9 ms·

I wish more sites were like this. 1. It loads lightning fast on my 512 kbps connection. 2. The font is preinstalled on my system, no separate request needs to

I wish more sites were like this. 1. It loads lightning fast on my 512 kbps connection. 2. The font is preinstalled on my system, no separate request needs to be made. 3. It's easy to tell what is a link and what isn't. 4. Scrolling works like I'd expect it to, and doesn't involve any clever "transition" effects. More generally, there are next to no distracting animations or effects on the entire page.

bane 11y ago
It's amazing how much work we've put into making the web a worse place.
- blowski 11y ago
  All this pseudo-hipster "the web became a worse place when designers got involved" stuff really annoys me. Seriously, if all the web looked like this it would be more complicated to use for 99.9% of the world, so it would have remained a niche, so its overall usefulness would have remained limited. Instead, talented hard-working people put lots of effort into making the web look a much more friendly place. This has made the web a much more inclusive place, and thus, much more of the world has started to use it. RMS is a brand, and this 'zero design' is part of his brand. You already know who RMS is before you visit his site, and if you don't, you probably aren't part of his 'target market'. The jarring "Oh the CSS hasn't loaded" moment is precisely what he wants you to experience. The kind of people who visit his site know how to use reading mode on their browser, are comfortable adjusting the line width in whatever client they are using, so it doesn't matter. It doesn't mean that the rest of the web would be a in a better place if it had remained looking like this. It would have remained an obscure corner of the world where a group of geeks met, and so many of the benefits of the internet would never have transpired.
  - bane 11y ago
    The design work we see in the modern web is (IMHO) a result of making the web marketable and thus monetizable. You have a point that is would have remained an obscure geek meeting ground, but the reasons for the modern web aren't to make it easier to use, it's to make it not feel so much like reading. Logos and colors, design and layout are designed to make the web appealing and inviting to some group. Black text on white feels too much like a book and an amazingly large segment of society is put off from that. Yet his page is fast, responsive, standards compliant, easy to navigate, accessible (screen readers have no problems with it). I don't have to addblock it, turn on readability, or any other nonsense to focus on the content. We've succeeded in simply trying to reinvent what we already have.
    - blowski 11y ago
      I agree with what you're saying, to a point. If it hadn't become monetisable, then services like Youtube and Netflix etc, would never have taken off. I wouldn't have been able to convince family to use email. I would still need to stand in a queue on my lunchbreak to transfer money from my savings account to my current account. Instead, the web evolved, some people took advantage of that for their own ends, and we've ended up with a system which is better for most people, though a long way from being perfect for each individual group.
    - eropple 11y ago
      > The design work we see in the modern web is (IMHO) a result of making the web marketable and thus monetizable. What you call "marketable and thus monetizable", I (and I'm not a designer, though I do a little of my own print and web design) call "human-friendly." It's not that people don't want to read, it's that we have learned over the span of human history how to present information in a more accessible way, culminating for now--though surely not terminating--in high-signal, short forms: lectures, web content, stuff like that. I'm not saying that's an unequivocal good; as this post might show, I like to write, and I have more than occasionally been told that I like to "lecture" because I have and share thoughts that take more than a few sentences to get to their conclusion. But it's not purely for marketing, it's because this is how most people think. It's not a new thing, it's not Those Kids And Their Short Attention Spans, it's why a catchy slogan has always done better than a reasoned argument. You can speak to them in your language, and get mad that they Just Don't Understand, or you can speak to them in theirs. There's a reason the absolute best work on the NSA and spying was John Oliver asking Edward Snowden if the NSA can see pictures of his penis. That one interview did more than literally every electron perturbed by the EFF and other groups to get this into people's heads. That's more than marketing. That's human communication. And dismissing it is fashionable in nerdy circles and absolutely tragic at the same time. We need to get out of our own heads and understand other people, dammit. It's the only way we can really do good.
      - hurin 11y ago
        > We need to get out of our own heads and understand other people, dammit. It's the only way we can really do good. What you call understanding people is what I call pandering to the least common-denominator. Most of those web-pages aren't better, they are objectively less informative, and harder to access useful information on - maybe the problem isn't that plain white on black isn't exciting enough but that people are so accustomed to being served low quality content packaged with frivolous design, explosions or 10 second sound-bites. Here is a good discussion of the topic at large: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
  - sean-duffy 11y ago
    Agreed, the minimal design does have its place but I don't think the web as a whole would be any better for it. Pretty much all the webpages for the modules I study on my CS degree are of a similar kind to Stallman's, because that's all they need to be.
  - wenderen 11y ago
    I don't think any one is claiming that design is bad and designers should never have "got involved", your parent comment is saying that we've gone too far. Today, lots of websites use full-width images and videos on their landing pages, make multiple requests for all sorts of assets and use all sorts of tracking and analytics code. More and more often I find myself closing a tab in frustration because the page is taking too long to load. Blogs, e-commerce sites, this is getting quite common. I interpreted your parent comment as a call for minimalism, nothing more. > The jarring "Oh the CSS hasn't loaded" moment is precisely what he wants you to experience. But I honestly don't experience that moment. I see some text and I start reading it. You're over-thinking, IMO.
    - blowski 11y ago
      That you didn't notice the lack of CSS is precisely why you need to see this from the point of view of a non-technical person. If my mother-in-law saw this page, she would probably call me screaming that her computer had broke or she had been hacked.
      - thrownaway122 11y ago
        And yet other people's parents beg them to install 'that blocking thingy that makes the web less flashy'.
  - tedunangst 11y ago
    It's funny how anyone we don't like is a hipster. You think they're the people who like plain web pages. I think hipsters are the people who insist on using a dozen artisanal hand crafted fonts on every web page.
    - blowski 11y ago
      I see what you mean, and re-reading my comment I was wrong to use such a cliche. What I was referring to is the 'everything 20 years ago was so much better' mentality. If I were to rewrite that sentence I would talk about nostalgia and a self-centred worldview.
      - johnny22 11y ago
        that's certainly what i get out of so many comment threads on this site and similar ones. Self-centered world view hits the nail on the head.
    - Dewie3 11y ago
      "Hipsters" nowadays are people who shun trends and only want in on the "underground" stuff. "Hipsters" are also those that are all about being trendy. "Hipsters" are also those who care about the new-and-shiny, even if they don't bring anything new or useful to the table, or if it's a reinvention of some wheel. "Hipsters" are also those who indulge in retro stuff, even though they may be archaic and not useful any more...
  - pb9lrpweu 11y ago
    > RMS is a brand No, he's a person, trying to live the life he wants - just like everyone else. That he is talked about does not make him a brand. GNU is his brand. > The jarring "Oh the CSS hasn't loaded" moment is precisely what he wants you to experience. Actually, Stallman's website has been around for decades - as has the GNU project - and his sites have always been very plain. I don't think I'd describe consistent apathy for gimmick as a gimmick. > The kind of people who visit his site know how to use reading mode on their browser What's reading mode?
    - thrownaway122 11y ago
      > What's reading mode? I think that it is something invented by the people that have pushed for huge javascript monstrosity websites so that they can avoid the javascript monstrosities...
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      "Reading mode" on Safari is an integrated support for Readability (http://www.readability.org http://www.readability.org), which presents a minimally styled, highly readable, Web page. I prefer a strongly similar design for my own sites.
  - weland 11y ago
    To me -- someone reasonably tech-savvy and with questionable artistic taste -- the whole "web became a worse place when designers got involved" has a lot more to do with the entire ecosystem and a lot less to do with the design itself. I don't really miss Geocieties. I do, however: * Think it's unpardonable that web pages are about as snappy as they were ten years ago, despite including about the same amount of information, while the available speed and bandwidth have increased at least ten times, not to mention computing power. * Have to keep a full array of extensions and browser hacks in order to keep my own fucking choice of font types and especially sizes. If I wanted to see brilliant examples of typography and calligraphy, I'd have gone buy a book or visited a bloody exhibition. * Miss the days when I could move around without having my ass tracked at every corner and having to keep an array of extension and browser hacks just so that I don't get spammed with questionable, sometimes outright tracking-based scams at every step. The web can hardly be called "friendly" when the experience of browsing it without at least three or four extensions that deal with innovations in e-marketing, web design and development is so painful. Saying that the web "got worse" in the last ten years is certainly midway between "you're not sure what Netscape is, right?" and "I bet you also think Motif was fucking sweet". But a lot of people who have seen it grow (myself included) are certainly disappointed at the huge, gaping chasm between what we dreamed it would be and what it turned out.
    - darkmighty 11y ago
      It should be viewed in an evolutionary perspective. If you had an equally functional amazon website that used only basic HTML elements, which is orders of magnitude lighter (but still loads in about the same time for most users), which one do you think would succeed? Do (most) users need all the shininess? Nope. Do they (most) prefer it? Absolutely. Each product has an optimal "clutter" (in competitive terms, maybe a "Nash equilibrium"?) -- a good example is the Google homepage/search results; anything more complicated is clearly unfavorable in terms of competition, unless you offer a qualitative improvement.
    - blowski 11y ago
      The web experience is optimised for the average user, who typically prioritises features over privacy, aesthetics over performance, and ability-to-use over ability-to-customise. Your priorities may be different, but you can run your own website which does meet your priorities, and even a search engine of websites of which you 'approve'. _THAT_ is the beauty of the web.
  - meatysnapper 11y ago
    If designers understood the concept of "limited bandwidth" and "when in doubt, do less", I'd have a lot more sympathy for them.
  - 205guy 11y ago
    Odd that none of your parent comments mentioned designers, yet you felt they were being criticized. Why does looking like this (rms's website) equate to unusable? It is unfancy, unadorned, a bit unorganized, yet it is highly usable. The default unstyled look of the Internet was "designed" to be highly readable: paragraph blocks, list items, contrasting and underlined links, line separators, etc. You've already been corrected on your derogatory use of hipster and why reading mode is just a kludge. What I wanted to point out was that the "CSS hasn't loaded" moment is a symptom of a broken Internet. The layers added to the Internet fail, they fail noticeably, they fail ungracefully, and people are annoyed by the failure. It's not about designers vs. hipsters vs. raw HTML, it should really be about adding layers to the Internet in a way that isn't so broken and/or breakable. The fact that you can't zoom some websites on mobile means someone is breaking the Internet (either the page creators or the mobile browser devs). The fact that your browser can refresh a page with unsubmitted input and lose your work means someone is breaking the Internet (again, it's a conspiracy of page creators/designers and browser devs). No, the real problem is when people invent new layers and extensions that aren't robust and don't support all the functionally of the old layers, but everybody adopts them because new and shiny and they allow some new features. Since you bring up designers, I will say that all too often the designers are the ones pushing these new extensions, without enough consideration for usability and compatibility.
  - Nadya 11y ago
    >All this pseudo-hipster "the web became a worse place when designers got involved" stuff really annoys me. The web became a worse place when marketers got involved. Marketers ruin everything. [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7FVOSA9jIE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7FVOSA9jIE
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- grkvlt 11y ago
  Which of the following sites do you you prefer: 1. https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=incubator-brooklyn.git https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=incubator-brooklyn... 2. https://github.com/apache/incubator-brooklyn https://github.com/apache/incubator-brooklyn The first is nothing but HTML and text, the second is a fully functioning web front end to a DVCS with issue tracking and documentation, plus metrics and graphs, all only possible due to the 'worsening' of the web with Javascript, CSS, Flash and so on. I know I prefer GitHub, and the same is true for most modern web applications where there is a choice. And apologies for the shameless Apache Brooklyn plug ;)
  - bane 11y ago
    You'll notice though that the main documentation on github is basically just what we already had in the web 1.0 days and not much more. We had most of those other things in the web 1.0 days too. Here's a directory hierarchy that's just as navigable as github's ftp://modland.com/ in the old days, ftp sites used to even have some kind of readme that browsers would autoload and put at the top of the directory list as documentation. Graphs have been back-end generated and served in web 1.0 days as well and just inlined as <img> tags. It was basically the same, with less control of look-and-feel, but about as usable and hundreds of times quicker. Responsiveness and accessibility just sort of "happened".
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Why would you need JS, CSS or Flash to have issue tracking, documentation, metrics or graphs? An issue tracker is essentially a forum where the threads have an open/closed state attached. People have built such web applications before JS even existed. Documentation is even simpler, just a bunch of HTML documents, maybe with an HTML form to edit them. As for graphs, there are many here, and they work fine without JS or CSS: http://hydra.it.teithe.gr/munin/aetos/aetos/index.html http://hydra.it.teithe.gr/munin/aetos/aetos/index.html -- The problem with your first link is not the lack of CSS, it's that the information listed is less relevant than what Github shows. But instead of comparing with that, try disabling the CSS in the GH page. Ignoring the header section, I think the file list and README look just fine, and I wouldn't be bothered at all to use it as such.
  - 11y ago
- lazyjones 11y ago
  Most web pages "guilty" of this are owned and operated by corporations and they're doing it for a reason: visitors apparently trust websites more if they look professionally styled, so they prefer those over simpler looking competitors at first sight. Market pressure forces websites to polish their UI so it becomes attractive, usability is only an optimization (if you don't have a significant number of users due to the website's initial impression, it's not as important to optimize for maximum profit). Some early movers got away with crappy visual aesthetics for a long time (like my former company), but today an 'RMS-style' (or old craigslist style) website would not stand a chance upon entering a competitive market. This works a bit like we judge other humans, perhaps: based on appearance, before they even open their mouths (and maybe that's the reason why we have better haircuts now but whether we are better characters than a few generations ago, is debatable).
  - shanemhansen 11y ago
    People might choose websites with a "more polished UI", but better converting isn't always better for consumers. Most websites are like junk food: clearly optmized for getting users to "convert", but lacking in any real substance.
pi-squared 11y ago
http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
- nfoz 11y ago
  This site uses javascript and an advertising company to track you.
  - nunull 11y ago
    From the source: > yes, I know...wanna fight about it?
  - ljk 11y ago
    how did you discover that? on ghostery it doesn't say anything
    - lazyjones 11y ago
      ublock shows it clearly. Ghostery seems to whitelist GA these days?
    - wenderen 11y ago
      It does for me. Maybe it's a default setting for you? Anyway, uBlock does show it.
      - ljk 11y ago
        hmmm ublock for me (on opera) doesn't block the frame where the ad is so I see an area on the page with "cannot be displayed" so for me it looked like adblock plus is still the better option; is there one area where ublock better than adblock?
    - ilurk 11y ago
      IIRC ghostery tracks you. I use NoScript and RequestPolicy (for the moment incompatible with latest version of FF).
lucianmarin 11y ago
http://lucianmarin.com/archive/sublevel.html http://lucianmarin.com/archive/sublevel.html
mkramlich 11y ago
which is how the web worked originally, how it was intended to be. in some ways the ecosystem has gotten better than the 90's, in others its been getting worse. too many sites are getting too cluttered, too slow, with too many moving parts and unnecessary optional tangential things forced into your face at the expense of the main dish. Text, images, forms and links -- you can move mountains with those alone. We should bias to them wherever we can, keep things as simple as we can.
crististm 11y ago
See cr.yp.to for a similar experience.
alansmitheebk 11y ago
1. Why do you have a 512 kbps connection, do you live in the North Pole? 2. You should read a newspaper, they load even faster!

bane 11y ago

It's amazing how much work we've put into making the web a worse place.

blowski 11y ago
All this pseudo-hipster "the web became a worse place when designers got involved" stuff really annoys me. Seriously, if all the web looked like this it would be more complicated to use for 99.9% of the world, so it would have remained a niche, so its overall usefulness would have remained limited. Instead, talented hard-working people put lots of effort into making the web look a much more friendly place. This has made the web a much more inclusive place, and thus, much more of the world has started to use it. RMS is a brand, and this 'zero design' is part of his brand. You already know who RMS is before you visit his site, and if you don't, you probably aren't part of his 'target market'. The jarring "Oh the CSS hasn't loaded" moment is precisely what he wants you to experience. The kind of people who visit his site know how to use reading mode on their browser, are comfortable adjusting the line width in whatever client they are using, so it doesn't matter. It doesn't mean that the rest of the web would be a in a better place if it had remained looking like this. It would have remained an obscure corner of the world where a group of geeks met, and so many of the benefits of the internet would never have transpired.
- bane 11y ago
  The design work we see in the modern web is (IMHO) a result of making the web marketable and thus monetizable. You have a point that is would have remained an obscure geek meeting ground, but the reasons for the modern web aren't to make it easier to use, it's to make it not feel so much like reading. Logos and colors, design and layout are designed to make the web appealing and inviting to some group. Black text on white feels too much like a book and an amazingly large segment of society is put off from that. Yet his page is fast, responsive, standards compliant, easy to navigate, accessible (screen readers have no problems with it). I don't have to addblock it, turn on readability, or any other nonsense to focus on the content. We've succeeded in simply trying to reinvent what we already have.
  - blowski 11y ago
    I agree with what you're saying, to a point. If it hadn't become monetisable, then services like Youtube and Netflix etc, would never have taken off. I wouldn't have been able to convince family to use email. I would still need to stand in a queue on my lunchbreak to transfer money from my savings account to my current account. Instead, the web evolved, some people took advantage of that for their own ends, and we've ended up with a system which is better for most people, though a long way from being perfect for each individual group.
  - eropple 11y ago
    > The design work we see in the modern web is (IMHO) a result of making the web marketable and thus monetizable. What you call "marketable and thus monetizable", I (and I'm not a designer, though I do a little of my own print and web design) call "human-friendly." It's not that people don't want to read, it's that we have learned over the span of human history how to present information in a more accessible way, culminating for now--though surely not terminating--in high-signal, short forms: lectures, web content, stuff like that. I'm not saying that's an unequivocal good; as this post might show, I like to write, and I have more than occasionally been told that I like to "lecture" because I have and share thoughts that take more than a few sentences to get to their conclusion. But it's not purely for marketing, it's because this is how most people think. It's not a new thing, it's not Those Kids And Their Short Attention Spans, it's why a catchy slogan has always done better than a reasoned argument. You can speak to them in your language, and get mad that they Just Don't Understand, or you can speak to them in theirs. There's a reason the absolute best work on the NSA and spying was John Oliver asking Edward Snowden if the NSA can see pictures of his penis. That one interview did more than literally every electron perturbed by the EFF and other groups to get this into people's heads. That's more than marketing. That's human communication. And dismissing it is fashionable in nerdy circles and absolutely tragic at the same time. We need to get out of our own heads and understand other people, dammit. It's the only way we can really do good.
    - hurin 11y ago
      > We need to get out of our own heads and understand other people, dammit. It's the only way we can really do good. What you call understanding people is what I call pandering to the least common-denominator. Most of those web-pages aren't better, they are objectively less informative, and harder to access useful information on - maybe the problem isn't that plain white on black isn't exciting enough but that people are so accustomed to being served low quality content packaged with frivolous design, explosions or 10 second sound-bites. Here is a good discussion of the topic at large: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
- sean-duffy 11y ago
  Agreed, the minimal design does have its place but I don't think the web as a whole would be any better for it. Pretty much all the webpages for the modules I study on my CS degree are of a similar kind to Stallman's, because that's all they need to be.
- wenderen 11y ago
  I don't think any one is claiming that design is bad and designers should never have "got involved", your parent comment is saying that we've gone too far. Today, lots of websites use full-width images and videos on their landing pages, make multiple requests for all sorts of assets and use all sorts of tracking and analytics code. More and more often I find myself closing a tab in frustration because the page is taking too long to load. Blogs, e-commerce sites, this is getting quite common. I interpreted your parent comment as a call for minimalism, nothing more. > The jarring "Oh the CSS hasn't loaded" moment is precisely what he wants you to experience. But I honestly don't experience that moment. I see some text and I start reading it. You're over-thinking, IMO.
  - blowski 11y ago
    That you didn't notice the lack of CSS is precisely why you need to see this from the point of view of a non-technical person. If my mother-in-law saw this page, she would probably call me screaming that her computer had broke or she had been hacked.
    - thrownaway122 11y ago
      And yet other people's parents beg them to install 'that blocking thingy that makes the web less flashy'.
- tedunangst 11y ago
  It's funny how anyone we don't like is a hipster. You think they're the people who like plain web pages. I think hipsters are the people who insist on using a dozen artisanal hand crafted fonts on every web page.
  - blowski 11y ago
    I see what you mean, and re-reading my comment I was wrong to use such a cliche. What I was referring to is the 'everything 20 years ago was so much better' mentality. If I were to rewrite that sentence I would talk about nostalgia and a self-centred worldview.
    - johnny22 11y ago
      that's certainly what i get out of so many comment threads on this site and similar ones. Self-centered world view hits the nail on the head.
  - Dewie3 11y ago
    "Hipsters" nowadays are people who shun trends and only want in on the "underground" stuff. "Hipsters" are also those that are all about being trendy. "Hipsters" are also those who care about the new-and-shiny, even if they don't bring anything new or useful to the table, or if it's a reinvention of some wheel. "Hipsters" are also those who indulge in retro stuff, even though they may be archaic and not useful any more...
- pb9lrpweu 11y ago
  > RMS is a brand No, he's a person, trying to live the life he wants - just like everyone else. That he is talked about does not make him a brand. GNU is his brand. > The jarring "Oh the CSS hasn't loaded" moment is precisely what he wants you to experience. Actually, Stallman's website has been around for decades - as has the GNU project - and his sites have always been very plain. I don't think I'd describe consistent apathy for gimmick as a gimmick. > The kind of people who visit his site know how to use reading mode on their browser What's reading mode?
  - thrownaway122 11y ago
    > What's reading mode? I think that it is something invented by the people that have pushed for huge javascript monstrosity websites so that they can avoid the javascript monstrosities...
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    "Reading mode" on Safari is an integrated support for Readability (http://www.readability.org http://www.readability.org), which presents a minimally styled, highly readable, Web page. I prefer a strongly similar design for my own sites.
- weland 11y ago
  To me -- someone reasonably tech-savvy and with questionable artistic taste -- the whole "web became a worse place when designers got involved" has a lot more to do with the entire ecosystem and a lot less to do with the design itself. I don't really miss Geocieties. I do, however: * Think it's unpardonable that web pages are about as snappy as they were ten years ago, despite including about the same amount of information, while the available speed and bandwidth have increased at least ten times, not to mention computing power. * Have to keep a full array of extensions and browser hacks in order to keep my own fucking choice of font types and especially sizes. If I wanted to see brilliant examples of typography and calligraphy, I'd have gone buy a book or visited a bloody exhibition. * Miss the days when I could move around without having my ass tracked at every corner and having to keep an array of extension and browser hacks just so that I don't get spammed with questionable, sometimes outright tracking-based scams at every step. The web can hardly be called "friendly" when the experience of browsing it without at least three or four extensions that deal with innovations in e-marketing, web design and development is so painful. Saying that the web "got worse" in the last ten years is certainly midway between "you're not sure what Netscape is, right?" and "I bet you also think Motif was fucking sweet". But a lot of people who have seen it grow (myself included) are certainly disappointed at the huge, gaping chasm between what we dreamed it would be and what it turned out.
  - darkmighty 11y ago
    It should be viewed in an evolutionary perspective. If you had an equally functional amazon website that used only basic HTML elements, which is orders of magnitude lighter (but still loads in about the same time for most users), which one do you think would succeed? Do (most) users need all the shininess? Nope. Do they (most) prefer it? Absolutely. Each product has an optimal "clutter" (in competitive terms, maybe a "Nash equilibrium"?) -- a good example is the Google homepage/search results; anything more complicated is clearly unfavorable in terms of competition, unless you offer a qualitative improvement.
  - blowski 11y ago
    The web experience is optimised for the average user, who typically prioritises features over privacy, aesthetics over performance, and ability-to-use over ability-to-customise. Your priorities may be different, but you can run your own website which does meet your priorities, and even a search engine of websites of which you 'approve'. _THAT_ is the beauty of the web.
- meatysnapper 11y ago
  If designers understood the concept of "limited bandwidth" and "when in doubt, do less", I'd have a lot more sympathy for them.
- 205guy 11y ago
  Odd that none of your parent comments mentioned designers, yet you felt they were being criticized. Why does looking like this (rms's website) equate to unusable? It is unfancy, unadorned, a bit unorganized, yet it is highly usable. The default unstyled look of the Internet was "designed" to be highly readable: paragraph blocks, list items, contrasting and underlined links, line separators, etc. You've already been corrected on your derogatory use of hipster and why reading mode is just a kludge. What I wanted to point out was that the "CSS hasn't loaded" moment is a symptom of a broken Internet. The layers added to the Internet fail, they fail noticeably, they fail ungracefully, and people are annoyed by the failure. It's not about designers vs. hipsters vs. raw HTML, it should really be about adding layers to the Internet in a way that isn't so broken and/or breakable. The fact that you can't zoom some websites on mobile means someone is breaking the Internet (either the page creators or the mobile browser devs). The fact that your browser can refresh a page with unsubmitted input and lose your work means someone is breaking the Internet (again, it's a conspiracy of page creators/designers and browser devs). No, the real problem is when people invent new layers and extensions that aren't robust and don't support all the functionally of the old layers, but everybody adopts them because new and shiny and they allow some new features. Since you bring up designers, I will say that all too often the designers are the ones pushing these new extensions, without enough consideration for usability and compatibility.
- Nadya 11y ago
  >All this pseudo-hipster "the web became a worse place when designers got involved" stuff really annoys me. The web became a worse place when marketers got involved. Marketers ruin everything. [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7FVOSA9jIE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7FVOSA9jIE
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
grkvlt 11y ago
Which of the following sites do you you prefer: 1. https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=incubator-brooklyn.git https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=incubator-brooklyn... 2. https://github.com/apache/incubator-brooklyn https://github.com/apache/incubator-brooklyn The first is nothing but HTML and text, the second is a fully functioning web front end to a DVCS with issue tracking and documentation, plus metrics and graphs, all only possible due to the 'worsening' of the web with Javascript, CSS, Flash and so on. I know I prefer GitHub, and the same is true for most modern web applications where there is a choice. And apologies for the shameless Apache Brooklyn plug ;)
- bane 11y ago
  You'll notice though that the main documentation on github is basically just what we already had in the web 1.0 days and not much more. We had most of those other things in the web 1.0 days too. Here's a directory hierarchy that's just as navigable as github's ftp://modland.com/ in the old days, ftp sites used to even have some kind of readme that browsers would autoload and put at the top of the directory list as documentation. Graphs have been back-end generated and served in web 1.0 days as well and just inlined as <img> tags. It was basically the same, with less control of look-and-feel, but about as usable and hundreds of times quicker. Responsiveness and accessibility just sort of "happened".
- icebraining 11y ago
  Why would you need JS, CSS or Flash to have issue tracking, documentation, metrics or graphs? An issue tracker is essentially a forum where the threads have an open/closed state attached. People have built such web applications before JS even existed. Documentation is even simpler, just a bunch of HTML documents, maybe with an HTML form to edit them. As for graphs, there are many here, and they work fine without JS or CSS: http://hydra.it.teithe.gr/munin/aetos/aetos/index.html http://hydra.it.teithe.gr/munin/aetos/aetos/index.html -- The problem with your first link is not the lack of CSS, it's that the information listed is less relevant than what Github shows. But instead of comparing with that, try disabling the CSS in the GH page. Ignoring the header section, I think the file list and README look just fine, and I wouldn't be bothered at all to use it as such.
- 11y ago
lazyjones 11y ago
Most web pages "guilty" of this are owned and operated by corporations and they're doing it for a reason: visitors apparently trust websites more if they look professionally styled, so they prefer those over simpler looking competitors at first sight. Market pressure forces websites to polish their UI so it becomes attractive, usability is only an optimization (if you don't have a significant number of users due to the website's initial impression, it's not as important to optimize for maximum profit). Some early movers got away with crappy visual aesthetics for a long time (like my former company), but today an 'RMS-style' (or old craigslist style) website would not stand a chance upon entering a competitive market. This works a bit like we judge other humans, perhaps: based on appearance, before they even open their mouths (and maybe that's the reason why we have better haircuts now but whether we are better characters than a few generations ago, is debatable).
- shanemhansen 11y ago
  People might choose websites with a "more polished UI", but better converting isn't always better for consumers. Most websites are like junk food: clearly optmized for getting users to "convert", but lacking in any real substance.

pi-squared 11y ago

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

nfoz 11y ago
This site uses javascript and an advertising company to track you.
- nunull 11y ago
  From the source: > yes, I know...wanna fight about it?
- ljk 11y ago
  how did you discover that? on ghostery it doesn't say anything
  - lazyjones 11y ago
    ublock shows it clearly. Ghostery seems to whitelist GA these days?
  - wenderen 11y ago
    It does for me. Maybe it's a default setting for you? Anyway, uBlock does show it.
    - ljk 11y ago
      hmmm ublock for me (on opera) doesn't block the frame where the ad is so I see an area on the page with "cannot be displayed" so for me it looked like adblock plus is still the better option; is there one area where ublock better than adblock?
  - ilurk 11y ago
    IIRC ghostery tracks you. I use NoScript and RequestPolicy (for the moment incompatible with latest version of FF).

lucianmarin 11y ago

http://lucianmarin.com/archive/sublevel.html http://lucianmarin.com/archive/sublevel.html

mkramlich 11y ago

which is how the web worked originally, how it was intended to be. in some ways the ecosystem has gotten better than the 90's, in others its been getting worse. too many sites are getting too cluttered, too slow, with too many moving parts and unnecessary optional tangential things forced into your face at the expense of the main dish. Text, images, forms and links -- you can move mountains with those alone. We should bias to them wherever we can, keep things as simple as we can.

crististm 11y ago

See cr.yp.to for a similar experience.

alansmitheebk 11y ago

1. Why do you have a 512 kbps connection, do you live in the North Pole? 2. You should read a newspaper, they load even faster!