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Comment by mgiannopoulos | Hacker News Reader

A lovely example of super-fast-loading 1995 webpage. Pure content. No garbage. We should find a way to get back to that.

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B-b-but think of how much bandwidth could be saved if the whole thing were a webapp! We could replace the images with low-res copies which are always downloaded, and only download the full-res copies when they are viewed. Of course, that requires JavaScript, but every browser that counts (/me glares at eww, links, lynx, elinks et al.) supports it. And never mind about the fact that downloading low-res images and high-res images is more downloading than just high-res images to begin with.

Really, this could best be written as a single-page app. We'll have to rewrite it every six months, of course, in order to comply with current best practices and trends.

It's kinda embarrassing to see someone using static HTML for static text. Think how much better this would be with spinners, animation and ads!

This site is perfect. It allows my browser to convert it into "reading mode", so I can simple read the content with my preferred size, colors, font, etc.

I want to move to more content focused simple sites like this with my own content.

My own website has gone from being a WordPress site, to a custom CMS, and now finally to a static site with zero JavaScript and minimal CSS.

You have to be the change you want to see in the world.

It would just need a bit of CSS to make it look modern without making it slower.

Why does it need to look "modern?" If it's not broken, why try fixing it?

At very least there are some modernizations you could do for text legibility. Screens are bigger now, and today lines of text that run the entire width of the page are unnecessarily difficult to read. Similarly, with more screen real-estate you could pump up that font-size and line spacing a bit.

I'm having none of these problems, it's more legible than all of the "modernized" websites I've seen. Reasonable serif font, pure black text, pure white background. More legible than any posts on here, with the choice of gray text for certain things.

Here's why I feel the lines should be shorter:

https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

And the font bigger:

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/16-pixels-body-copy...

Now for smashing magazine to change their font colors to #000, for legibility's sake.

The line length is the main problem i would say.

Consumer perception, mainly. It depends on the target audience of the page. Modern consumers have come to correlate certain appearances with quality. It's not an awesome cultural development, but you're not likely to gain much traction by fighting against that momentum unless you already have an oversized influence on that readership's expectations.

It needs a max-width somewhere. This website was not designed for 25' screens.

I've just tweaked the page with:

    body {
	    width: auto;
	    margin: 2em auto;
	    max-width: 40em;
	    font-size: large;
	    line-height: 1.4;
	    background-color: #fffff8;
    }

    * {
	    line-height: 1.4;
    }

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