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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

As a side note - I LOVE when people continue to use this super basic HTML 1.1 web design. It's just superior in literally every way to the garbage we use today, with its overblown everything, just so the site can scale to every device imaginable under the sun. Guess what, this is perfectly readable on a phone, I have two fingers, I can zoom in and scroll about, no need to load 70MB of javascript just to adjust it for me thanks.

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Just to provide a different perspective - the page is perfectly UNreadable on my fairly normal 1080p phone with Firefox and if I wasn't browsing HN on my Mac atm I would've closed the article immediately for that sole reason. Yes, I am that petty. I value my time, even my lazy browsing time.

Also, a couple lines of CSS would be enough, no need to load 70 MB of JS.

Ah, yeah, fixed width layout: that's pretty annoying and one thing I don't miss from the "old" web. I do quite appreciate the overall aesthetic - as well as the page load speed - of this particular site.

As you say, variable width and proper viewport support are easily fixed with a line or two of CSS, and if he did that it would work as well on mobile as it does on desktop.

That's crappy defaults from those browsers. I hate the point-size inflation that we've gone through because browser makers refused to do anything sensible until it was pushed by Apple and designers would always use a font size that looked right on their expensive mac, so now the only way to view a site right is to guess how old it is and then adjust your zoom to compensate. It didn't have to be like this!

Interesting - for me on Android in Chrome the website scales to the correct width automatically.

> It's just superior in literally every way to the garbage we use today

Nostalgia can be blinding. I love plain HTML pages too though.

> this is perfectly readable on a phone

There's some jQuery driven magic at the bottom of the source for that.

If all of a sudden, Hacker News decided to add a 2px blur filter to this entire website using CSS, making everything harder to read, would your desire to have it go back to the way it was be for 'nostalgic' reasons? I suppose you could argue 'yes' because presently reading this site right now is satisfying in some way, and you would want to return to it being satisfying. But is that THE reason? If someone walks into your room right now and begins to torture you with a knife, do you say 'Hey stop i have nostalgic memories of not being tortured 30 seconds ago?' Again yes... damn you are right nostalgia is blinding!

The phrase "it's just superior in literally every way" is pretty hard to argue for.

I wasn't saying that all nostalgia is blinding, nor that it is the only thing that blinds.

A 2px blur filter would be blinding.

But 120 characters line width is 2x as wide as a line should be. Publishers have known that for centuries.

Don't think the people who spent years to typeset a book centuries ago were dumb.

They thought hard about what they were doing.

I like the useless horizontal scroll and the clashing colours the best.

Yes! Me too. Check this out: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maxion/

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