terrible example.
        reconnecting 1y ago
        Just for fun, I tried opening the tirreno website on the first iPhone now, and it works as it should. However, it must be clear that no one expects this website to be taken as an example. Back in the day, there was no other solution than using tables and 1px gif spacing, this is just a reminder of how things were at the beginning. It’s like seeing neon gas advertising and insisting it should be made with a flat screen display. In this case, it’s our way of bringing back neon to the web.
        kelas 1y ago
        No, brother - a neon tube requires at least a 4kV transformer, she's not so easy going. And in 2025 there are still absolutely valid use cases for CRT oscilloscopes, lamp amplifiers, LPs and Compact Cassettes, if you're old enough to know what those things are. But arithmometers are only useful to have fun under influence, sorry. Don't be a luddite. A modern web browser, on the other hand, is the closest the humanity ever got to building a tower of Babylon, which is very easy to see by spending a few hours exploring how the Chromium sausage is made. I'm not aware of any worse codebase out there in the wild, and it is definitely not glowing neon. On yet another hand, there are good news - it is just a matter of time when DOM API will get properly exposed to WASM VM, and on that sunny day all script kiddies, along with nodejs kiddies, along with endless pythonista will finally and traumatically learn the difference between the definitions of "computer programmer" and "software developer". The day will come, and computer programming will again be art and full of fun. You always get back to the basics, they say. But the road is long and full of sticks and stones, just like a false sheperd called 1-pixel gif. That's not yet the art of programming, sorry. And btw I fully support HN for flagging this post. The quality of writing there is as silly as it is obnoxious.
  - kelas 1y ago
    Hard to disagree on the last part, but hand-coding HTML4 for food in 2025 is not the answer. First, it will look horrible. Second, if will look even more horrible on mobiles, which are first. Third, if you're really determined to go piedi nudi nel parco in a modern browser, why not abandon HTML4 as well, and the dreaded 1-pixel along with it? Just escape everything altogether, and you'll be fine. Avoid HTML5, CSS, WOFF, Canvas, and all other dreadfully slow and bug-ridden APIs. You'll be fine, take my word for it. All you need, really, is unobstructed access to target GPU, which will be orders of magnitude faster than all API bs and still do more than HTML4 ever could. For one example, can you figure out how the following page manages to render an HTML page with Garamond Math on it without loading any Garamond Math to begin with and no HTML to write home about? Network tab is a good start: https://kel.as https://kel.as Buckle up and enjoy the ride.
    - reconnecting 1y ago
      The ultimate irony of the moment is that you're typing this exact comment on a webpage that contains the following code: <table border='0'> <tr> <td class='ind' indent='0'> <img src="s.gif" height="1" width="0"> </td>
pfg_ 1y ago
It's super zoomed out on my phone, it doesn't have a mobile viewport. And if you do want to read text, you have to zoom in more than the width of the full page so you have to constantly scroll left and right.
- noisem4ker 1y ago
  This is a failure or regression of mobile browsers. We once had automatic line wrapping (Opera Mobile did it best back in its Presto engine days) which provided readable size paragraphs and avoided the need for horizontal scrolling. The onus of adapting the presentation to the medium shifted to the websites, while browsers lost agency.
  - Gualdrapo 1y ago
    I'd like to see how that worked. In my mind I'd guess such a feature could have been great for one column layouts, like in this website, but I can't imagine how it would be for the then-traditional layouts of a left sidebar navigation column and a right area for content.
    - noisem4ker 1y ago
      Page starts zoomed out. Each element is limited in width. Double tapping on an element (e.g. a paragraph) zooms in on said element, making it full width. Further zooming in causes the text to reflow to the viewport width. It's difficult to describe, but it used to work fine.
Mashimo 1y ago
> Easy to update. How does updating the font or color work? Search and replace on multiple HTML files?
bradly 1y ago
Nice! I'm working on a private Recipe bookmarking site that currently has no JavaScript and minimal CSS. https://github.com/bradly/recipin https://github.com/bradly/recipin
- reconnecting 1y ago
  It's says 'Your browser is not supported. Please upgrade your browser to continue.'
  - bradly 1y ago
    Thank you. That is a bug and I will investigate. CloudFlare does inject JS into the outgoing HTML for email address obfuscation in the footer. I may need to remove that.
    - reconnecting 1y ago
      When I took my first full time webdev job (23 years ago), our company had always used outdated browsers because it helped to prevent bugs earlier. Time flies, but I'm still not on the latest browser, and it helps a lot.
- martibravo 1y ago
  Nice commit emojis
  - bradly 1y ago
    Thank you! It is inspired by this artwork by Jimi Biscuits https://www.jimibiscuits.com/product/mood-juggler-letterpress-print https://www.jimibiscuits.com/product/mood-juggler-letterpres...
Etheryte 1y ago
Impossible to read on mobile unless you pinch zoom way in and then pan back and forth across the page. A bit bold to say that it works well.
- reconnecting 1y ago
  Interesting, as the webpage has a viewport meta tag. May I ask what your phone model is?
  - uallo 1y ago
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=800, initial-scale=0"> This sets the width to a mininum of 800px, no matter what phone model or browser you use. I'm a little confused how you can can claim this "Works well on any device" when apparently it was not tested on a phone. I, too, closed the tab before I even had a chance to learn about your product. Update: Not OP, but I'm on a Pixel 8a with Firefox.
    - reconnecting 1y ago
      It has been tested and works well on various devices, including phones, which is why I’m kindly asking for your exact device model.
    - reconnecting 1y ago
      This is a software website, and we don't expect many visitors from mobile devices. However, I'll check if this issue can be resolved without using CSS. Thanks for letting me know.
      - Etheryte 1y ago
        I think this is a classic case of familiarity blind spot. It's easy to think of your users as people similar to you, but that's not necessarily the case. Statistically mobile phone users outnumber non-mobile users online nearly two to one, some statistics put the estimate even higher.
bdcravens 1y ago
I have no idea if this is satire, or if you're a younger developer who "found" the techniques we ran away from screaming 20 years ago. <table border="0" width="720" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" align="center"> <td height="1" width="100%" bgcolor="#575677"> <img src="spacer.gif" alt="" width="1" height="1" border="0"> </td> I feel like CSS is unfairly coupled to JS frameworks. It may be reasonable to say that CSS 3 is unnecessarily complex, but clean "semantic" HTML and a basic presentational style sheet is an amazing combination that isn't related to the ball of mud that modern development has become.
- reconnecting 1y ago
  The idea to make a website without CSS/JS came to me when I was picking up my mechanical watch from the watchmaker. He used some analog machines to calibrate the movement, and it gave me a sense of trustworthiness that I want to convey through tirreno website.
gullevek 1y ago
Doesn't work with any mobile phone. So what is the point in this?
- reconnecting 1y ago
  May I ask whether you see something shows in the devices below [1]? Or the page not loading at all, completely blank, or displaying a broken layout? [1] https://www.tirreno.com/news-phone.jpg https://www.tirreno.com/news-phone.jpg

bambax 1y ago

| <font size="5" face="Helvetica">Monitor and protect your web app from cyberfraud, account threats, bots and abuse with a single security platform.</font> Sure but how is this better than setting up the font in CSS? There may be an advantage to not having an external CSS file, but setting up CSS rules inside the HTML file works perfectly well and is much more maintainable than this IMHO.

reconnecting 1y ago
The short answer: Because anyone can do this using in-line or in-file CSS. The long answer: Technologies are a blend of humans and machines. Typing HTML code by yourself, especially in 2025, gives another level of meaning and human touch. It's more like modern art in some way.
- Mashimo 1y ago
  Might be art, might be fun. But you also claimed it's easy to update. But now you have to write <font size="5" face="Helvetica"> every time you create another one of those elements. And if you want to change the font you would need to search and replace in different .html files. It does not seem easy to update.
  - reconnecting 1y ago
    Easy to update means you only need a text editor and source code to maintain it. Regarding the effort to write `<font size="5" face="Helvetica">` (I'm just typing this again), it's fairly easy, and taking into account the meaning of the text inside those tags, it is worth spending the time for typing.
  - 28304283409234 1y ago
    Easy as in 'you do not need to shave a yack, just open a text editor'. As opposed to "install node, sass, webpack, vuex, tailwind" or what have you nowadays. I like that. Few or no dependencies.
    - wartijn_ 1y ago
      But the same can be achieved by using css. Then there's still nothing to install, and it's still something you can change by just opening a text editor. Plus it would be easy to update in the sense your parent poster meant. And with css you're using the right tools to style your website, so you won't have people complaining the website isn't working well on mobile, although you thought it would be. I'm all for using simple tools and web standards, but this website with its layout build with tables is a terrible example.
      - reconnecting 1y ago
        Just for fun, I tried opening the tirreno website on the first iPhone now, and it works as it should. However, it must be clear that no one expects this website to be taken as an example. Back in the day, there was no other solution than using tables and 1px gif spacing, this is just a reminder of how things were at the beginning. It’s like seeing neon gas advertising and insisting it should be made with a flat screen display. In this case, it’s our way of bringing back neon to the web.
        kelas 1y ago
        No, brother - a neon tube requires at least a 4kV transformer, she's not so easy going. And in 2025 there are still absolutely valid use cases for CRT oscilloscopes, lamp amplifiers, LPs and Compact Cassettes, if you're old enough to know what those things are. But arithmometers are only useful to have fun under influence, sorry. Don't be a luddite. A modern web browser, on the other hand, is the closest the humanity ever got to building a tower of Babylon, which is very easy to see by spending a few hours exploring how the Chromium sausage is made. I'm not aware of any worse codebase out there in the wild, and it is definitely not glowing neon. On yet another hand, there are good news - it is just a matter of time when DOM API will get properly exposed to WASM VM, and on that sunny day all script kiddies, along with nodejs kiddies, along with endless pythonista will finally and traumatically learn the difference between the definitions of "computer programmer" and "software developer". The day will come, and computer programming will again be art and full of fun. You always get back to the basics, they say. But the road is long and full of sticks and stones, just like a false sheperd called 1-pixel gif. That's not yet the art of programming, sorry. And btw I fully support HN for flagging this post. The quality of writing there is as silly as it is obnoxious.
- kelas 1y ago
  Hard to disagree on the last part, but hand-coding HTML4 for food in 2025 is not the answer. First, it will look horrible. Second, if will look even more horrible on mobiles, which are first. Third, if you're really determined to go piedi nudi nel parco in a modern browser, why not abandon HTML4 as well, and the dreaded 1-pixel along with it? Just escape everything altogether, and you'll be fine. Avoid HTML5, CSS, WOFF, Canvas, and all other dreadfully slow and bug-ridden APIs. You'll be fine, take my word for it. All you need, really, is unobstructed access to target GPU, which will be orders of magnitude faster than all API bs and still do more than HTML4 ever could. For one example, can you figure out how the following page manages to render an HTML page with Garamond Math on it without loading any Garamond Math to begin with and no HTML to write home about? Network tab is a good start: https://kel.as https://kel.as Buckle up and enjoy the ride.
  - reconnecting 1y ago
    The ultimate irony of the moment is that you're typing this exact comment on a webpage that contains the following code: <table border='0'> <tr> <td class='ind' indent='0'> <img src="s.gif" height="1" width="0"> </td>

pfg_ 1y ago

It's super zoomed out on my phone, it doesn't have a mobile viewport. And if you do want to read text, you have to zoom in more than the width of the full page so you have to constantly scroll left and right.

noisem4ker 1y ago
This is a failure or regression of mobile browsers. We once had automatic line wrapping (Opera Mobile did it best back in its Presto engine days) which provided readable size paragraphs and avoided the need for horizontal scrolling. The onus of adapting the presentation to the medium shifted to the websites, while browsers lost agency.
- Gualdrapo 1y ago
  I'd like to see how that worked. In my mind I'd guess such a feature could have been great for one column layouts, like in this website, but I can't imagine how it would be for the then-traditional layouts of a left sidebar navigation column and a right area for content.
  - noisem4ker 1y ago
    Page starts zoomed out. Each element is limited in width. Double tapping on an element (e.g. a paragraph) zooms in on said element, making it full width. Further zooming in causes the text to reflow to the viewport width. It's difficult to describe, but it used to work fine.

Mashimo 1y ago

> Easy to update. How does updating the font or color work? Search and replace on multiple HTML files?

bradly 1y ago

Nice! I'm working on a private Recipe bookmarking site that currently has no JavaScript and minimal CSS. https://github.com/bradly/recipin https://github.com/bradly/recipin

reconnecting 1y ago
It's says 'Your browser is not supported. Please upgrade your browser to continue.'
- bradly 1y ago
  Thank you. That is a bug and I will investigate. CloudFlare does inject JS into the outgoing HTML for email address obfuscation in the footer. I may need to remove that.
  - reconnecting 1y ago
    When I took my first full time webdev job (23 years ago), our company had always used outdated browsers because it helped to prevent bugs earlier. Time flies, but I'm still not on the latest browser, and it helps a lot.
martibravo 1y ago
Nice commit emojis
- bradly 1y ago
  Thank you! It is inspired by this artwork by Jimi Biscuits https://www.jimibiscuits.com/product/mood-juggler-letterpress-print https://www.jimibiscuits.com/product/mood-juggler-letterpres...

Etheryte 1y ago

Impossible to read on mobile unless you pinch zoom way in and then pan back and forth across the page. A bit bold to say that it works well.

reconnecting 1y ago
Interesting, as the webpage has a viewport meta tag. May I ask what your phone model is?
- uallo 1y ago
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=800, initial-scale=0"> This sets the width to a mininum of 800px, no matter what phone model or browser you use. I'm a little confused how you can can claim this "Works well on any device" when apparently it was not tested on a phone. I, too, closed the tab before I even had a chance to learn about your product. Update: Not OP, but I'm on a Pixel 8a with Firefox.
  - reconnecting 1y ago
    It has been tested and works well on various devices, including phones, which is why I’m kindly asking for your exact device model.
  - reconnecting 1y ago
    This is a software website, and we don't expect many visitors from mobile devices. However, I'll check if this issue can be resolved without using CSS. Thanks for letting me know.
    - Etheryte 1y ago
      I think this is a classic case of familiarity blind spot. It's easy to think of your users as people similar to you, but that's not necessarily the case. Statistically mobile phone users outnumber non-mobile users online nearly two to one, some statistics put the estimate even higher.

bdcravens 1y ago

I have no idea if this is satire, or if you're a younger developer who "found" the techniques we ran away from screaming 20 years ago. <table border="0" width="720" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" align="center"> <td height="1" width="100%" bgcolor="#575677"> <img src="spacer.gif" alt="" width="1" height="1" border="0"> </td> I feel like CSS is unfairly coupled to JS frameworks. It may be reasonable to say that CSS 3 is unnecessarily complex, but clean "semantic" HTML and a basic presentational style sheet is an amazing combination that isn't related to the ball of mud that modern development has become.

reconnecting 1y ago
The idea to make a website without CSS/JS came to me when I was picking up my mechanical watch from the watchmaker. He used some analog machines to calibrate the movement, and it gave me a sense of trustworthiness that I want to convey through tirreno website.

gullevek 1y ago

Doesn't work with any mobile phone. So what is the point in this?

reconnecting 1y ago
May I ask whether you see something shows in the devices below [1]? Or the page not loading at all, completely blank, or displaying a broken layout? [1] https://www.tirreno.com/news-phone.jpg https://www.tirreno.com/news-phone.jpg