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Comment by halgir | Hacker News Reader

Very old and very relevant:

And if you search for "motherfucking website", you'll find a million similar, satirical versions of a website inspired by that first one.

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Is it bad that I unironically like the first one, actually more than the second one?

You might like https://bestmotherfucking.website

Yeah, this is the best one of these i've seen! Here's a SFW version too: https://www.goshdarnwebsite.com/

Nice. Usually people link https://thebestmotherfucking.website which is not better than "better motherfucking website" but seriously worse. This one was actually better.

> Your meme website isn’t as random as you think it is and will compress much faster.

That's very funny

agreed, the "better" motherfucking website wastes all that precious space with it's gloriously large and dumb margins around the text. the kind of silly idocy that makes me glad there's a reader mode to undo that crap.

the original motherfucking website is already perfect, no reaching for the reader mode.

I actually prefer the margins, as it doesn't force me to move my eyes so much. I know it sounds stupid, but that's why we have text wrapping containers.

It doesn't sound stupid. Readability declines as line length increases.

Except that goes against decades of studies that have shown that people read columns of text faster with better comprehension. So while you may prefer the column-less design, it is empirically worse.

Why would you think your user is not capable of resizing their rendering window? This seems to be a wide-spread notion in the ranks of the "responsive" design lads (where "responsive" means: choose one of those four fixed designs which do not react graciously on window resizes). Tiled window managers make usually halving (or doubling) one dimension of your browser window just one key(combination-)press away...

Why should I care (assuming I'm a designer). If I make my column the correct width it would work no matter the size of the browser window. If they want to narrow it to the same size as the column they'd just see the column. But for those who didn't want to do that having the column helps them as well.

this is not about columns nor line lengths, it's about the width of the single column relative to screen size.

The problem is with hw vendors and their 16:9 aspect mania. That's way afar from what olden motherfuking screen glory was to begin with. Look at the ridiculous small space gmail leaves you to actually write your stuff.

If your "reader mode" doesn't have margins, it's not a reader mode.

the cool thing about it is that you can adjust it to your preferences.

This is the one advantage of the column-less layout... you can create your own column by resizing your browser where otherwise you don't get a vote, you get what they think is best.

I do too.

I'm biased for obvivious reasons, but:

https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB

Yeah, but can it really be good if you can't load the motherfuckingwebsite because your IT department blocked the website because it has a dirty word in it?

My IT department intercept TLS and break half of the internet in the process.

So they can get fucked in my opinion. I’m not convinced that the issue lies with the website.

Infantilising your users is exactly why contempt exists for sysadmins.

And I say that as a sysadmin.

Sure but they are web pages, not websites. The distinction matters and does undermine the satire somewhat.

There’s a distinction between a website and a web app. Web pages and websites are synonymous.

No I meant those two pages are each a single, individual, isolated page. A website is a collection of web pages, usually structured (even if loosely).

So, to make it a website you just need some links on each page that let you get to the other pages. I don't see how that undermines the satire.

Because it's easy to make one webpage, but when you make a website, you immediately run into a huge wall of issues about consistency and navigability. For example, it's become a convention that in the upper-left of a website, there will be a logo that leads you to the homepage of the site. How do you do that with bettermotherfuckingwebsite?

Hugo or any other static page generator work perfectly for maintaining clean and consistent markup.

Since the location of the menu to go to other pages was a big part of the original post, I'd say in this context it's pretty relevant.

For a blog you can just have one "posts" page or similar, linked from every page, organized chronologically. Or even with anchor links to the same posts organized a few different ways. Then you also don't need a search function for searching post titles. Or to worry about paginating your list.

"But what about when there are a lot, won't that be too big?" Look at how much transfer & memory your favorite Javascript framework uses just to show up to the party, and get back to me. You'd have to blog a hell of a lot for it to even be a factor. An HTML list of text & links is small and compresses well.

A collection of one item is still a collection. My website of a single page is still my website. It's also my web page.

https://danluu.com/

Works fine.

There can be many web pages on a single web site. And they may or may not be part of an web app.

http://www.motherfuckingblog.com/

Right. This page is also not interactive. I'd like to to see an interactive example that's also not an eye sore.

https://craigslist.org

I thought you were joking, since the last time I saw craigslist it was hilariously awful looking.

But, actually, it seems super clear and easy to navigate and certainly doesn't hurt my eyes. I am really surprised that either my usability/design standards have dropped so massively, or craigslist has improved enough without an overhaul.

I'm note sure which is true.

Craigslist has slowly changed over the years with little tweaks here and there. It’s really fun to go through the Wayback Machine on it when people bring it up as an example of something that hasn’t changed.

I’m no designer, and I have lots of love for Craigslist, but ... does it qualify as ‘not an eyesore?’

It's a thing of beauty. Simple, functional, information dense, logical layout. I don't use craigslist, but pulling it up, it is immediately obvious what needs to be done and how to do it.

Hero images are eyesores.

It's a thing of pure, unadulterated beauty in this day and age.

No. It's certainly an eye sore.

Is it?

I've never had any problem using Craig's List and it just works. There are no hamburgers, no material design, the dropdowns look like dropdowns, and the links look like links. I love Craig's List! It's one of the only shopping/marketplace websites I don't dislike.

My philosophy is that if you want it to have fancy CSS and skeuomorphic buttons, use a CSS extension and make your own CSS for it. Even better - use a browser that lets you edit a page's CSS in WYSIWYG (if there are any).

If Craig's List was suddenly revamped and looked like Amazon or Newegg, I would no longer use it.

agreed it is eyesore.

but, it is lightweight it is responsive and it works

What's the distinction?

More than one page. Sounds trivial, but having more than one web page also means you'll have navigation, which is much more challenging on default browser styles than simple document markup.

It's almost a shame the idea of having a sitemap.xml which the browser could parse and provide native navigation for never took off.

Of course it didn't because native controls are the first thing any designer changes because native controls on the web were always associated with amateur websites.

To be fair native controls were total ass for years. And still kind of are. Doubly so if you're trying to build an "app". Basic crap any half-decent UI toolkit would provide out of the box, just not there at all. The stuff that is there's often not great.

It seems like as soon as it became common to work around problems with HTML ui in Javascript, the already-slow work to improve the standard appearance and functionality of HTML websites dropped to almost zero. We got some alright semantic-markup stuff after that but it took forever to even get a couple layout primitives that are non-terrible.

When did beauty become something we loathe? Any attempt to make something look nice invites scorn from the programmer community. Get out of here with your styling and your white space, we only want to see black text on a white background.

I mean, I get it -- it's about load times, readability, accessibility, yadda yadda. But does that really mean everything has to look like shit? Why is it a binary choice?

"Well, I actually think that motherfuckingwebsite looks good. It's beautiful in its simplicity."

Fair call, there's no accounting for taste. But does this attitude also extend to, say, public spaces? What about architecture? Should a house be designed like motherfuckingwebsite.com?

If a house is hard to live in, does it really matter how beautiful it is?

You can make beautiful static websites with almost no extra load. Just add a little CSS.

Using e.g. Hugo you can generate nice static websites from markdown that are compact but not ugly.

Look, I wouldn't want to live in a "beautiful" house that didn't have a bathroom. But your response also kind of demonstrates my point, which is that somewhere along the way we decided that beauty was the antithesis of usability. My suggestion is that they can coexist.

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