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Comment by adamzerner | Hacker News Reader

Not to complain, but I find it surprising that the web pages for such prominent academics/people are often so ugly. Why not pay some web designer to spruce it up? Or maybe have the department/school use a nice template? Seems worth it to me.

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This already is a nice template. Plain text that responds well to zooming by the user; default colors that are easy to read and make links obvious; a few important images that are large enough to see, but don't take up half the screen like some sites' banners. If you prefer white-on-black text and have a user stylesheet for it (which I do), the site responds well to that too, without any nested <div>s or background-image:s complicating things (unlike some). I don't think that HTML5 web fonts or a whitespace-heavy designer template would aid in conveying any of the brief and well-organized information on the page.

(The only thing I would add to either of those is this bit of CSS: body{max-width:900px;margin:0 auto;} to make it easier to read on wide screens.)

Similarly Oleg Kiselyov repository of wonders:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080303222623/http://okmij.org/f...

He added a ~sidebar~ since, now it's all ugly. /s

I think it's great because it exemplifies the spirit of the Web, like back in the Geocities days. He probably wrote the site himself and really has nothing to sell or market. His name, the domain, his work, and his CV are all that's necessary.

It's all about the text.

That's a fair point.

http://justinjackson.ca/words.html is one of my favorite articles.

I was suprised too, but glad he didn't see the need for the latest bootstrap template. It's just his hompage. I imagine he will be surprised so many people are now looking it right now.

I hope he keeps it the same. A few years ago I was asked to put up website exactly like The Drudge Report. I was suprised it was just html. I don't even think they bothered with CSS? It must have changed?

Super super common for professor sites, particularly at CSAIL. They value the functional aspect more I suppose.

<BLINK>Agreed!!!</BLINK> Marvin Minsky should spruce up his home page with AIML [1] (Artificial Intelligence Marketing Language).

[1] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/aiml.html

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