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>>I want to hecking scream.

Overreacting much?

>The point of the original website in this chain was not that you couldn't do media queries, or that all of your designs had to be unstyled. It was a gosh-darned satire that showed that even if you did literally nothing, your website would still be responsive and readable and load fast. The fact that it did nothing, that it was just a completely unstyled HTML page was the reason that the joke worked.

Yeah, so? Who cares about the point of the original website? As if it was some sacred ultimate truth, that only makes sense in the exact original wording and message?

The point of THIS website is that you can improve upon the original "do nothing" website by a lot, and still do almost nothing: just add 10 tiny CSS lines.

This meme won’t die. Heck, I'm thinking how to build the next version of this site!

'a perfecter motherfucking site' will 'improve' this site adding 10 more tiny CSS lines

'the most perfectest motherfucking site' will improve that site by adding just 6 teeny tiny more CSS lines and maybe like the most little tiny bit of javascript.

'the absolute final most perfectest motherfucking site'.. will improve THAT site, and the feature creep goes on.

they're all built off of the concept of the original, so it makes sense to 'care' about the 'point' of the original website. the only sacred ultimate truth was that nice things are possible with HTML only. i disagree that this particular website offers any improvement.

I mean, it might not offer any improvement for you, but it certainly does for someone who uses a screen reader that doesn't default to English.

> Overreacting much?

Matching the poster's tone.

> Yeah, so? Who cares about the point of the original website?

This website (and the rest of the extensive "betterwebsite" collection) is written as a direct response to the original website. That's why the title is what it is, that's why it talks about the original.

Death of the author is a thing, but people don't typically cite death of the author when they are directly responding to someone's point. We usually expect responses to have something to do with what they're responding to.

If the URL of this website was "howtomakeafastprettywebsite.com", we wouldn't be having this conversation right now, because "put a max-width on your columns" is not exactly a controversial or bold design statement.

I agree that they might be missing the point, but I also feel that adding a one or two extra CSS lines is really needed to turn something that is very unpleasant to read (the biggest problem being the unlimited width) into something that is really basically perfect. Like, this one is actually pretty much perfect, while the original makes me want to manually add a max-width from the inspector.

I agree. You could pour 80% of web content into this and it would work.

This one has a dark theme though.

And a license.

and a lang= attribute

I took booleandilemma's comment as a joke, but to the broader point, why does a joke page that's smaller than a blog post need a license?

Does it add something to the satire, or does it make it funnier? Clearly the original page's lack of a license didn't make it impossible for anyone else to iterate on it.

And again, I can't stress this enough, the point of the original page was not that every single addition you could make to a website was bad. It was not that you shouldn't have a dark mode. It used radical minimalism to show that by default websites work, even if you have no clue what you're doing.

The lack of niceties is the point. Nobody was unable to read the original page or iterate on it. Could the page have been nicer? Sure. But the point was that even if you did nothing at all, the web still worked.

https://github.com/LeoColomb/perfectmotherfuckingwebsite/blo...

:) The irony here being that the WTFYWPL license is generally not advised for projects that actually care about making it easy for others to use the code, it is itself a little bit of a joke license used to forcefully make the point that the author doesn't care about the copyright and is not interested in suing people or arguing about ownership.

So it's appropriate in this context, but also pretty easy to argue that 10 lines of code are not a serious copyright threat anyway, and that it's not clear what code on this page is even subject to copyright in the first place, and that the author might have gone all the way and leaned into the fact that you don't really need an entire Git repo with a license for a single HTML page.

I have stopped waiting for website authors to figure out how to make a dark theme. I just have my user agent do it with https://darkreader.org/

Like ad blockers, sometimes you have to adjust it, but it usually Just Works. The main innovation from this is that my display has much improved contrast, because I can set the brightness for text on a black background, instead of setting the brightness for an entire screen of white. It is amazing how good a screen looks when it's not running at 1% brightness. (Just don't open a non dark mode app at night, or you won't be sleeping for a week.)

with dark-reader you still have the problem of getting blinded at night for the first second or so until the DOM finished parsing. There were some workarounds with userChrome.css userContent.css that solved this for a while, but they broke in recent builds so I'm back to feeling like a deer staring at the headlights every time a new tab opens on a page.

I'm not 100% certain that this should be forced by the browser and IMHO it's the websites owners job to provide properly working dark theme and the UI/UE they think fits best their purpose (and not the browsers). Unless the assumption is that styling across all sites should look 100% identical which may appeal to some, though if I really want that then I can go look for content on gemini:// and no page will ever use their own styling other than what I am telling it to. Maybe it's just me but I like being dazzled and surprised with new design and style that I've not seen before.

If rendering was server's concern, you would be served jpegs, not html.

You're definitely right about being blinded during a startup delay. It's not every site but it does happen.

I agree that all websites should give users a dark mode. They don't, so we have to make our own.

> I just have my user agent do it with https://darkreader.org/

And for $4.99 Safari user. 30% paid to Apple and 70% for developer to recoup their $99/year cost.

And HTTPS so I can sleep at night knowing noone MITM'd my stupid internet content.

I beg to differ. The first website looks horrible on widescreen displays. A lot of old websites follow the style of first website and their readability could be improved 10 times by adding 10 lines of CSS.

> The first website looks horrible on widescreen displays

But you were able to read it, right? You didn't have to go find a separate computer to use to figure out what it was saying. The text didn't get cut off when you resized your browser window.

> The first website looks horrible

I mean, yes? I'm not sure what you're saying by this though. Nobody (at least nobody worth taking seriously) is telling you that you should follow the style of the first website. You should have max-widths and throw some CSS on your page. To quote the original website:

> I'm not actually saying your **** site should look like this. What I'm saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren't broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them.

There's this argument in all of the followup websites that seems to boil down to "it's easier to make websites look better than the original." And yes? But who is arguing with you that we should deprecate CSS from the browser? Who is arguing that it's a hard task to make something that looks and reads nicer than a completely unstyled page? It's a weirdly oblivious misreading of the original joke.

The problem is that people do build sites that look like the first website:

https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/multiboot/multiboot...

Fair, but using GNU's work as an example almost feels like cheating in a weird way ;).

GNU is not building a hard-core minimalist website, they do include CSS on their page -- in fact they include more of it than this website does. So the problem isn't that GNU is too minimal or that they've sworn off of CSS, the problem is that modern GNU increasingly doesn't seem to know how to design anything at all when it comes to UX, and that there's probably somebody somewhere on their chain of authority for this page seriously arguing that line-wrapping is bad design or some other nonsense.

But I don't know. To the extent that GNU's design aesthetics actually represent a web design trend, then I do concede that it's a bad trend, and everybody who's following it should add `body { max-width: 40em; margin: auto; }` to the top of their CSS files.

GNU docs have good design in accordance with W3C best practices: rendering is user agent's job, and if it doesn't do the job per your preference, you change the user agent to the one that does or submit an RFE to your user agent vendor to support your preference.

> GNU docs have good design

Who's side are you on here, stop proving fctorial's point :)

> rendering is user agent's job

GNU uses more CSS than the joke website in question for an uglier result; they're putting in more effort to make something that's less readable. I don't see how anyone can call that good design. It would take literally 2 CSS declarations to improve their website's design for >90% of the people looking at their page, at no cost or inconvenience to any other user. Good user-interface design incorporates sensible defaults.

It is a very GNU-like thing to look at the current web ecosystem, notice that basically every browser acts a certain way and has a certain standard default styling for HTML, and then to still argue that it's the user's fault that their website looks the way it does.

I don't see any W3C best practices anywhere that argue column widths should be avoided, and GNU is clearly comfortable overriding default agent behavior for other parts of this page when it comes to indenting lists and styling code blocks.

Edit: actually, I stand corrected. GNU is including a bunch of styling code and then commenting it out so it doesn't work. What the heck, who is maintaining this page? Why is that stuff being shipped to the user if it's unusable? In any case, W3C best practice is very much NOT to avoid all CSS, that's a massive mischaracterization of their positions.

> Edit: actually, I stand corrected. GNU is including a bunch of styling code and then commenting it out so it doesn't work.

Where do you see that? If you’re referring to the  in the <style>, that’s an old standard compatibility hack and doesn’t stop the styles from being applied.

Yep that was what I was referring too. Good to know, today I learned.

>Who's side are you on here, stop proving fctorial's point :)

I'm on my side and against people who push their preferences on me.

>It would take literally 2 CSS declarations to improve their website's design for >90% of the people looking at their page, at no cost or inconvenience to any other user. Good user-interface design incorporates sensible defaults.

The sensible default is to follow user preferences. Those 90% people do it this way and GNU docs rightfully don't question it. User preferences can't be reasonably implemented on the server side, because different people have different preferences, so it's undecidable whose preferences to implement.

>I don't see any W3C best practices anywhere that argue column widths should be avoided

W3C best practice is to let user agent render text as appropriate.

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ touches on this too:

>You dumbass. You thought you needed media queries to be responsive, but no. Responsive means that it responds to whatever motherfucking screensize it's viewed on. This site doesn't care if you're on an iMac or a motherfucking Tamagotchi.

W3C often refers to unusual user agents to illustrate their point of client side rendering.

> and against people who push their preferences on me.

> The sensible default is to follow user preferences.

> W3C best practice is to let user agent render text as appropriate.

But nothing about including CSS goes against this. CSS is clientside rendering, it has nothing to do with forcing preferences on anyone. Your browser has the ability to override provided styles and either modify or ignore CSS. If it doesn't then I suggest, in your words, "changing the user agent to the one that does, or submiting an RFE to your user agent vendor."

This is why we use CSS. So that we can separate style from content and lay out a page with nice defaults that can still be overridden by the user.

And not only is CSS customizable and overridable, because it's completely separate from content it is also optional. Any of your users can choose not to download your CSS file and they'll get served the exact same HTML content that they're getting now. So when I say that there's no cost or inconvenience for users who don't like your styles, I literally mean that. There is no cost to them because they don't have to download the file. They can disable all 3rd-party CSS in their user agent if they don't want it, and then they don't even need to waste time making an extra network request.

Imagine taking this attitude with other applications as well. Should we be upset that Emacs ships with default keybindings? Is that as an undecidable problem? When I install a MELPA package, should I get mad that the author is pushing their default config on me? There's no downside to having optional defaults that users can partially override or fully ignore at their own convenience.

> W3C best practice is to let user agent render text as appropriate.

If this is genuinely GNU's attitude, then why does this page include style resets?

You're heavily misreading the W3C's position here. Letting the user agent render text as appropriate does not contradict providing CSS, and I've never heard of the W3C advising authors to avoid CSS.

Maybe it's defeatable, but it's still fighting against user preferences. Not sure how you can make that sound palatable. The analogy is if the text documents dictated the editor settings, what font, size, color scheme and keybindings to use because emacs defaults are not to the document author's preferences.

>There's no downside to having optional defaults that users can partially override or fully ignore at their own convenience.

That's what GNU docs do, they use defaults: i.e. they follow user preferences.

> Maybe it's defeatable, but it's still fighting against user preferences.

It's not "defeatable", you're not fighting anybody. You can turn off CSS in Firefox in 2 clicks: View -> Page Style -> No Style. What's happening here is that you're being served a text document, and optionally, if you want to, you can download a separate list of styles that will make it look pretty.

This is like buying a bag of cheese at the grocery mart and getting mad that the a recipe on the side of the package is trying to force you to cook a certain way. Nobody is trying to force you to do anything, we'd just like to have the option of having sensible defaults that look nice without being forced to write custom CSS clientside for every website we visit.

And if it's really that awful of a problem for you, then file a pull request with your user agent to get rid of CSS. It's not the website's fault that your user agent is requesting random files from the Internet without your permission. It's not the server's job to tell your user agent how to display HTML and whether or not to use CSS. Your agent doesn't have to do any extra work here, it just needs to stop going out of its way to request extra files on every website it visits. How is it the server's problem if your user agent can't do that?

You're making this out like CSS has to be "circumvented" or something, but it is easier to build a user agent that ignores CSS than one that consumes it. It's less work, not more.

> The analogy is if the text documents dictated the editor settings

They basically do in Emacs: most specialized buffer-types like Magit and Org ship with their own modes that they expect you to use that have their own keybindings and settings. And Org literally does what you're describing. It allows you to override variables locally per-buffer[0]; everything from column widths to TODO colors to indentation to list styles can be specified using CSS-style declarations at the start of a file.

This is also really common in the terminal world for things like manpages; many manpages will use terminal escape codes to color/bold text, and most hard-code their own indentation using whitespace. And even in regular documents, rich text files and PDFs allow you to specify color information and fonts.

The main difference in all of these examples is that most of them are less user-controllable than CSS is. I can't override how a PDF displays; I can't easily change the indentation in a manpage. Globally disabling buffer settings in Org-mode can be problematic because styling information is mixed with functional information like archive locations. In contrast, I can easily disable and override CSS, and it won't affect the actual content of the page at all.

> That's what GNU docs do, they use defaults

No, not by your standards. The GNU docs do ship CSS. The docs ship with multiple style resets, they set the font size in code blocks, they override list styles, they set fonts as well. So GNU docs are willing to override user preferences for code blocks, just not to make the page work well on widescreen displays.

[0]: https://orgmode.org/manual/In_002dbuffer-Settings.html

I felt like the original was definitely taking the piss from websites that were 90% static textual content, but won't even load without Javascript. The sort of sites in search of a solution to a problem that does not exist.

Same. Websites are fast, accessible, readable, and decent looking by default. We'd be better off if (like operating systems) more of the presentation preferences were left to the user. I used to use an extension for Firefox that allowed me to disable all styles for a website by hotkey. 9/10 websites were more readable after turning off all styles.

I don't agree with this conclusion. The original could have added ~7 lines of css and made it about 100x more readable, while still making the same point.