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Comment by oftenwrong | Hacker News Reader

I have to say that aside from a few things* this is what I consider the perfect blog design in terms of structure, styling, layout.

* use of HTML tables, month-first dates

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This is really close to what a default blog site would look like using Svelte: same load times and essentially identical date/title blog post format is almost what you get out of the box, with Svelte and Sapper, the router.

Anyway, if this is something you like, that's one way to get it on your own domain name, without compromising on 'bloat' or load times.

I don’t see how Svelte is related to a blog site?

Svelte is a JavaScript framework that's very close to pure JavaScript. It's ideal use case is probably a static blog site - like this one.

I guess I just don’t see how you’d need Svelte for that at all.

I feel the same way. I might borrow some of the techniques. The plain text with <br> tags makes for really clean code on the index page and I like how the dates are done there too. Last week I created the Neat CSS framework to try to distill my own thoughts on minimal site design.

https://neat.joeldare.com

I disagree with a couple decisions, such as the font size, font tag, the table, and using non-breaking spaces to indent paragraphs, but I applaud this person for keeping it simple.

They probably didn't expect their code to be scrutinized, either. The content is great and I'm only being critical because I like it's simplicity so that got me to look.

160++ character long lines are almost unreadable in my opinion. Any readable material should stick to 60-80 characters per line.

I prefer 132 characters, preferably with an alternating green bar background.

To each, their own.

I agree -- it looks exactly like a Gopher page.

On mobile the text is very small.

Agreed. As-is, it's a poor mobile experience.

On mobile Firefox, the Reader mode does a great job of making the articles readable, though.

So, mobile-specific default CSS would probably be ideal, but this kind of site also shows off the advantages of just doing the simplest thing, and letting the agent optimize for the user.

yeah, the main page doesn't even use css, it's only html tags. you might ask the author to add viewport scaling on the <head>, even if it will kinda break the zen of the html:

   <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

You are right, though it is a shame a proprietary meta tag shoehorned into a CSS feature is now required to make unstyled webpages legible. With the fixed-width layouts of the 00’s there could conceivably be a justification, but never with CSS-less webpages. With all that said, I hope more people keep leaving out this tag, to remind some smartphone users that, despite all the wonders their $1000+ device can do, it doesn’t get unstyled HTML.

I've been using a gopher mirror to browse HN on my phone recently, and I love it. Quick page loads, legible text, and easy navigation.

I'm curious; why do you feel HTML tables are bad?

They are bad for things that are not tables. I suppose the blog index is a table, though.

Ok, but you didn't say why they're bad.

I bought into that hype back in the day. I don't anymore. They're a tool, they're not inherently good or bad.

They’re bad because they force a lot of styling that is hard to remove.

When you don’t want that kind of styling you are better off not using tables, instead of making them work for you.

I guess that is exactly what you are saying though ;)

“In my times, we designed sites using only tables and handcrafted 1 pixel spacer gifs! And we did just fine!”

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