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Comment by jxy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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