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Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

I now yearn for the old plain HTML pages with "up / next / previous" links [1]. I used to hate how basic they were, but with "modern" web sites loading so much JavaScript to display static content, I'm starting to see the appeal of basic websites with no styling whatsoever.

[1] https://www.freesoft.org/CIE/Topics/index.htm - I learned from this twenty years ago. Still relevant.

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I wish more people would hop on board the info train, which is what the "up / next / previous" style of hypertext comes from (thanks again, Richard Stallman).

People love to shit on info because its default viewer uses emacs keybindings and the documentation "isn't geared for professionals" which is another way of saying providing minimum-viable knowledge (AKA non-OpenBSD man pages).

I happen to love info for those very reasons. Software freedom and usability used to mean that non-developers could understand how to use software. Want to learn how to code in Emacs Lisp? An info book on it comes with Emacs. Want to learn the ins and outs of the coreutils? Bash? gawk? Documentation the size of a book comes with all of them as well, formatted and designed to be friendly to people who have no idea what they're doing.

With a few lines of CSS in the head section you can have a blazing fast page that looks elegant as well. This site is one, although I think it is a touch too narrow. Also, headers/footers with a different background color are pleasing.

Agreed, altough I find myself liking websites with a narrow width lately.

I have no data to back this up, but to me, it seems that when people think about building websites without JS, they completely forget that CSS, or design are a thing.

I am building a website for a simple API I built for my company[1] that I thought others might want to use, and while there is no JS, that does not mean that I just uploaded an unstyled .html file to the root of my server.

While unstyled have their own charm at times, in general, I think a little bit of CSS, design, and inspiration goes a long way.

[1] https://i.cpimg.sh/pwiyfpBpIKL5.png

I usually use a max-width of 40rem and add 1rem padding for small screens/windows to keep off the grass, as it were. That anchors the width to the base text size so the line length makes basic sense, no matter what the user font settings might be.

That's a great go-to. I also use character width for setting max-widths (66-75ch is best range for reading length)

This type of differences in personal preferences is precisely why I'm for leaving pages completely unstyled...

Yes, I agree. I don't like the max-width setting; it should use the width of the window that the user has set. Same with font sizes, and usually, also colours. (Sometimes CSS is helpful (if not overused), but for many documents it will be much better to avoid CSS.) CSS is often what makes web pages look bad.

I generally use a full-screen browser. I never want a full-screen line of text.

Does your browser have sidebars? You can add sidebars if you want to reduce the width of the document, I suppose. (There is bookmark sidebar, history sidebar, and web developer sidebar; what I think is missing is the table of contents sidebar, which would list the <h1>, <h2>, etc in the current document. Another thing that might be wanted is split-screen mode, I think.) I personally do want a full-screen line of text, although I suppose some people do not want.

One thought is that we could have two mandated versions of every website: (a) the text-retrieval optimised version and (b) the web developer engagement version.

When this idea has come up on HN before it has been met by angry web developers claiming they "would have to maintain two websites" or some such nonsense.

However, consider that no one composes content in JSON, or even HTML. Textual content always begins as readable text. Even if only in the mind of the person creating it. There is nothing to maintain as there is nothing to "develop". All that needs to be done is add the HTTP header and deliver the text.

One of the most popular examples of text retrieval I can think of to illustrate:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/

Personally I prefer the directory-style "Index of" to the HTML-ised "Up / Next / Previous". Same functionality.

Even if the complaint "we would have to maintain two websites" had any substance, which website do you think would be easier to maintain?

That is a rhetorical question. That means I already know the answer.

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