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Comment by madspindel | Hacker News Reader

Why does the page look like a joke?

To filter out people who would judge a book by its cover.

Also, this is an ancient web site, built back before everyone had to have glitzy junk. So it has a little whimsy. Did you notice how fast it loaded?

I noticed that it used <a> for fragment anchors instead of the id attribute. I changed over most of those on my WWW site some years ago.

Well, I just learned that the id attribute is what one should use for fragment anchors. All the HTML source code I've read (probably within the last year or so) used <a>. :/

Perhaps the moral here is that "newer" code was so obfuscated (minified; framework-infested) that I wasn't able to read it, so I only ever ended up looking at very dated HTML to fish examples out of. (Figuring out how to phrase something to Google can sometimes be slower and/or harder than simply looking in existing source code where you know you'll find something...)

FWIW, I started tinkering with HTML circa 2003 and have slowly (not especially concertedly) studied it over the years, which is my excuse^Hdefense. HTML5/CSS3 aren't especially intimidating to me (thanks to browser compatibility :D) and I could probably photocopy 60-80% of the designs I see here given significant time (this likely describes a lot of people here), but I don't really actively develop for the Web, so little oversights like this happen. Goes and reads how to include a CSS file again

I'm a bit ashamed to admit that you just taught me that anchor links work with id attributes. I just always used <a name> tags... which I rarely used, but still. I guess my excuse is that I started with HTML around 1996 :)

I guess it's a good thing that I don't do much frontend coding anymore!

Important clarification: it was JdeBP's comment that taught _me_ that one uses id attrs for anchors! That was the point I was making in my previous comment.

I think I followed a similar path to what you did, albeit 7 years later. IMO frontend dev is fine, given the time that seems to be required in order to stumble on these "things we didn't know we needed to know", whether by concerted tuition/learning or simple wandering.

Nice to see simple fast sites!

A sort of a filter, getting rid of the viewers who are only interested in the currently popular visual gimmicks instead of the actual content.

The animation led to me leaving the site without taking the time to look at the actual content.

The animation says "I hate Animations!".

I guess the filter worked then

If the filter is to keep out readers annoyed by animations, then yes, I suppose it worked perfectly!

Perhaps you'd be more comfortable if it loaded a few megs of JavaScript.

I guess working with x86 at the microarchitecture level requires a certain amount of humour.

If you were to ignore the man in the plane, all the content is presented very clearly and directly.

It really isn't. There's the weird link thing and the random space at the right you can scroll of the page.

Still clearer and easier to navigate than 95% of websites on the Internet today. Also, even with the animation it loads on my iPhone SE without causing Safari to restart, which is more than I can say for many websites.

The page isn't to bad. Better than certain other pages I visit that has to fill half the screen with a notice about how they ask for my permission to ignore the GDPR.

Would it be better without an animation? Possibly.

But given the current state of the web I'd ve fine with a few extra "i hate animations"-animations if they replaced sites that spy on me, only work in Chrome and advertises dating sites I don't need.

Edit: good -> not too bad

Why do you ask?

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