21 ms·

This is a web page

• loceng 13y ago
  Abracadabra!
  • loceng 13y ago
    P.S. Can I hire you for my copy editor? ;)
    • loceng 13y ago
      To whoever downvoted me, I know Justin -- we go waayyy back. I was being silly.
• mijustin 13y ago
  Just realized I published this on the same morning that "Video on Instagram" is one of the day's top stories. Interesting irony. ;)
  • pknerd 13y ago
    REAL words are way stronger and natural than Marketing Buzz.
  • freehunter 13y ago
    It's funny because in that Instagram thread, I just wrote a comment about how "beautiful" is the new "it just works"[1]. This post and the many like it are a direct backlash from that mindset, just as the Linux users mantra during "it just works" was "I can make it work better". It's a grab for control in a world where oftentimes your choices are limited. Everything is beautiful, and everything looks the same. What will be the new "beautiful"? I don't know. But I'll bet there will be a counter-culture there to espouse an alternative as well. Perhaps the new "beautiful" will be "content is simple". Time will tell. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5913461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5913461
• lsiunsuex 13y ago
  this is exactly what i'm trying to accomplish with version 2 of one of my sites - although I still need the cms and all of that, i'm stripping away all the fancy colorful css, photos, etc... only keeping what I need. minimalistic - let the content speak for the site, not the fancy design
• speg 13y ago
  > One of my friends is named Montreal,she is fun to play with I smell a sequel...
  • mijustin 13y ago
    Ha ha. She's working on it!
• a3_nm 13y ago
  "I wrote these words, and you're reading them"... and Google knows you're reading them. I find it a bit ironical that a manifesto for minimalism still carries Google Analytics code to track people.
  • zinssmeister 13y ago
    ...and a DIV with a wrapper class. So really not "just" words.
    • ProCynic 13y ago
      "There's not much code on this page at all, just simple markup for paragraphs, hierarchy, and emphasis."
  • mijustin 13y ago
    It's true. There's a bit of CSS. There's also a tracking script. I also needed a web server to host them, an FTP client to transfer them, plus the entire infrastructure of the web to make this work. ;) So beneath the simplicity of "just words" is some complexity. But all that stuff is invisible for most people visiting the page. The point is that simple words on a page can be powerful and effective.
    • wtvanhest 13y ago
      How do I download your app so I can read the text better?
      • mattnewton 13y ago
        +1 Internet.
      • mijustin 13y ago
        ;) I'm working on it!
  • bad_user 13y ago
• knotdvn 13y ago
  TL;DR
  • loceng 13y ago
    GR;YL -- Great Read; Your Loss
  • levosmetalo 13y ago
    Find a story on Reddit, and usually TL;DR is a first comment. Here, we actually prefer to first read and then comment, or not comment at all.
    • lotharbot 13y ago
      Here on HN, you occasionally find tl;dr near the top of a comment thread -- but it's followed by a nice summary of the article. Instead of expressing the rather worthless sentiment of "I didn't read this", it's expressing the far more valuable "if you're not sure you want to invest the time in reading this, here are the highlights of what you would have otherwise missed."
    • antoko 13y ago
      Speak for yourself. I'll often read the comments briefly first before deciding if I want to read an article.
      • levosmetalo 13y ago
        While tldr summary is certainly valuable, asking for one without even bothering to form a single sentence is the same level of spam as +1 type of .
        • antoko 13y ago
          I totally agree, I don't read the comments for an explicit summary. I read the comments to see what opinions people have of the article, on the basis of the comments I determine if the article is worth reading. I don't do this for all articles, but it is a pretty common occurrence.
• leeoniya 13y ago
  oh the joy loading a static html page @ 150ms
• minikites 13y ago
  Reminded me of This Is the Title of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself mixed with Web Design is 95% Typography http://consc.net/misc/moser.html http://consc.net/misc/moser.html http://ia.net/blog/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period http://ia.net/blog/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period
  • dredmorbius 13y ago
    This is a sentence. That fragments. Useful. One of my favorite of Hofstadter's essays. And thanks for your links.
• zobzu 13y ago
  I much prefer those simple pages. Load fast, display fast, no distraction. A little bit like HN.. except for the load fast part :P
  • mijustin 13y ago
    Only 4KB!
    • dreen 13y ago
      It made me look - the front page of HN is currently 7.8KB, and this is: - 1.6% of yahoo.com size (477KB) - 18.9% of reddit.com size (41.2 KB) - 23.6% of stackoverflow.com size (33KB) and - 108.3% of gmail.com size (7.2KB) - 520% of google.com size (1.5KB) - 866.6% of your blog post size (908B) so this gives some perspective. edit: the most surprising is gmail.com for me, id have thought they load tons of js in the background. but maybe so does hn?
      • monkeyspaw 13y ago
        How did you do these measurements? I would be shocked if the entire gmail webapp is 7.2KB. Just looking at the Network tab in Chrome's inspector, I see a lot more than 7KB being transferred. It seems the main page on gmail is just loading the other j.s. files.
        • dreen 13y ago
          Same as you, even on disabled cache its about the same, thats why I was surprised. edit: OK so in Incognito Mode i got 17KB which is a bit more believable, but why doesnt it show that in normal mode with disabled cache?
          • monkeyspaw 13y ago
            When I use incognito mode, I see about 200k of Javascript. I wonder why we're getting different sizes. The largest file I see is the ?shva=1 /mail/u/0 file, clocking in at 173KB.
• pajju 13y ago
  This is the same reading experience we get in HN. Just think — we treat text as our user interface! High quality content + focus on readability = bliss.
  • inthewind 13y ago
    The actual HN interface though isn't that readable (for me) though! I read it with my own style - so that it is just words. A few issues I have with it, is the contrast, the bright background, and when you zoom in, the text isn't fluid so soon flys out the side of the browser. And I have to restyle most of the articles that are linked from HN so I can read them too. Any article of any length ends up on my eReader - which is particularly no frills but readable.
  • smaili 13y ago
    Couldn't have said it better myself.
• JasonFruit 13y ago
  I think this is a beautiful exposition of a powerful truth: words are magical, and we can now publish anything we want so that anyone who wants to can read it. That is amazing power, and it's available to almost anyone who is literate, in the developed world.
  • mijustin 13y ago
    Thanks; I think you put it better than I did. ;)
• FreeFull 13y ago
  True minimalism would be a plain text file.
• rabino 13y ago
  Interesting that the website where he makes money, is full of pictures and colors for the call to actions. http://buildandlaunch.net/ http://buildandlaunch.net/
  • methodin 13y ago
    You gotta play the game to win but you do not necessarily have to like it.
  • mijustin 13y ago
    So is my blog: http://justinjackson.ca http://justinjackson.ca I'm thinking of doing a redesign. ;) To be fair, in both cases I started with a simple text file on my computer. After that I send them as a plain-text email to friends for review. And then I publish on the fancy website. I don't think there's anything wrong with pictures or colors. "If that additional styling or image gives the audience more understanding - then add it." At this point, I think I can experiment more with taking things out. Maybe that's where I'll start with my websites.
    • meerita 13y ago
      I changed the format of my blog many times. I came up with this http://www.minid.net http://www.minid.net and its pleasant to read even on phone. The readers love it and it loads lighting fast. I can say faster than OPs website.
• RBerenguel 13y ago
  I agree with him, and this is why I find Reddit, HN and some blogs I get to read around here (M. Gemmell's, M. Arment's, J. Gruber, PG) so good: they focus on the text, not on the fancy (and this nags me again to clear all cruft from my blog, but... some other day.) PS: I kind of missed "all craftwardship is of the highest quality" in the page, though (or text that menaced with spikes of http or something.) I guess I'm too geeky today
• darrelld 13y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. I've been obsessing over so many new fancy effects using javascript and fancy CSS3 styling and getting held up about the technology, but you reminded me why I ever got into programming / web development in the first place. To share things with people all over the world. As a kid growing up on a tiny island that was a huge deal for me when I first started. I think some of the magic got lost over the years as I I focused more and more on the technical aspects but you've reminded me that sharing is important and the tech is just "syntactic sugar"
• RyanMcGreal 13y ago
  It's the anti qz.com.
  • samtp 13y ago
    Why is there so much hate for Quartz on here? It may be hard to read on a mobile device, but if you focus on just the articles it is very distraction free and easy to read. Nit-picking is fine, but overly criticizing is stupid when qz.com is miles ahead of almost every other publishing outlet online. Would you rather see more sites like qz.com that focus on content and navigation or more sites like traditional newspapers that throw 100 links, 10 ads, pop-us about related articles, and other crap at you?
    • argv_empty 13y ago
      Would you rather see more sites like qz.com that focus on content and navigation I would expect something that's focused on the content would eliminate the top/side bars, and show me the actual content. Annoyingly, NoScript (which often makes newspapers' web sites quite tolerable) doesn't appear to remove qz.com's clutter.
    • glesica 13y ago
      I find quartz painful to interact with. I generally skip links once I realize they go to Quartz. The problem is that it tries so hard to be simple, but just isn't. It's actually just what the author of the article seems to have been thinking about. For instance, the right-hand sidebar is totally pointless and serves no purpose other than to push the scroll bar into a weird position. The header at the top is just meaningless clutter. Why does the left side-bar need to exist? Why can't the links to other articles just scroll with the rest of the page (the '90s called, they want their frames back)? Sure, Quartz is somewhat less cluttered than Huffpo, but Huffpo doesn't claim to be about simplicity, Quartz does, I find that infuriating.
    • threedaymonk 13y ago
      I can't speak for anyone else, but my disdain for Quartz comes from the fact that following a Quartz link on the device I'm using at that moment seems to have a less than evens chance of delivering readable text. For a site that's full of content, they make it hard to get that content. If they were failing at a hard problem, I'd be more sympathetic, but overcomplicating the business of putting text on a screen to that extent is just inexcusably narcissistic.
• ChuckMcM 13y ago
  First time [1] my in-laws saw "the web" they were trying to find information about vacation spots in Brazil but their travel guide was obsolete, I found a web page a student had written up about where the best places to stay and see were in Brazil. I could almost see the dots connect when they realized that someone they didn't know, in Brazil, had written up a piece of information at some point that they were now seeing and using, and anyone could do that. It was like watching a Pachinko machine pay out a jackpot :-) [1] It was circa Christmas 1994 since I was trying to explain to them what Java was and why I thought it might have an impact on the world.
  • conanbatt 13y ago
    Just like your Pachinko reference
  • simpleglider 13y ago
    That's a great anecdote. Out of curiosity, how did you find the site? I had just turned four at the time, so I don't quite remember what browsing the Internet was like then.
    • Aloisius 13y ago
      I don't know about the OP, but in 1994, I was mostly using Webcrawler as my search engine. Lycos came out around then too. Switched to Altavista pretty quickly after it came out.
    • drcube 13y ago
      I didn't have a computer at the time, but my friends who were online all used AOL, which came with its own search engine, chat rooms, email, etc.
    • ChuckMcM 13y ago
      In context, I was part of the group that would eventually become the Java group (at that time it had transitioned from being the Oak group to being the 'Liveoak' group[1]) Patrick Chan had written a web spider in Java, we marvelled that it seemed like it could visit every site on the web over night :-) But mostly what it found were the 'big' web sites (computer companies, early movers in the Internet space) and students who had downloaded X-mosaic and the httpd from CERN and were playing around with early HTML. [1] The name was a somewhat morbid joke on James Gosling's part as Sun was cancelling the Java project at the end of the fiscal year and had been split into the "part that the hardware guys liked" (Sun Interactive) and "the part no one knew what to do with." (Liveoak)
• ignostic 13y ago
  Sure, simple text is fine for a blog. But if I'm selling something like a piece of art it's all about the images: large, high-quality images from multiple angles. Pinterest wouldn't be called minimalist, but it does a damn fine job of accomplishing its goals. Design should help accomplish business (or personal) goals. We run into trouble when we adopt some sort of "minimalism, always, ever, for everything" dogma.
  • mijustin 13y ago
    I agree. "If additional styling, image, media, or script gives the audience something more - then add it."
    • dbrian 13y ago
      But that's what minimalism is. You can say the same thing in reverse.. "If it doesn't give the audience more understanding - then leave it out."
  • bad_user 13y ago
    > We run into trouble when we adopt some sort of "minimalism, always, ever, for everything" dogma. Evidence? Examples?
    • cma 13y ago
      Unix-style "bunch of small processes communicating through pipes" model when applied in inappropriate domains.
    • devilshaircut 13y ago
      Is it not self-obvious that if every page attempting to serve up content similar to that in the OP (pictureless editorial), the web would be bleak and characterless? Not debating the effectiveness of that kind of design, but rather pointing out the obviousness that this sort of anti-"always, ever" statement is easily validated.
      • 13y ago
• hackermann 13y ago
  Looks like the focus is everything else, but words here http://buildandlaunch.net/ http://buildandlaunch.net/
• devilshaircut 13y ago
  I can't speak for all designers, but when I design webpages, I do start with words. Typography and content serve as most the fundamental concerns when working toward a usable, visually stunning design. If the thesis of this editorial is "add only which serves to aid in achieving the spec/goal", I agree. But there is an implicit danger here as well of underestimating the total needs of the resource's end user.
• null_ptr 13y ago
  There's something magical about personal websites. Something that a Facebook profile page or a Twitter stream or a Tumblr will never reach. I really wish more people would go back to the earlier roots of the internet, and share what's on their mind in a more personal and genuine way.
  • mikeg8 13y ago
    I agree completely. Learning HTML was such an empowering feeling for me. You can make something fancy or minimal, whatever you feel like. We are all unique and personal websites show that much better than a social media website ever can IMHO
    • yen223 13y ago
      I miss MySpace pages too.
  • tep 13y ago
    Exactly! "Art of Travel"[1] is one of those websites. When I read that website I was impressed how lovingly it was put together. The overall experience was so good that I didn't even think about evaluating its design. [1]http://artoftravel.com/ http://artoftravel.com/
• inthewind 13y ago
  I think you've got to question the definition of "web design". I'd argue that the text is framed content and is part of the design. The post at least highlights that 'web design' is somewhat of a distraction. There is so much (unnecessary?) labour involved in framing the content by posturing programmers (lost down some rabbit hole) and anal pixel pushers that you could easily forget that to many: the content is what matters. Getting your head around HTML, publishing and hosting is still not that trivial. That's why people take to something like Facebook, or sharing photos via Instagram via their mobile phones. That's not to detract from the beauty and the 'miracle' of web publishing.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• Nux 13y ago
  I'm not obsessed with fancy designs and scripts. Have a look at my home page. What I'm obsessed with is the fact every god damned web site on the internet includes google-analytics stuff! You would have made your point had you left it out.
• olaf 13y ago
  Forget the web/web page, it's only a means, a tool for a higher purpose. It's no end in itself.
• rkuykendall-com 13y ago
  This was a bit of an obsession of mine ever since I saw Coding Horror a few years ago. I had seen a lot of extremely minimalist designs, but they were all doing things to accomplish that minimalism. As a developer though, you have a nagging feeling in the back of your brain saying "that's a lie, it's not simple, it's very complicated, it just looks simple." Coding Horror is complex, but it was plain enough for me to imagine it with even less structure. I decided to stick as close to plain HTML for my personal website as possible. The problem is, plain HTML is ugly. So instead, I tried to imagine what the default style of HTML would be if it was created today. I've am still far from that ideal, but it is a work in progress: http://rkuykendall.com/ http://rkuykendall.com/
  • jaykru 13y ago
    Your site looks great. I especially like your logo.
    • chas 13y ago
      The logo is nice, but the aliased angled lines really kill it for me. I think a vector (or better anti-aliased) logo would really make a positive difference in the feel of the site.
      • tehwalrus 13y ago
        it looks as if the colour is just a background-color attribute in CSS, which changes on mouseover. If so, it should be white->transparent anti-aliased in the RK image, which is looks like it's trying to be. Vector, e.g. drawn with Canvas, would be better (e.g. with a fallback to a single colour png.)
        • rkuykendall-com 13y ago
          It was trying to be, and failing. I am currently serving up a ( antialiasing fixed ) png, and @2x png for hdpi displays. Do you think a canvas logo would provide any additional benefit above these two?
• muppetman 13y ago
  Sure, that page is just text. But I found it via hackernews. If hackernews looked like that, I wouldn't visit it every day.
  • mijustin 13y ago
    Don't you think Hacker News does look like that? A lot of people (below) have commented that they like HN because it is just text and links on a page.
    • muppetman 13y ago
      Absolutely, it's one of the things I love about HN, it's simple. But the fact it appears simple doesn't mean no design's gone into it. It's still visually appealing. I suspect if HN was just <h1> <h2> that, regardless of its content, it'd have a lot less traffic.
      • trendoid 13y ago
        I dont think you are getting the point of his post. He specifically mentions "Will that additional styling, image, or hyperlink give my audience more understanding? ". I think HN is a perfect example of what he is arguing.
  • adregan 13y ago
    That site is more responsive than hacker news!
• breck 13y ago
  Neat, and I like what you're saying. However, although words are important, and longer lasting, looks are perhaps equally as important to an individual in the present. Always were, always will be. People care about looking good. People are attracted to good looking things. Great words might improve the legacy of your ideas, but great looks will improve the legacy of you. Both are justifiably important to people. Also, often a great picture is greater than many words. And the web is equally powerful for that.
• callmeed 13y ago
  >> But the most powerful tool on the web is still words. No. YouTube comments are words. They're also terrible. Also, images can be as powerful (or more so) than words. IMO his thesis would be better stated as: "But the most powerful tool on the web is still a compelling piece of content (words, image, video)"
• frogpelt 13y ago
  I can pay my bills online, shop online, transfer funds between accounts, invest, watch videos, listen to music, share pictures, reserve hotel rooms, flights and rental cars, see maps of the world and my own city. The web is also expanding every day to include more capabilities. It is about way more than words. Let's not oversimplify it just because we think minimalism is cute.
• adventured 13y ago
  "At it's heart, web design should be about words." No. The web is not just a place for text / words, that is not its heart and soul, and therefore neither is that the case for web design. It really never has been. I see no great argument in favor of words being the core over any other form of expression. Today's bandwidth more than allows for beautiful video, animation, high quality graphics and photos, etc. Or low key graphics, subtle interactivity, and so on. It's absurd to argue that such a rich medium should always be focused on words. Text does not have to be the focus. It depends on what the purpose to be achieved is.
  • weixiyen 13y ago
    change "words" to "content".
    • adventured 13y ago
      I don't think so. That isn't what the person said. Their entire post was built around stripping down web design to the words. In fact, the author was very precise in the usage of the term "words." This for example: "But the most powerful tool on the web is still words." That blatantly is not the case in my opinion. Photos are vastly more powerful than words on today's web. That's why 3/4 of all the posts on Reddit's home page are links to imgur. That's why a gazillion photos are uploaded to and shared on Facebook every day. That's why you can read about protests in Brazil all day long, and until you see the photos, the sheer power of the protest will not ring anywhere near as loudly. This has been true so long as photography has existed. Whether we're talking about the Holocaust and WW2, an atomic bomb going off, or a photo of a kitten or puppy, you name it and photos win 9 times out of 10 over words. What would walking on the moon be like without photos (and video) to go with it? Would reading the transcripts have amazed the world like the imagery did? I say not even remotely. Imagine reading about a man standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square, versus seeing it. Another side note to all of this: there are almost a billion illiterate people still, sadly. And another billion that are only partially literate. Nearly every one of them can understand imagery. Imagery also crosses languages, you don't have to understand Mandarin to grasp the Tiananmen Square protest.
• anigbrowl 13y ago
  I wish there were a lot more client-side design tools. I liked the idea of building something that was like your own daily newspaper, but that's not practical when every article is trying to differentiate itself visually (frequently to obscure the fact that the textual content is largely churn).
• davidrudder 13y ago
  Loved the story about the squirrel
  • SpeakMouthWords 13y ago
    "One's she had to go the emergency tree" caused me to spit out my drink a little with laughter. All done with words.
• foobarbazqux 13y ago
  The irony of this essay is that he went overboard with the bold and italic text. Otherwise I wish I could read more articles in a form like that.
• quackerhacker 13y ago
  This article really embodies what I love about the net and why I became a web dev first then a software engineer. A Webpage is designed to be reached by anyone, anywhere, and now...can be read (at least the words) in different languages. I love text just for the global demographic that it can reach thanks to online translators like Google and Bing!
• jaredcwhite 13y ago
  I love it. Even seeing Times/Times New Roman in use brings back a tinge of nostalgia. I like sites with some design pizazz, but a simple page like this with well-written content trumps most over-designed, over-widgetized crap sites any day.
  • threedaymonk 13y ago
    It's only Times [New Roman] because that's what your browser is set to use by default. Imagine: a world in which you could choose your preferred font for reading websites! Sure, most people would choose Comic Sans, but that would be better than making people download some super-thin font that looks great on (and only on) the designer's Retina display.
• laureny 13y ago
  > At it's heart, web design should be about words. If you're going to praise the power of words, you might want to start with spelling them correctly.
• crimezone20xx 13y ago
  Fantastic, and makes me hopeful for how I'm about to launch my resumé. Just words.
• koshak 13y ago
  seems like echo of http://mnmlist.com/w http://mnmlist.com/w
• steveplace 13y ago
  I agree, but... ...the author made the choice to display the text at 600px wide with a font size of 18px. There's plenty of markup (design) to point out key ideas on the page. Would this writing have the same impact if the font was at 12px, with smaller spacing between paragraphs, or maybe with a page width of 1280px? I don't think so.
  • derleth 13y ago
    > Would this writing have the same impact if the font was at 12px, with smaller spacing between paragraphs, or maybe with a page width of 1280px? Yes. Of course. Books don't need precise pixel rules to be readable.
• md224 13y ago
  Slightly off topic, but if we're talking about simplicity... why are people still using this doctype: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> instead of the beautifully simple HTML5 doctype: <!DOCTYPE html> I get that people might use the old doctype out of habit, but it's such an ugly, unnecessary habit, and it would probably be smart to work on discarding it. At the very least, we should be making sure that new developers learn the new doctype.
  • mijustin 13y ago
    Dang it! You're right. Bad habit. :( I've just updated it. Thanks!
  • sidcool 13y ago
    Is a DOCTYPE even required?
  • dendory 13y ago
    I personally still code HTML 4.01 instead of 5 by habit. I also use <font> and other things that HTML5 is trying to get rid of. But I cling to older things. I also write all my code in Notepad++.
  • lmm 13y ago
    Better compatibility with old browsers? This seems like the kind of site and attitude that wants to be accessible to as many people as possible.
• andrewljohnson 13y ago
  I only read the bold words, so I guess style matters.
• marban 13y ago
  I built postagon.com under this dogma but nevertheless I think that it comes with an almost arrogant touch if you deliberately publish an article in a format as simple as this and expect everyone to extract the message from an otherwise horrible reading experience.
  • threedaymonk 13y ago
    "an otherwise horrible reading experience." What's horrible about the article? It's straightforward, conventional typography of the sort used in printed books for a long time.
• martin_ 13y ago
  This page is a little conflicting to the main website has fancy mail in widgets and runs a powerful (arguably bloated) CMS.
• tenpoundhammer 13y ago
  I can't speak for the author,but what I can say what I got out of this. This article spoke to the idea that we often start our endeavours in the wrong place. We start off trying to find the flashy angle and trying to hit all the write aesthetic notes before we even know what we are trying to communicate. We should start our process by making a clear and distinct communication and filling our sites with content --the meat-- and then building everything else around that.
  • mijustin 13y ago
    Yes; that's it exactly!
• cia_plant 13y ago
  Just a note on the text style: it all seems kind of overemphasized and breathless, due to the heavy use of bold, italic, short sentences, one-sentence paragraphs, and so on. Less is more with such devices, especially bold text. I'm not a skimmer by nature, but when a post is full of bold text I find myself involuntarily skimming the bolded parts, because they have such a higher visual weight than the rest of the text. It's almost as though those words are shouted, and it becomes harder to hear the rest of the text. Simply paying close attention to the flow of your writing can usually give a sufficient sense of emphasis without resorting to special formatting.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• csomar 13y ago
  Sorry, but this is not true in many dimensions: 1. He doesn't have an RSS feed. That's a medium many people use it to connect. 2. He doesn't have a mailchimp (or other) list to subscribe to. That's another medium people use. 3. He didn't optimize for Google. That's a huge medium people use to reach content. (he uses analytics, though. guess why) 4. Font size is set in pixels. This is the wrong way to do it if you want to be optimized for reading. You should set it in "em" to have the size of the browser default. Another reason why you need a professional to design a site. It's true that we are sometimes (or in many occasions) taking the features to the extreme. But there is a reason why they are there. That's the new web. Learn how to use the feature to improve the experience, and not to make it worse. Not using is just moving us backward.
  • kryten 13y ago
    There is something infuriating about your post. It misses the point entirely and concentrates on the banality of the medium rather than the message. The new web is the old web, rehashed with less content and more money making prospects through complicated meshes of dross leeched from the veins of media startups. Not using is putting the message first for a change and I applaud that.
• swamp40 13y ago
  Anyone else think the referenced 37Signals "Know Your Company" idea was interesting? I wondered how it worked w/o asking employees to sign up for anything, and this is what I found: "What they came up with was Know Your Company, which poses one question to all employees via email, three days a week. The queries vary from day to day. Responding is optional, and answers are attached to employee names. Workers can also choose whether they want their replies shared with the whole group."
• jmagoon 13y ago
  I'm not sure if this applies to artistic theory, but in film theory there's an entire discipline based around formalist, or stylistic critique. Briefly, they would say that an effective ideological argument stems from style--two films with the exact same script that are shot, set, lit, and edited differently could have totally different meanings. So, what's most interesting is that your argument perhaps isn't actually about words or content -- it's about the way those words and content are presented.
• hnriot 13y ago
  This guy is living in the 90's. Today the web is a platform for providing digital services. Words are a very small part of the story.
  • raymondduke 13y ago
    You couldn't be more wrong.
    • haldujai 13y ago
      Actually, he couldn't be more right. This post is the internet equivalent of a newspaper article, really simple and some people will like it, but you can't really sell anything in that format or build a community. Modern, design based websites, are the equivalent of magazines. People would rather read the Economist in color than (insert newspaper here) in black and white by far.
      • raymondduke 13y ago
        You are missing the point. Words are the backbone of any deliverable content. You said it yourself, in your own words: "...people would rather READ the Economist in color than b & w...," which I agree with. And you can sell plenty with just words. I'm not harking on design. I think design is just important as anything else is. What I am saying is that words are like vital to life itself. Just like air, water, and food is.
• sirwanqutbi 13y ago
  He still used CSS styling. If anything, its a take on bringing back Times New Roman... everything is designed.
• csel 13y ago
  Wait...whatever happened to "A picture is worth a thousand words"?
• Nate630 13y ago
  That's why web typography is worth knowing as well!
• smackfu 13y ago
  Centered text, large white borders, and larger than standard font size are all design. Minimal design, but it does feel very different if you look at it completely unstyled: http://i.imgur.com/xOWPr8E.png http://i.imgur.com/xOWPr8E.png I feel like it subverts the message a bit that he still felt the need to style things.
  • mijustin 13y ago
    I like your version even better. ;) The point of the post wasn't: "un-style everything!" The point was that simple, unadorned words on a page can be powerful and effective.
  • devilshaircut 13y ago
    I couldn't agree with you more. It illustrates particularly well the fact that there is a line in the sand to be drawn and that it is ambiguous. His is just but one perspective on a site that serves up one type of content.
  • justinjlynn 13y ago
    Words are the substance, style is the presentation. The focus should be on the content with style in a supporting role. You can't convey content without a style, so at the very least you should ensure that your styling doesn't detract from the message you're imparting. The first bite is with the eyes, as they say.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • tl 13y ago
    This is the full stylesheet: <style type="text/css"> body { font-size:18px; } .wrapper { max-width: 600px; margin:0 auto; } </style> I feel like you're being a little unfair here.
    • meerita 13y ago
      Still needed style. The good point is, we don't need to be extremist.
• borgchick 13y ago
  So we've come around full circle. Back to plain old text. NCSA Mosaic anyone? I just hope we don't all go back to <marquee> and <blink>...
• cpdean 13y ago
  After sitting on the setup of my blog for a good nine months -- trying out several static site generators, experimenting with different color schemes, reactive layouts, font sizes, font families, deployment scripts, and composing about 15 stubs for posts and not finishing a single one -- i have accomplished less than this.
  • krapp 13y ago
    I had a perfectly usable blog built in laravel 3 with a content manager, hosted comments, the works -- but I destroyed it because one day I decided everything had to be turned into modules, and then one day everything had to be statically cached, and the switching the css framework from bootstrap to skeleton then back to bootstrap, then I built a custom static-page generating php framework, then I realized what an awful idea that was (although it's what my site is running now, minus a blog and anything interesting), and now I'm trying to port my laravel 3 stuff over to 4. Just dumping textfiles into an open directory honestly would've been more productive (if less fun.)
• Felix21 13y ago
  Interesting to see this today. My next website is sitting in Tomboy Notes at the moment. I'm just about to start coding.
• obviouslygreen 13y ago
  While I agree that the substance of a web page is the most important part of it, there's a whole lot of visual work that aids marketing, retention, and conversion, and while those things are often not appreciated by those of us who enjoy plain text, they are significant and have real benefits. The problem with all of the "You're reading this" and "You're still reading this" is that the only reason anyone read it is because of the author's networking, and in our case the fact that it was promoted up HN. That says nothing about the content of the page or its power. It'd be just as true and just as irrelevant if the author were the only one who ever read it. Yes, I agree with some of what's presented. But I also think it's a very narrow and outdated way of looking at the web, and it marginalizes disciplines that, for better or worse, have effectively changed the way that most people experience and internalize the experience of browsing.
  • mijustin 13y ago
    I'd say that there's a whole lot of effort that goes into marketing, retention, and conversion (as opposed to visual work). I didn't cover how to drive traffic to a web page; that'd be a great "sister topic" to this one. As an aside: that little link at the bottom of that page has converted better than anything else I've done. ;)
• dclowd9901 13y ago
  Something that struck me with an unexpected amount of force was a recent scene in Game of Thrones where one of the characters is explaining to another (sheltered) character that he knew the location of a secret passage because he had read about it in a book. The sheltered character was astounded that he looked at squiggles on a page, and through which was able to know something about the world. "Wizardry", was I think the word used. But when you break communication down to what it is, ideas and knowledge abstracted so they can be externalized, it's pretty fucking amazing.
• dragontamer 13y ago
  Looks a lot better than what was here a few hours ago. Good job fixing the typesetting issues.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• FrankBlack 13y ago
  Way back in the 90's, when this new-fangled web thing was just starting to take off (especially the .com side) I was teaching an "Introduction to the Internet" course at my college. I took meticulous care in trying to explain what was happening, why it happened and how to best sort through the voluminous information resources. To me, the web was about information. To my classes (dozens of classes after a while) all that mattered was they could "surf the net". They didn't care about information, they cared about seeing pictures. They were seduced by the flashy images and bored by the banal information resources available. This is when I learned that the web is just TV with a more precise remote control. Who cares if you have (more or less) the sum total of human knowledge at your fingertips? All that matters is "Dancing Baby" and "Peanut Butter Jelly Time". sigh
• daralthus 13y ago
  Damn, you have this medium full of potential that could be anything and you just want to mimic paper...
• psibi 13y ago
  Reminds me of the HTML hell page from Eric Raymond: http://catb.org/esr/html-hell.html http://catb.org/esr/html-hell.html
  • leephillips 13y ago
    All reasonable gripes, except "CSS that changes the hotlink colors". Everyone with a stylesheet does this. I understand the value of standardizing here, but the default colors are a bit garish, and in any case are unlikely to harmonize with your design. What are you going to do?
• jerednel 13y ago
  I read the first sentence, one in the middle and the last just because it was the top link on a page I frequent. Nothing too revolutionary.
• wfunction 13y ago
  http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp12/diatribe.html http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp12/diatribe.html
• skw 13y ago
  Good design facilitates the function and purpose of the message you want to communicate. Your example is just a handful of paragraphs, so it's easy to interpret such simple information. When you have text, images, lists, objects and dynamic content your argument falls apart. All of the elements I just described are made up of words and/or represent words. Sure designers can lose their way and become engrossed in decorating elements (which in some cases becomes a USP), but that's not typically the end goal.
• aaron695 13y ago
  It works because it's a one off. If every page did this then a contrary page with images would make the point against just words and everyone would agree. Looking at simple page's like that all day would be depressing, I want beauty in my life, not just words which can be beautiful, that's why I read novels, I also want visual beauty.
• nhamann 13y ago
  I had an insight a few months back when I was looking at djb's website (http://cr.yp.to/djb.html http://cr.yp.to/djb.html). I was spending far too much time playing with toys (static site generators) and not enough time actually producing interesting content. Nobody cares about your pretty blog theme, they care about your ideas.
  • adregan 13y ago
    I've been adopting an incremental approach. Enough style to get you going, and as you produce content, you refine the design. So by the time you announce it to your friends, the world, etc., you've got a bit of content and a good looking site.
• logn 13y ago
  Thank you. I've shared this with someone whom I know who's interested in learning to program. I think HTML is a great first step. After you learn HTML you can learn to write programs to generate HTML... and that's an application. From there you could learn more advanced programming concepts or native app development, but I think this is probably the best way to introduce people to programming, something which seems almost magical and impossible, until you get the right introduction.
• olalonde 13y ago
  And tomorrow's top story on HN: "Users can't read".
• capex 13y ago
  Hope the book page he's writing follows the same simplicity as in the article.
• undo 13y ago
  I think this is a great reminder to make our words on the web more meaningful. If you create something, make sure that the words make sense and are well supported by design, not the other way around.
• Pitarou 13y ago
  True, but don't for get, IF IT LOOKS GOOD, MORE PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ IT. That's why, for instance, even with the driest of academic textbooks, they still spend a few extra dollars on a cover design.
• freejack 13y ago
  Nice, except it needs a "like" button.
  • iso8859-1 13y ago
    Why does it need a like button? You can like every webpage! Just use a "like" bookmark. Let's assume every webpage is made to be liked (I'm an optimist). Hopefully you see the madness of like buttons now.
• gbog 13y ago
  That's what I'd call responsive design. No snarks: it displays perfectly on phone screens and large monitors and loads fast. How could it be made more responsive. I think the key to responsiveness is to remove all javascript, all unnecessary styling, and most importantly to remove all dynamic social features. Then you have an html static page with long cache life.
  • chris_mahan 13y ago
    Yes, and no js and css means it works beautifully on lynx, and search engines love it.
  • bti 13y ago
    I'd like the font size to be larger on mobile. But I agree with you about javascript. Those dynamic social buttons are horrible, multiple requests and 200kb+ additional data in some cases. All for a couple buttons that no one will use.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• devgrapher 13y ago
  I'm touched
• chris_mahan 13y ago
  I recently redid a restaurant main page (http://californiacanteen.com/ http://californiacanteen.com/) in a very similar way, targeting mostly mobile/tablet. Same principle. (the rest of the site is a work in progress and looks horribly 1996'ish).
• chris_mahan 13y ago
  The main problem is that writing is hard, and leaving just the words will make bad writing stand out. It seems that making a site "pretty" is easier than making the writing better, which is why I think the majority of sites go for glitz rather than excellent prose.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• tytyty 13y ago
  You had me until your twitter and I read "I wear a fake mustache."
• rakeshsharmak 13y ago
  Brilliant. Thank YOU for the simplicity. The best things in life are always the most simple..
• rakeshsharmak 13y ago
  Brilliant. Thank YOU for the simplicity. The best things in life are always the most simple..
• tericho 13y ago
  While I do agree that copy is an important and valid starting point, don't dismiss the power of images either. This[1] is a very important and meaningful symbol in any language. [1]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7c/A14.svg/220px-A14.svg.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7c/A14...
  • iso8859-1 13y ago
    Just because it's a symbol doesn't mean it's an image: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/26a0/index.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/26a0/index.htm Related: In my head, webpages should visually only consist of vector graphics and photographs. You can put JPEG's in SVG's, so there is no reason to rasterize hybrids.
• Myrmornis 13y ago
  > This is a web page. Pretentious drivel more like.
  • pg 13y ago
    If that's all you have to say, better to say nothing.
    • Myrmornis 13y ago
      I respectfully disagree with this ethos of positivity or nothing. Criticism is a valuable thing. We don't want our discourse to resemble some sort of Christian summer camp.
      • grey-area 13y ago
        If you have a criticism, try to expand on it and produce something others might find interesting as a counterpoint. Constructive criticism can be very useful, but just choosing an epithet as you have done here adds nothing and is not valuable criticism.
      • pg 13y ago
        Not positivity or nothing. Substance or nothing.
• angrytoast 13y ago
  The future of the web is ideas, and the medium that it is delivered through, whether it be test, video, audio, or whatever that I can begin to comprehend, will hopefully be one that will be seen by as many as possible.
• vivekian2 13y ago
  I think what I really miss is reading web pages which were truly written from the heart. I remember even as far as back in 2005, for a search like "unrequited love", Google's top hit would be a link to a physics Phd's home page who had written about his multiple experiences of being declared 'just a friend' and how to get past being rejected over and over again. Jump to today and the Google search yields following the obvious wikipedia link, is a whole bunch of wikihow, nytimes, urban dictionary and youtube links. Those personal web pages with an intellectually rich content have just been lost to the dark internet.
• hhorsley 13y ago
  Wow. Love this.
• kenbellows 13y ago
  I read his daughter's squirrel story [1]. I loved the last line: "Poor grandma Jalapeno she got arested for turning into superman." [1] http://justinjackson.ca/words.html http://justinjackson.ca/words.html
• Doro22 13y ago
  words are awesome!
• disclosure 13y ago
  This is typography
• tiagofernandez 13y ago
  Thanks for bringing me back to 1994.
• kidsil 13y ago
  Except Web Design has long been more similar to commercials, which have next to nothing to communicate except "BUY ME!"
• s4m20 13y ago
  This is why I love https://github.com/circa75/dropplets https://github.com/circa75/dropplets Simple, minimalist, publish through markdown. I stripped the Twitter button out of my fork because I thought even that was too much clutter (example: http://notes.darkfunction.com http://notes.darkfunction.com). Now I have just a list of articles, with a link to each article, and I can't think why I would need any more. I always found article history navigation on traditional bogs tedious (how am I supposed to know which month/year you wrote what I am looking for?) and as for social media buttons, if I want to put your post on my Facebook page I don't need a button to do it.
• kuchaguangjie 13y ago
  understand the core, and do things as simple as possible.
• kombine 13y ago
  "I didn't need a Content Management System, a graphic designer, or a software developer." The guy is arguing that we don't need software then, since it is possible to create every page by hand.
  • lmm 13y ago
    I agree with a lot of his position, but HTML is so tiresome to write by hand (all those angle brackets) and the tools to manage it already exist. My blog (http://m50d.github.io http://m50d.github.io) is all about text like the OP, but I still use strapdown so that I can write markdown rather than html.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• withparadox2 13y ago
  I really like this article!
• dendory 13y ago
  I don't know about the over-reliance on words, I think images and videos are just fine on the web, but I do agree with the sentiment that pages have become way too bloated around the web. When a single news site that should be telling you about a story has dozens of external scripts, hundreds of assets and takes way too long to display, things have gotten too far.
• ahawkins 13y ago
  I'm surprised this post has so many votes.
• dmourati 13y ago
  i'm a squirrel ftw
• DanBC 13y ago
  I strongly agree with this post. Please, when creating content, concentrate on the words first. There are some obvious exceptions, but almost always the words are most important. You can then add the markup, and the css, and the javascript, and all the other stuff. But having great copy means that your visitors will always have good quality content even if they turn all that other stuff off.
• uxwtf 13y ago
  > At its heart, web design should be about words. The Web is for sure a place to communicate with words. But can you imagine what will it look like if every web page will have only words? I can't. I wouldn't enjoy it anymore. As a UI designer, I always try to create an interface as intuitive as possible, and sometimes words do work better than icons and images. But sometimes it will break the concept. Let's take Airbnb as an example. If we'll remove all those attractive images and UI elements, which create its particular universe, Airbnb will look like Craigslist (though some apts have pictures today). And it won't be fun! Both words and images play important roles in the web design. The role of the words is to communicate an idea. The role of the images is to illustrate the idea and to bring an additional value to the content.
• kenbellows 13y ago
  I read his daughter's squirrel story [1]. I loved the last line: "Poor grandma Jalapeno she got arested for turning into superman." [1] http://justinjackson.ca/words.html http://justinjackson.ca/words.html
• plonko 13y ago
  Stoner....
• shalander 13y ago
  I instantly recognized what he was doing, and yet, I was still reading, and kept reading, until the end. Great article!
• aklein 13y ago
  From the perspective of someone who works with data, I simply have to disagree that words seem to be the most important way to convey information. Perhaps it is to some; but I'd bet the majority of information consumers prefer an alternate mode of visual communication with a well-executed design component. It is the concept is critical; words are simply one way to execute that concept. [Disclaimer: my wife is an advertising art director who has educated me a tiny bit on semiotics]
• phawk 13y ago
  And what? Your font looks like crap, line-height is not nice for me to read either.
• exodust 13y ago
  sorry, but words on a web page isn't "magic". > "We've become obsessed with fancy designs, responsive layouts, and scripts that do magical things." When we didn't have those fancy things, we wanted them. If they were taken away, we'd want them back. Nothing wrong with fancy presentation if your intention is to present something. The first thing I ever did on the internet back in the 90s was look up guitar tab for beginners. I skipped the words and printed out the guitar tabs I found. The author of "this is a web page" is flogging a book. That's nice, but I don't really think that reading his words is "magical". Oxygen is magical. Gravity is magical. Magic is everywhere. Can we please move on to the magical things that actually stand out as deserving such a label relative to where we are in online evolution? The internet of things is settling in nicely, and it isn't about words, it's about things. Linking data and real-time manipulation from online to things in our immediate and remote environments. THAT is closer to magic than plain text on a white page.
• robwgibbons 13y ago
  tl;dr
• bastifantasti 13y ago
  word.