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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>>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.

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> 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.

'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.

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

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