7 ms·

Dude, What's with the Web Site?

56 points by drizzzler 13y ago

badman_ting 13y ago
> Here's a pro tip from a seasoned veteran of web development: if you want to do something really remarkable on a computer, you don't write it in HTML. You write it in C. WTF?
- smtddr 13y ago
  I stopped reading right there. I don't know if this is satire or not, or what...
  - colmvp 13y ago
    Hmm well it's all inline styling...
  - Goladus 13y ago
    He's simplifying for dramatic effect.
- MagicWishMonkey 13y ago
  I guess that would explain why the site looks like garbage.
- Supermighty 13y ago
  What if you wrote it in C but it outputs HTML?
  - BrandonY 13y ago
    There's a hot new technology for accomplishing this called the Common Gateway Interface. Apache has an experimental new module that supports this, but I'd wait to see if this mod_cgi thing sticks around for a while before relying on it.
- gcr 13y ago
  Why do you disagree with the author?
- Kluny 13y ago
  You crunch data on the backend in C. Output the results in HTML. Sounds good to me. We all use PHP, Ruby, or Python for the back end. I see nothing wrong with using C if you're good at it - well written C is faster.
Supermighty 13y ago
I've seen too many people's solution for a problem is to throw Javascript libraries at it with no regard for page load times. Or want to use something flashy and sexy without a reason that improves ROI. They just want it to be sexy. I love the idea of simplifying until all that is left is the bare minimum to get the job done.
- ulisesrmzroche 13y ago
  jQuery minified is less than 100kb. Those ugly anime cats on this site are almost 70kb together, each one making its own request. How can someone simplify with so little understanding of the subject matter?
  - kcorbitt 13y ago
    And almost everybody will be pulling jQuery from a cached version of the one on Google's CDN.
qqg3 13y ago
That page is PHP, I thought he said he was going to use HTML...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
tylerlh 13y ago
Let's be clear: web site != web app I think the author forgot to check out the noted companies' other web properties...
sugerman 13y ago
> The original Heavy Cat Multimedia company site was likely one of the first 200 sites to go live on the web. What?
- rhizome 13y ago
  And this is the domain name they chose.
- davidandgoliath 13y ago
  Registered in 2008? I doubt it ;)
  - Killswitch 13y ago
    Could have let it drop and reregistered it. Edit:: oldest Archive.org entry for this domain is 2009; http://web.archive.org/web/20090213172323/http://www.heavycatweb.net/ http://web.archive.org/web/20090213172323/http://www.heavyca...
    - glomph 13y ago
      But that talks about them being online in 1996.
      - Killswitch 13y ago
        Yeah I am skeptical myself, but this isn't definite proof that the site isn't as old as he says, just could mean IA-Archive bot was blocked from indexing up to 2009...
deleted 13y ago
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VMG 13y ago
> Think about all the most popular, successful web sites. Google. Craigslist. YouTube. Facebook. Twitter. Even Apple's company site. What do they all have in common? Text and the occasional image. There's no animation, video, color backgrounds, textures, window decorations, animated drop-down menus, ambient sound, background music, gimmicks, gizmos or gew-gaws. They are all simple and functional, and those six web sites together represent about a trillion dollars in value. With the exception of Craigslist, all of the sites he lists are complex web applications. The author conflates shiny gimmicks and modern web technology.
- joevandyk 13y ago
  Yes. I'm not sure why he wrote that Youtube has no videos.
  - hamburglar 13y ago
    He's only looked at it in lynx.
  - rickdale 13y ago
    Especially with the heavy cat home page having a youtube video on it. Besides the slight hypocrisy, I understand the point the author is trying to get off as simplify simplify simplify. When you have been doing it for as long as he has, seems like the natural progression.
    - hamburglar 13y ago
      > I understand the point the author is trying to get off as simplify simplify simplify That's not actually the point. The point is that the author wants to be seen as a badass iconoclast. Unfortunately, he (or she) has no actual valid ideas, so he's joined a cargo cult of simplicity-worship, as if eschewing everything complex in a web design automatically makes it good. The points made are hilariously ignorant. The argument about how it was dumb of people to make Doom for DOS because "DOS wasn't designed for that" is jaw-dropping. Claiming that you should write all web stuff in C, OMG. The defensive explanation about why they build sites with Flash. Oh wait, I just figured it out. These guys are Flash developers and nobody wants Flash these days, so they're flailing, trying to explain why modern web development practices are no good, but sites that consist solely of a Flash widget are totally where it's at. All is clear now.
aram 13y ago
Dude, what's with this article being on the first page of HN?
- rhizome 13y ago
  do u even web, bro
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    No time to web, lifting. /s
- badman_ting 13y ago
  No idea, it is straight garbage.
- Killswitch 13y ago
  Because let's face it. This site is web scale, and your site is total fail.
deleted 13y ago
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MrZongle2 13y ago
Dude, what's with the pretentiousness?
- michaelwww 13y ago
  I'm surprised he didn't say he writes HTML with a typewriter and has an assistant scan it in.
thinkpad20 13y ago
Some guy with a web site which I've never heard of, that looks like shit, tells me that I should do web dev in C. Cool story bro.
artumi-richard 13y ago
He goes too far. Images should also be abandoned. And maybe colour. And in this case, perhaps the text too.
Detrus 13y ago
Twitter and Facebook front ends have as much complexity as any fancy gizmo FWA site. And took even more work to get right, because most fancy gizmo sites are throwaway internet flyers, see them once and forget. If they flop it's no big deal. It's also why they get shut down, after the promotion they have no useful traffic, so no one even bothers to pay for hosting. I agree with their philosophical principle though, a content site shouldn't be as complex as an application, but they often are.
octatone2 13y ago
TIL youtube is text with the occasional image.
drivebyacct2 13y ago
Not only are entire paragraphs completely factually inaccurate, this is just fucking stupid: "use that ancient technology called a bookmark." Sure, I'll add yours to the 6000 other bookmarks I have, along with the 6 other sites that I try to check regularly because they have updates but don't use RSS. This is so smug and arrogant and not nearly as justified as they seem to think it is. I guess I'm going to be that guy, but this goes in /r/cringe, not on Hacker News. >I have decided after 20 years that I'm tired of trying to make the web site equivalent of DOOM. HTML is text and the occasional image. Text and the occasional image. That's it. So he's just like the other ignorant masses that come on HN and act like HTML hasn't progressed since HTML4 because they can't be fucking bothered to understand that things like WebComponents are coming and are already usable and that it's just mind-numbingly stupid to the rest of us "in the known" when you make uninformed, dated arguments like this.
deleted 13y ago
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klinquist 13y ago
"Get off my lawn!"
deleted 13y ago
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coldtea 13y ago
Between the meme responses ("cool story bro" etc) and the misunderstandings, this has to be the lowest value HN comment thread ever. It's like I'm reading 9gag. For a site were tons of people speak of the value of simplicity, and every other day they "Show HN" their own "static site generator", it's surprising how many people do NOT get his message. First, he is not a web developer. He is a busines owner that also had to create a site for his business. He chose to follow the KISS principle, and that's what he advocates: catering to content first, fancy stuff second (or never at all). The peripheral details to his post (if he personally uses Flash for some stuff but you don't like it, or if he has a line about coding important apps in C and you disagree) don't matter. What matters is that for content websites --which makes most of them out there, including all blogs and brochure-ware sites --, his advice is spot on. As for his website "looking like crap" (as 1-2 people comment below). That's the whole point. As long as it gets the job done he doesn't care. And it's not worse than Hacker News (no paragon of great web design) or Paul Graham's site. Would you rather read PGs eassays in his website, or some moron's zero-content marketing fluff on a great looking, fancy-ass website, with CSS 3D transforms and the whole works?
- awj 13y ago
  > Would you rather read PGs eassays in his website, or some moron's zero-content marketing fluff on a great looking, fancy-ass website, with CSS 3D transforms and the whole works? I'd rather read PGs essays on a great looking, fancy-ass website. Why the false dichotomy?
  - colmvp 13y ago
    I'm not sure why you got downvoted. I prefer not to have either extreme.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >I'd rather read PGs essays on a great looking, fancy-ass website. Why the false dichotomy? Because real life is full of dichotomies, and they are not all false. They even exist in our profession -- we call them "engineering tradeoffs". Have you seen many "fancy-ass websites" with great essay content? Perhaps you can find 1 or 2. I doubt you can find 10. There's a reason for that too. Most of the good writers I've read value simplicity, both in their writing and in their presentation. And, as they believe in the value of their content, they see no need to dress it on a "fancy-ass website". That's what the whole "content first" / "minimalism" etc movement has been all about, from the 37 Signals blog to the emergence in our community of stuff like Jekyll. And I don't see what the fancy-assness of the website would add to PG's essays. Care to enlighten me?
etjossem 13y ago
There are some very good reasons why modern designers don't use background music. Elements don't blink and strobe like they did in the 90s. The time for skeuomorphic visual design is over. We've learned from our mistakes. Instead, we embrace technologies that help convey the site's meaning and purpose to the user. Sometimes that takes the form of a fancy JS single-page scroll (http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/ http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/) to give a more natural flow to a traditional sales funnel. Sometimes that means robust streaming video (https://developers.google.com/youtube/ https://developers.google.com/youtube/), so people can watch live music or election coverage from home. Sometimes, it's adding a Leaflet map widget to one of the most design-conservative sites on the web (https://twitter.com/LeafletJS/status/240820008605851648 https://twitter.com/LeafletJS/status/240820008605851648) to help people find new apartments. All of these sites are elegant and work as expected, and they rely on far more than HTML4 and inline style tags to do so.
ryansan 13y ago
I can understand where he's coming from. I've always been amazed at how carried away people can get with the their web designs and applications. Several typefaces, a ginormous color palette, skeuomorphic stuff, wizzbang doo-dads, unnecessary libraries, the list goes on. I can appreciate a well-designed and well-built site. One that pays attention to hierarchy and how the information is presented with an eye toward performance and scalability. I always find that my favorite sites are the ones that seem to take Edgar Allen Poe's advice for writing a short story. Every component has a reason for being there (i.e., it is functional). If the component or element's purpose is to be there for the sake of simply being there (it just looks cool!), then it shouldn't exist. I suppose that's minimalism. But oftentimes, minimalism goes against what people think of in terms of "creating an experience." Most of the time when I visit a website that creates an experience, I am left with a sour taste in my mouth.
etjossem 13y ago
Oh look, animated GIFs. http://heavycatweb.net/showcase.php http://heavycatweb.net/showcase.php
crazygringo 13y ago
This is the most bizarre thing I have ever seen to reach 50 votes on HN. Who is upvoting this?! I can't even figure out the point of it all, between the tangential boasting of being one of the first sites on the web (is this even true?), saying to write in C instead of HTML (is he programming-illiterate?), rants about how bad "background music, gimmicks" are and then boasts that their site will use Flash because it will "make our graphics, music, voices and games look and sound good". This doesn't even look like satire, it's complete nonsense as far as I can tell.
deleted 13y ago
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umario 13y ago
I'll just leave this here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dinner-table-epics-fantasy-adventure-graphics-series?c=comments http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dinner-table-epics-fantasy... https://www.gandi.net/whois/details?search=hikousenenterprises.com https://www.gandi.net/whois/details?search=hikousenenterpris... and the parent company were both created in 2008 https://www.gandi.net/whois/details?search=palaceinthesky.com https://www.gandi.net/whois/details?search=palaceinthesky.co..., so either the author has a time machine or is lying?
vonseel 13y ago
Without taking progressive enhancement into consideration, let's look at the facts. From the article: Google. Craigslist. YouTube. Facebook. Twitter. Even Apple's company site. What do they all have in common? Text and the occasional image. There's no animation, video, color backgrounds, textures, window decorations, animated drop-down menus, ambient sound, background music, gimmicks, gizmos or gew-gaws. Let's see: Google: Currently has a game on the homepage. Certainly could be considered a `gimmick, gizmo, or gew-gaw.` YouTube: Obviously has video, some fancy modals can be found by hovering over certain things, I'm sure there's a ton that I am missing. Facebook: The site is built on databases, JavaScript, and other technologies the author apparently considers `slow, buggy nonsense`. Where do you think all those user images are stored? Chat certainly requires either AJAX or Websockets (I have not checked). Twitter: OK, we are closer to `text and images`. Still, these guys released Bootstrap http://getbootstrap.com/ http://getbootstrap.com/ which changed the web -- obviously huge proponents of CSS. I think the understanding today is -- even if you are not a designer/front-end developer, it is unacceptable to deliver work without minimal styling, since you can throw Bootstrap on something with little effort. Do you prefer plain browser styled inputs to that? Twitter also has a ton of infrastructure underneath that 'simple' 140-character messaging 'social network'. Apple: http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ Enough said. -- And finally, the comment `Here's a pro tip from a seasoned veteran of web development: if you want to do something really remarkable on a computer, you don't write it in HTML. You write it in C.`. I'm confused whether you mean "do something remarkable on a computer" (as written) or "do something remarkable on the web". Your essay appears to be a rant on why, you think, the web sucks. I get it, most of the technologies we use are somehow dependent on C (CPython, most databases, OS). So, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Those libraries written in C enable us. What does that have to do with the average web developer doing something remarkable? Most of us will never have to deal with the scaling problems of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Python is fast enough for me. Ruby is fast enough for most Rails users. If I ever need more performance, perhaps I will look into Go. The key point is `if`. I'm not going to start a new web project in `C`, when modern languages and frameworks ease the level of effort to write the code, and contain features I would otherwise have to re-implement. You sure you aren't trollin`?
msimpson 13y ago
Dude, What's with the Lack of Knowledge I've been in the Web business for over a decade. The original Heavy Cat Multimedia company site was likely not part of the first 200 sites to go live on the Web. Search engines then did not have the analytics results to prove this because that's all there was. Yeah. They've been around for a bit. They just weren't the first site with a background color other than gray. During that time, I've learned a few things. One of them is that probably half of Heavy Cat's competition soared to amazing heights by building "cool" Web sites to market their products. The reason is pretty simple. HTML is designed to present text and the occasional image. When you spend money and time to try to make it do more than that: innovation is born. CSS is not intuitive. The only reason most people don't complain more about it is because they learn to use it. HTML is not intuitive either, but at least it's easy to learn once you realize there's a Box Object Model. JavaScript is very useful, and also pretty amazing. You can spend days, weeks and months cramming them together in new and innovative ways and ultimately you'll end up with a lot of well spent time and a site made of unique functionality and the occasional video. You know those sites with the long lists of really amazing-looking Web designs? Funny how all those links go to prosperous sites with a link trying to sell you the products they've created. DOS was the same way. It was a simple, quick shell and file system for PCs. It took a couple of stone cold geniuses years to make the DOOM engine. Why? DOS wasn't designed for that. Which is why they made it in C with their own graphics library and only hooked into the system APIs they needed. All the DOOM engine parts had to be invented from scratch. I have decided after over a decade that I'm tired of trying to make bad developers understand the abilities of the Web. HTML is amazing and full of possibilities. It can be molded like clay into beautiful creations. That's it. Here's a pro-tip from a seasoned veteran of Web development: if you're going to write an article flaming Web technologies, learn to capitalize Web and JavaScript correctly. And, more seriously, never use markup as a high level imperative language. Now I do get some benefits from doing Web sites this way. One, it's simple and easy to update with the advent of modern technologies like content management systems. Two, it's not cluttered with distractions like all the incoherent blog articles. Three, they load ultra fast when you keep scalability in mind. Why look at that! We've solved all the problems most "shitty" Web sites have, at a portion of the profit they generate! Think about all the most popular, successful Web sites. Google. Craigslist possibly, YouTube -- I mean Google. Facebook. Twitter. Even Apple's company site. What do they all have in common? Mountains of servers, load balancers, support staff, etc. to preserve up time and availability. There's animation, video, color backgrounds, textures, window decorations, animated drop-down menus, sound in general, gimmicks like games and apps, gizmos like Google's widgets or gew-gaws (whatever that may be). They are all complex and functional, and those six Web sites -- well more like four -- together represent about <a non-verified, completely shot from the hip> dollar amount value. Simplistic and forgotten. That's what Heavy Cat's site is going to be. They have a lot of information, if you can consider seven main pages to be "a lot". They have a choice. They can spend six months building a gee-whiz site, or they can build more marginally profitable products. They chose the products. They use Flash too, as a final insult. You know why they use Flash? Because it's the only thing they learned how to use. The tools integrate well into their established workflow and they interoperate well with all the tools designed by the exact same software firm (somehow). They allow them to make graphics, music, voices and games look and sound good. As they should, with the monthly subscription costs. Someday Heavy Cat might use HTML5 too. But Flash had a 16-year death, so they're going to use what doesn't work with the majority of the world. If you are on an Apple phone, or just don't want to run Flash, their site will look even shittier. If you want to look at their Flash stuff, bend to their will. They also no longer care about SEO, so you won't see their Web pages on any search engines much. Searching for anything but "Heavy Cat" directly yields no results referencing their site. Matt
rhizome 13y ago
Ahistorical braggadocio posted to HN with a green account. I'm calling shenanigans.

56 points by drizzzler 13y ago

> Here's a pro tip from a seasoned veteran of web development: if you want to do something really remarkable on a computer, you don't write it in HTML. You write it in C. WTF?

smtddr 13y ago
I stopped reading right there. I don't know if this is satire or not, or what...
- colmvp 13y ago
  Hmm well it's all inline styling...
- Goladus 13y ago
  He's simplifying for dramatic effect.
MagicWishMonkey 13y ago
I guess that would explain why the site looks like garbage.
Supermighty 13y ago
What if you wrote it in C but it outputs HTML?
- BrandonY 13y ago
  There's a hot new technology for accomplishing this called the Common Gateway Interface. Apache has an experimental new module that supports this, but I'd wait to see if this mod_cgi thing sticks around for a while before relying on it.
gcr 13y ago
Why do you disagree with the author?
Kluny 13y ago
You crunch data on the backend in C. Output the results in HTML. Sounds good to me. We all use PHP, Ruby, or Python for the back end. I see nothing wrong with using C if you're good at it - well written C is faster.

Supermighty 13y ago

I've seen too many people's solution for a problem is to throw Javascript libraries at it with no regard for page load times. Or want to use something flashy and sexy without a reason that improves ROI. They just want it to be sexy. I love the idea of simplifying until all that is left is the bare minimum to get the job done.

ulisesrmzroche 13y ago
jQuery minified is less than 100kb. Those ugly anime cats on this site are almost 70kb together, each one making its own request. How can someone simplify with so little understanding of the subject matter?
- kcorbitt 13y ago
  And almost everybody will be pulling jQuery from a cached version of the one on Google's CDN.

qqg3 13y ago

That page is PHP, I thought he said he was going to use HTML...

deleted 13y ago
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tylerlh 13y ago

Let's be clear: web site != web app I think the author forgot to check out the noted companies' other web properties...

sugerman 13y ago

> The original Heavy Cat Multimedia company site was likely one of the first 200 sites to go live on the web. What?

rhizome 13y ago
And this is the domain name they chose.
davidandgoliath 13y ago
Registered in 2008? I doubt it ;)
- Killswitch 13y ago
  Could have let it drop and reregistered it. Edit:: oldest Archive.org entry for this domain is 2009; http://web.archive.org/web/20090213172323/http://www.heavycatweb.net/ http://web.archive.org/web/20090213172323/http://www.heavyca...
  - glomph 13y ago
    But that talks about them being online in 1996.
    - Killswitch 13y ago
      Yeah I am skeptical myself, but this isn't definite proof that the site isn't as old as he says, just could mean IA-Archive bot was blocked from indexing up to 2009...

deleted 13y ago

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VMG 13y ago

> Think about all the most popular, successful web sites. Google. Craigslist. YouTube. Facebook. Twitter. Even Apple's company site. What do they all have in common? Text and the occasional image. There's no animation, video, color backgrounds, textures, window decorations, animated drop-down menus, ambient sound, background music, gimmicks, gizmos or gew-gaws. They are all simple and functional, and those six web sites together represent about a trillion dollars in value. With the exception of Craigslist, all of the sites he lists are complex web applications. The author conflates shiny gimmicks and modern web technology.

joevandyk 13y ago
Yes. I'm not sure why he wrote that Youtube has no videos.
- hamburglar 13y ago
  He's only looked at it in lynx.
- rickdale 13y ago
  Especially with the heavy cat home page having a youtube video on it. Besides the slight hypocrisy, I understand the point the author is trying to get off as simplify simplify simplify. When you have been doing it for as long as he has, seems like the natural progression.
  - hamburglar 13y ago
    > I understand the point the author is trying to get off as simplify simplify simplify That's not actually the point. The point is that the author wants to be seen as a badass iconoclast. Unfortunately, he (or she) has no actual valid ideas, so he's joined a cargo cult of simplicity-worship, as if eschewing everything complex in a web design automatically makes it good. The points made are hilariously ignorant. The argument about how it was dumb of people to make Doom for DOS because "DOS wasn't designed for that" is jaw-dropping. Claiming that you should write all web stuff in C, OMG. The defensive explanation about why they build sites with Flash. Oh wait, I just figured it out. These guys are Flash developers and nobody wants Flash these days, so they're flailing, trying to explain why modern web development practices are no good, but sites that consist solely of a Flash widget are totally where it's at. All is clear now.

aram 13y ago

Dude, what's with this article being on the first page of HN?

rhizome 13y ago
do u even web, bro
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  No time to web, lifting. /s
badman_ting 13y ago
No idea, it is straight garbage.
Killswitch 13y ago
Because let's face it. This site is web scale, and your site is total fail.

deleted 13y ago

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MrZongle2 13y ago

Dude, what's with the pretentiousness?

michaelwww 13y ago
I'm surprised he didn't say he writes HTML with a typewriter and has an assistant scan it in.

thinkpad20 13y ago

Some guy with a web site which I've never heard of, that looks like shit, tells me that I should do web dev in C. Cool story bro.

artumi-richard 13y ago

He goes too far. Images should also be abandoned. And maybe colour. And in this case, perhaps the text too.

Detrus 13y ago

Twitter and Facebook front ends have as much complexity as any fancy gizmo FWA site. And took even more work to get right, because most fancy gizmo sites are throwaway internet flyers, see them once and forget. If they flop it's no big deal. It's also why they get shut down, after the promotion they have no useful traffic, so no one even bothers to pay for hosting. I agree with their philosophical principle though, a content site shouldn't be as complex as an application, but they often are.

octatone2 13y ago

TIL youtube is text with the occasional image.

drivebyacct2 13y ago

Not only are entire paragraphs completely factually inaccurate, this is just fucking stupid: "use that ancient technology called a bookmark." Sure, I'll add yours to the 6000 other bookmarks I have, along with the 6 other sites that I try to check regularly because they have updates but don't use RSS. This is so smug and arrogant and not nearly as justified as they seem to think it is. I guess I'm going to be that guy, but this goes in /r/cringe, not on Hacker News. >I have decided after 20 years that I'm tired of trying to make the web site equivalent of DOOM. HTML is text and the occasional image. Text and the occasional image. That's it. So he's just like the other ignorant masses that come on HN and act like HTML hasn't progressed since HTML4 because they can't be fucking bothered to understand that things like WebComponents are coming and are already usable and that it's just mind-numbingly stupid to the rest of us "in the known" when you make uninformed, dated arguments like this.

deleted 13y ago

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klinquist 13y ago

"Get off my lawn!"

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coldtea 13y ago

Between the meme responses ("cool story bro" etc) and the misunderstandings, this has to be the lowest value HN comment thread ever. It's like I'm reading 9gag. For a site were tons of people speak of the value of simplicity, and every other day they "Show HN" their own "static site generator", it's surprising how many people do NOT get his message. First, he is not a web developer. He is a busines owner that also had to create a site for his business. He chose to follow the KISS principle, and that's what he advocates: catering to content first, fancy stuff second (or never at all). The peripheral details to his post (if he personally uses Flash for some stuff but you don't like it, or if he has a line about coding important apps in C and you disagree) don't matter. What matters is that for content websites --which makes most of them out there, including all blogs and brochure-ware sites --, his advice is spot on. As for his website "looking like crap" (as 1-2 people comment below). That's the whole point. As long as it gets the job done he doesn't care. And it's not worse than Hacker News (no paragon of great web design) or Paul Graham's site. Would you rather read PGs eassays in his website, or some moron's zero-content marketing fluff on a great looking, fancy-ass website, with CSS 3D transforms and the whole works?

awj 13y ago
> Would you rather read PGs eassays in his website, or some moron's zero-content marketing fluff on a great looking, fancy-ass website, with CSS 3D transforms and the whole works? I'd rather read PGs essays on a great looking, fancy-ass website. Why the false dichotomy?
- colmvp 13y ago
  I'm not sure why you got downvoted. I prefer not to have either extreme.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >I'd rather read PGs essays on a great looking, fancy-ass website. Why the false dichotomy? Because real life is full of dichotomies, and they are not all false. They even exist in our profession -- we call them "engineering tradeoffs". Have you seen many "fancy-ass websites" with great essay content? Perhaps you can find 1 or 2. I doubt you can find 10. There's a reason for that too. Most of the good writers I've read value simplicity, both in their writing and in their presentation. And, as they believe in the value of their content, they see no need to dress it on a "fancy-ass website". That's what the whole "content first" / "minimalism" etc movement has been all about, from the 37 Signals blog to the emergence in our community of stuff like Jekyll. And I don't see what the fancy-assness of the website would add to PG's essays. Care to enlighten me?

etjossem 13y ago

There are some very good reasons why modern designers don't use background music. Elements don't blink and strobe like they did in the 90s. The time for skeuomorphic visual design is over. We've learned from our mistakes. Instead, we embrace technologies that help convey the site's meaning and purpose to the user. Sometimes that takes the form of a fancy JS single-page scroll (http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/ http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/) to give a more natural flow to a traditional sales funnel. Sometimes that means robust streaming video (https://developers.google.com/youtube/ https://developers.google.com/youtube/), so people can watch live music or election coverage from home. Sometimes, it's adding a Leaflet map widget to one of the most design-conservative sites on the web (https://twitter.com/LeafletJS/status/240820008605851648 https://twitter.com/LeafletJS/status/240820008605851648) to help people find new apartments. All of these sites are elegant and work as expected, and they rely on far more than HTML4 and inline style tags to do so.

ryansan 13y ago

I can understand where he's coming from. I've always been amazed at how carried away people can get with the their web designs and applications. Several typefaces, a ginormous color palette, skeuomorphic stuff, wizzbang doo-dads, unnecessary libraries, the list goes on. I can appreciate a well-designed and well-built site. One that pays attention to hierarchy and how the information is presented with an eye toward performance and scalability. I always find that my favorite sites are the ones that seem to take Edgar Allen Poe's advice for writing a short story. Every component has a reason for being there (i.e., it is functional). If the component or element's purpose is to be there for the sake of simply being there (it just looks cool!), then it shouldn't exist. I suppose that's minimalism. But oftentimes, minimalism goes against what people think of in terms of "creating an experience." Most of the time when I visit a website that creates an experience, I am left with a sour taste in my mouth.

etjossem 13y ago

Oh look, animated GIFs. http://heavycatweb.net/showcase.php http://heavycatweb.net/showcase.php

crazygringo 13y ago

This is the most bizarre thing I have ever seen to reach 50 votes on HN. Who is upvoting this?! I can't even figure out the point of it all, between the tangential boasting of being one of the first sites on the web (is this even true?), saying to write in C instead of HTML (is he programming-illiterate?), rants about how bad "background music, gimmicks" are and then boasts that their site will use Flash because it will "make our graphics, music, voices and games look and sound good". This doesn't even look like satire, it's complete nonsense as far as I can tell.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

umario 13y ago

I'll just leave this here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dinner-table-epics-fantasy-adventure-graphics-series?c=comments http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dinner-table-epics-fantasy... https://www.gandi.net/whois/details?search=hikousenenterprises.com https://www.gandi.net/whois/details?search=hikousenenterpris... and the parent company were both created in 2008 https://www.gandi.net/whois/details?search=palaceinthesky.com https://www.gandi.net/whois/details?search=palaceinthesky.co..., so either the author has a time machine or is lying?

vonseel 13y ago

Without taking progressive enhancement into consideration, let's look at the facts. From the article: Google. Craigslist. YouTube. Facebook. Twitter. Even Apple's company site. What do they all have in common? Text and the occasional image. There's no animation, video, color backgrounds, textures, window decorations, animated drop-down menus, ambient sound, background music, gimmicks, gizmos or gew-gaws. Let's see: Google: Currently has a game on the homepage. Certainly could be considered a `gimmick, gizmo, or gew-gaw.` YouTube: Obviously has video, some fancy modals can be found by hovering over certain things, I'm sure there's a ton that I am missing. Facebook: The site is built on databases, JavaScript, and other technologies the author apparently considers `slow, buggy nonsense`. Where do you think all those user images are stored? Chat certainly requires either AJAX or Websockets (I have not checked). Twitter: OK, we are closer to `text and images`. Still, these guys released Bootstrap http://getbootstrap.com/ http://getbootstrap.com/ which changed the web -- obviously huge proponents of CSS. I think the understanding today is -- even if you are not a designer/front-end developer, it is unacceptable to deliver work without minimal styling, since you can throw Bootstrap on something with little effort. Do you prefer plain browser styled inputs to that? Twitter also has a ton of infrastructure underneath that 'simple' 140-character messaging 'social network'. Apple: http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ Enough said. -- And finally, the comment `Here's a pro tip from a seasoned veteran of web development: if you want to do something really remarkable on a computer, you don't write it in HTML. You write it in C.`. I'm confused whether you mean "do something remarkable on a computer" (as written) or "do something remarkable on the web". Your essay appears to be a rant on why, you think, the web sucks. I get it, most of the technologies we use are somehow dependent on C (CPython, most databases, OS). So, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Those libraries written in C enable us. What does that have to do with the average web developer doing something remarkable? Most of us will never have to deal with the scaling problems of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Python is fast enough for me. Ruby is fast enough for most Rails users. If I ever need more performance, perhaps I will look into Go. The key point is `if`. I'm not going to start a new web project in `C`, when modern languages and frameworks ease the level of effort to write the code, and contain features I would otherwise have to re-implement. You sure you aren't trollin`?

msimpson 13y ago

Dude, What's with the Lack of Knowledge I've been in the Web business for over a decade. The original Heavy Cat Multimedia company site was likely not part of the first 200 sites to go live on the Web. Search engines then did not have the analytics results to prove this because that's all there was. Yeah. They've been around for a bit. They just weren't the first site with a background color other than gray. During that time, I've learned a few things. One of them is that probably half of Heavy Cat's competition soared to amazing heights by building "cool" Web sites to market their products. The reason is pretty simple. HTML is designed to present text and the occasional image. When you spend money and time to try to make it do more than that: innovation is born. CSS is not intuitive. The only reason most people don't complain more about it is because they learn to use it. HTML is not intuitive either, but at least it's easy to learn once you realize there's a Box Object Model. JavaScript is very useful, and also pretty amazing. You can spend days, weeks and months cramming them together in new and innovative ways and ultimately you'll end up with a lot of well spent time and a site made of unique functionality and the occasional video. You know those sites with the long lists of really amazing-looking Web designs? Funny how all those links go to prosperous sites with a link trying to sell you the products they've created. DOS was the same way. It was a simple, quick shell and file system for PCs. It took a couple of stone cold geniuses years to make the DOOM engine. Why? DOS wasn't designed for that. Which is why they made it in C with their own graphics library and only hooked into the system APIs they needed. All the DOOM engine parts had to be invented from scratch. I have decided after over a decade that I'm tired of trying to make bad developers understand the abilities of the Web. HTML is amazing and full of possibilities. It can be molded like clay into beautiful creations. That's it. Here's a pro-tip from a seasoned veteran of Web development: if you're going to write an article flaming Web technologies, learn to capitalize Web and JavaScript correctly. And, more seriously, never use markup as a high level imperative language. Now I do get some benefits from doing Web sites this way. One, it's simple and easy to update with the advent of modern technologies like content management systems. Two, it's not cluttered with distractions like all the incoherent blog articles. Three, they load ultra fast when you keep scalability in mind. Why look at that! We've solved all the problems most "shitty" Web sites have, at a portion of the profit they generate! Think about all the most popular, successful Web sites. Google. Craigslist possibly, YouTube -- I mean Google. Facebook. Twitter. Even Apple's company site. What do they all have in common? Mountains of servers, load balancers, support staff, etc. to preserve up time and availability. There's animation, video, color backgrounds, textures, window decorations, animated drop-down menus, sound in general, gimmicks like games and apps, gizmos like Google's widgets or gew-gaws (whatever that may be). They are all complex and functional, and those six Web sites -- well more like four -- together represent about <a non-verified, completely shot from the hip> dollar amount value. Simplistic and forgotten. That's what Heavy Cat's site is going to be. They have a lot of information, if you can consider seven main pages to be "a lot". They have a choice. They can spend six months building a gee-whiz site, or they can build more marginally profitable products. They chose the products. They use Flash too, as a final insult. You know why they use Flash? Because it's the only thing they learned how to use. The tools integrate well into their established workflow and they interoperate well with all the tools designed by the exact same software firm (somehow). They allow them to make graphics, music, voices and games look and sound good. As they should, with the monthly subscription costs. Someday Heavy Cat might use HTML5 too. But Flash had a 16-year death, so they're going to use what doesn't work with the majority of the world. If you are on an Apple phone, or just don't want to run Flash, their site will look even shittier. If you want to look at their Flash stuff, bend to their will. They also no longer care about SEO, so you won't see their Web pages on any search engines much. Searching for anything but "Heavy Cat" directly yields no results referencing their site. Matt

rhizome 13y ago

Ahistorical braggadocio posted to HN with a green account. I'm calling shenanigans.