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Comment by raintrees | Hacker News Reader

A humorous observation: Ever look at an HTML page created by Microsoft Word? Quite a bit of code goes into what should have been a simple HTML document.

Now try viewing source of Mr. Gates' web page here: 6873 lines, the HTML <p> content starts at 5816 and goes for 9 lines to describe the 4 books plus the bonus, for a whopping total of 9 lines of content, 6864 lines of behavior and presentation... Wow.

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Furthermore, with uBlock Origin on Chrome the doesn't show any text / paragraph. I see the header image followed by an endless sea of whitespace.

works fine with Firefox+uBlock Origin

On my Firefox+uBlock Origin I see also a photo and endless sea of whitespace

If you were ever wondering why Google started AMP, this is it. 5k+ LOC of inlined Javascript, 2.6MB of data and a 13 second load time.

You could just not write the code in the first place.

Bill Gates writes very well in English. It's evidence that he wrote excellent software decades ago. It's interesting that writing software seems to make more money than dealing with English documents as ordinary office workers. However, as one moves up and becomes a successful businessman, he reads and writes in English primarily, and makes much more money than those who write software.

His forte is not really writing software but surrounding himself with good people like Paul Allen who was a way better programmer. Gates is a great businessman who had an eye for the future and could broker a great deal. This is covered in most of the biographic material over the years.

Other humorous observation. Due to the js loading, Bing seems to have trouble caching the content.

Indeed. Almost as many characters as in the google.com page source.

For all that, it loads really fast and looks nice.

It takes GIGA-hertz machines to achieve that. On highly parallelized architectures. Often with SSD storage. When I started on the Internet I had a 33 MHz 32 bit CPU, just for comparison, and I used a word processor on 8 bit and with WYSIWYG and a modern GUI on 16 bit. So you telling me "it loads really fast and looks nice" leaves me unsure about my feelings, considering a wider context. It's just some (passive) graphics and text!

When you started websites also looked like shit. So..

So what? It still is just text and graphics! The fact that it "looked like shit" was far more attributable to the absence of designers and professionals at the time, and of professionally designed templates.

HTML tables for layout sucked - but you could get graphics and text on the page, nothing more is on that page we are talking about here.

Do you think to get better graphics and better layout options for static HTML pages we needed to first get Gigahertz Intel i5 CPUs, combined with Gigabytes of RAM and capable graphics GPUs?

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