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Comment by Trufa | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if I understand the categorization of it all, is it non modern web design, or no fluff?

Because you can't compare some to others:

https://context.co.de/ pretty nice, reminds you of man, nice and simple, one could even call it minimalist or whatever...

http://ethanbond.com/ not a bad idea for a simple resume page. it's clean cut.

http://drudgereport.com/ I will never go through that.

http://trendlist.org/ just looks like css is not loading.

http://laurelschwulst.com/ I want to tear my eyes out.

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http://drudgereport.com/ reminds me of http://stallman.org/

Its interesting to me that many of the people who are in the "who's who" of our space have a very bare-bones web presence.

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dfried/

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/

http://javascript.crockford.com/

It seems to me that web design trends tend to change faster than most people's patience for maintaining their personal site, so it makes sense that anyone with a sufficient amount of work to do who is not a web designer would choose a very simple "just get the info out there" design. Specifically these guys you posted have been in computing forever and are very, very busy.

Personally I can't justify more than updating bootstrap every six months or so. I'd rather spend that time on open source or with my family.

Those aren't the who's who of visual design though.

I particularly enjoy how going to http://javascript.crockford.com/ doesn't load any javascript.

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

Funny thing about Stallman's site is that I can't click "Fiction". Due to the italics change it moves around and disappears from under my cursor. You associate simple sites with usability, but in this case it's just as perilous as any other.

Tried this in 4 browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE, Opera) and couldn't reproduce - the text does move a little if you hover which makes for a somewhat amusing shifting effect as you slide the cursor around in the box, but at no point does it move so far it "disappears from under my cursor", and I can still click the link.

I know the behaviour you're referring to as I've seen it before on other sites, but not this one.

I think it depends on the window's width. There's a sweet spot, right when "Non-Political Articles" (but not the | accompanying it) is aligned to the edge of the container box, where I can reproduce in Firefox the jumping behavior described by the GP.

You're right, but that hover is the one "designed" part of the page.

Indeed it's more like "it does not fit in the typical buckets so let me create a catch-all exception called brutalism".

http://craigslist.com/ is pretty straight up

The first two in your list are quite good. The rest is really just eccentric and unusable.

The Drudge report is used by several million people every day. It happens to be one of a handful of sites on the Internet my mother in law can actually parse and use reliably.

I aspire to make something as unusable as the Drudge Report someday.

Everything is right in front of you. Nothing hidden behind obscure icons, or lurking out of view waiting for a scroll or mouseover event. I have something very much like it as my browser home page -- a simple local HTML file, no CSS, with links to stuff I commonly use.

As a designer I think the design is really bad. It may work pretty well from a functional point of view, but the readability could be improved dramatically with just a few typographical adjustments. If you gave this page to a designer and said, change nothing but the font, font size, colour, padding, and margins you could keep the functionally the same but it make much more comfortable on the eyes and easier to decipher.

There's no reason browsers should have trouble rendering an unstyled page in a readable way. It's a pity they stopped working on it on the (unfortunately correct) assumption that most pages are written by control freaks who put huge efforts into one or two idiosyncratic visual presentations.

As much as I would like to see browsers having nicer default styles (and all browsers ignoring website CSS), it will never happen because too many websites will break as a result since many of them implicitly rely on certain defaults like black text on a white background, link colours and other stuff.

I feel like browsers could improve their defaults without breaking that: make the background slightly off-white, text slightly off-black, add some small margins at the edges. Or even just import the Bootstrap 2 stylesheet as a default.

Been there. In Konqueror (oh the olden days), the default colors came from the system color scheme. When I was using an inverted color scheme (White on Black), some websites were unreadable because they set the text color to something dark, but left the background color at the default (which was implied to be something light, but was actually dark blue for me).

Do note that Drudge Report is far from an unstyled page. I'd say the styling it does have is far worse than the default browser styling in terms of readability.

Firefox's "reader mode" works really well on most websites. I kind of wish it were possible to have it on by default.

> If you gave this page to a designer and said, change nothing but the font, font size, colour, padding, and margins you could keep the functionally the same but it make much more comfortable on the eyes and easier to decipher.

I guarantee you they would piss off more people than they would please, but nevertheless feel quite self-satisfied.

They'd piss off a vocal minority opposed to any change, while the vast majority would never consciously notice the improvement to their reading experience.

I noted below that it has an Alexa rank of 130. Pretty good for an "unusable" site. :-)

It still looks like something a college student in 1997 would have made as a deliberate parody of bad websites. Literally all the text on the front page is monospace and underlined. Why?

Virtually all of the text is underlined because virtually everything on that page is a link.

It dates from a time before it was considered "good design" and "usability" to hide the links from the readers.

If everything's a link, then you hardly need special notation to call out the links from the non-links. It's not a conscious effort to make links more identifiable; it just didn't occur to the creator that you can do something with links other than underline them.

That's what I was thinking. Not all the websites look "brutalist" to me, some are okay. But some websites are really brutal and a pain to look at, like this one: http://kioskkiosk.com/ This one is a joke.

Brutalism is not supposed to be painful or unpleasant, just brutally honest. Brutalist buildings look like giant blocks of raw concrete (béton brut), because that's exactly what they are and no effort is wasted on hiding that fact.

drudgereport.com seems hypocritical to me because they don't have many images for their own news stories, but make room for images that advertise other products. Advisments are counter-brutalism because they're very much frivolous and attention grabbing.

You can think of the ads as being like the exposed ducts and conduits of brutalist buildings. They power the site.

Architectural historian here. Exposed services (ducts etc.) are a characteristic of High Tech architecture, not brutalism.

Many non-specialists think brutalism is more broadly applicable term than it actually is...

Thanks for the clarification! My favorite example in this style is the Digital Computer Lab at the University of Illinois. Until now, I didn't have a word for it.

http://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/virtualtour/engineer...

I really enjoyed the aesthetic effect of the exposed pipes and wire conduits.

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