Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I frequently get harangued for having "outdated" web designs, but I like them, they are simple and load fast, such as:

http://www.digitalmars.com/articles/index.html

Your websites are amongst the best. They load fast, contain the information you want, and you don't have to scroll through megabytes of random junk looking for something useful. The d forums are amongst the fastest and most useable websites I've seen in a long time.

Thanks!

I hate the modern design where there is one large picture at the top, and you scroll down to read the article. At some point, when scrolling down while reading, the article will randomly jump down a page or two, and I have to scroll back and find the place I was at.

I presume there is a purpose to this random jump, as I see it on site after site, but I cannot divine what it might be.

One of the reasons I like hackernews is its complete lack of artifice and trendy design.

My presentation slides also tend to be simple black on white text, using the default font, with zero decoration, borders, or any sort of design. The upside is even the back row has no trouble reading them :-)

I feel the same way. It seems to be compulsory to make you scroll through a huge image for no reason these days, and when you do get to some text you have about one paragraph before you have to scroll to the next huge block, usually with some coloured background.

I don't know what they are thinking...

Maybe it's supposed to be "cool" like buying new jeans that are already ripped. My JCPenney jeans look like Abercrombie&Fitch jeans after a few months all by themselves.

They are thinking "most people are too lazy to read, so we need to hold their attention with more images". Unfortunately, they are not thinking to have a button "I want to read, make your images get lost", which would cater for smaller but still considerable part of population.

Honestly, the new DLang forum design is probably one of the best looking online forums out there. Also IIRC the backend was written in D from scratch; certainly gives the language lot of credit given its speed

I read they were written in D too, is that true. Makes me want to give D another look. I used it a bit but various issues made me drift away from it.

I'd love to take the credit for the forum software, but it belongs to Vladimir Panteleev. I had ranted on the D newsgroups now and then everything I hated about modern forum software (in response to the perennial question "why use NNTP when there's all these great forum software packages?"), and Vladimir took it to heart and created the D forum software!

Probably the only case where my incessant whining actually paid off.

I did write a formatter for the newsgroup postings to turn them into web pages, but it is read only, and doesn't look as good as Vladimir's:

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/index.ht...

This site does loads fast but it does not have much content either. Plus, the list of articles in the side bar seems to be exactly the same as in the content right next to it, so the useful content is even less ;)

Plus the fact that it only seems exactly the same is wasting reader's time to check it.

On the positive side, the site authors did actually make the most important design decision -- to increase space between lines. On the less positive side, they did not do it for the title, which might be due to only checking how it look on the main page but not here: http://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b92.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com