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Comment by plugnburn | Hacker News Reader

When I opened the page, I honestly thought CSS failed to load. But then I looked at the first line of the page source:

  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

I think they really shouldn't tell us what is now an acceptable scripting language if they still consider that design and that doctype acceptable in 2016.

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I don't see anything wrong with that. Just because it doesn't use the fanciest and newest version of bootstrap, doesn't mean the site is bad. Sure it uses an old version of HTML but what the heck? It can read it just fine and safari's reader works perfectly – much better then most of the sites that use modern CSS. I'd rather have a site that loads quickly then a site that loads tons of MBs for scripts, big images and fonts (and thus eats up all my mobile bandwidth) just to see a site that breaks safari's reader, and disables zoom so I can barely read it. I'm not saying that all of those fancies sites are like that but a lot are. Especially when they're made by backend engineers who don't know much about UX design. I'd rather get a well made HTML 4 site then a badly made HTML 5 site.

Looks like it was created with an older version of Scribble: http://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/

I'm not sure why that would call the contents into question.

This is sickening-grade bikeshedding. Next time, spare us, and say it to your rubber duck instead.

I hope he doesn't look at HN HTML code.

Looked. So what? There's a difference between "ugly" and "invalid". Both cases are bad but the first one has much more impact on end users.

Edit to answer "how is it invalid": is this not enough? http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombina...

This is HN webpage, I meant the article page doctype.

taken from w3c:

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
	       "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

article doctype:

    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
		"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

How is it invalid ?

deleted b/c brigading

Having an insight into one area of computing doesn't make you an expert in all areas of computing.

It certainly makes some people think they do though.

They can't separate the content from the medium.

deleted b/c brigading

Consider if I was an expert in databases. Why would the appearance of a site dedicated to databases matter? It'd be completely unrelated to the topic I'd be sharing information on, and time I could spend improving the site could be time I spend improving my knowledge even further.

As for this Lisp scripting site, for all I care the author could've shared the information via a Pastebin site and I would've got the same value out of it.

And this happens regularly! I know of experts in programming languages[0], compression[1], graphics[2, 3], and computational geometry[3] who all have sites that both have excellent content, and look fairly awful.

[0]: http://piumarta.com/index.html

[1]: http://cbloom.com/

[2]: http://iquilezles.org/ (okay, this one doesn't look that bad in retrospect)

[3]: http://paulbourke.net/

[0] and [3] look great, unless you are opposed to simplicity. They kind of follow "brutalism" in a web architecture.

Except that most pastebins would at least make the text more readable than it is there. Especially on mobiles.

Markdown with Strapdown inclusion, a pastebin, a CMS, bare Bootstrap... anything would be more readable than this.

I feel as though this is at least somewhat relevant: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

Then surely, so is this http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

They made it washed out with poor contrast and made the lines annoyingly short. Seems like the first site is more readable to me.

Everything we know from centuries of design experience and all science knows about the eyes and how we read, tells us they made it better than the first site.

There's not even a parallel universe where the first one is better -- and it's not a subjective issue either.

What papers say that low contrast is better than high contrast black on white? There is research to show that black on white is better than white on black, but I doubt there's any to show that poor contrast dark grey on light grey is better than black on white.

It is just a fashion, there's no science to say that low contrast is better. http://contrastrebellion.com/

Shorter lines I might grant you, though.

>What papers say that low contrast is better than high contrast black on white?

Not about low contrast being better -- only about (slightly) reduced contrast than full on white on black blaze.

Black on white is better for readability, but the brightness can induce fatigue for longer term use (and people use computers all day long) and also hurt knowledge retention (according to educational related research).

A slightly off-white is better there than shining a white backlight on your eyes for hours on end (and adjusting monitor brightness achieves the same effect, color-wise as having a "less white" background in the first place, and is recommended by doctors).

Note that the website you linked doesn't have any sharp black on white.

I am not sure if this is a case of what this website calls "composition/division" or "genetic":

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/composition-division

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