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Comment by birriel | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate that many CS heavyweights have such plain webpages. Stallman and Larry Wall are some other examples.

It seems to almost be a "brand." Many tech heavyweights have these raw HTML pages.

It says "I'm so busy doing stuff that makes a difference, that I won't dedicate time to eye-candy. You know who I am. I don't need to tell you that."

I can't really argue with that.

I think even if he had time, he wouldn't change that page much. _simplicity_ is his philosophy. A page that you can edit with the most basic tools and publish in terminal is totally aligned with that. The page does its job, anything else is unnecessary clutter.

I mean you can't argue with it. If you want a page like this, you only need to know HTML, FTP, a text editor.

Meanwhile my attempted personal website, 'simply' github pages, also requires you to know about Hugo, which requires a ruby runtime locally; markdown, css, js, Git, Github, Github's two-factor authentication, etc.

I mean it won't win any design awards but basic html for infrequently updated websites is absolutely fine.

It's the equivalent of senior law firm partners leaving simple typos in their emails to junior staff.

I think the reason is that the original intention behind HTML was to be a quickly written markup language to present and share research. With minimal styling like text size, paragraphs, some bold or italics for emphasis and images. Anything going beyond that is for commercial rather than academic purposes.

To add to that, markup was intended to be semantic, not for layout, and the expectation was the browser would do the right thing to present it to the user. I think you are right that they are in that early mindset before browser decided to become pixel perfect typesetting engines. Why should I tell you how wide a <paragraph> should be?!? Browser knows best if it's on a small monitor, big monitor, phone, etc. Sigh.

Unstyled or almost unstyled HTML home page is basically standard practice among (especially older) academics, CS or not. Don Knuth's home page with custom colors is almost elaborately designed by academic standards.

> Don Knuth's home page with custom colors is almost elaborately designed by academic standards

Yeah, or Tanenbaum's.

I always assumed it was down to them creating their homepages early on (as in: the mid-to-late 90s) and having gotten used to editing the raw HTML file using vi/emacs/ed/whatever when they needed to update it. And they never had a reason to change that workflow.

My oldest, still active, website was created in that style around 20 years ago and only in recent years did I change to a git and ansible based deployment instead of just editing the raw files on the server over ssh.

You’re seeing (and falling for) an ego-trip that is not there. All CS professors have webpages like this one.

This is 100% the case. I wouldn't be surprised if universities actually have a policy against not customizing profile pages. Otherwise you're opening things up to the good old Geocities age.

Sigh... was the personal attack really necessary?

I see these pages, all the time, with tech heavyweights that aren't teachers. I won't bother tracking them down, but I've been seeing them for years.

I don't think it's an ego-trip. These folks really are that busy, and this stuff just isn't important. Some, however, I am sure, have ego trips. I don't really care. I'm not inviting them over for dinner, and they probably wouldn't come, if I did.

The ego trip is more with sites like mine, where I take the time to polish it up. It's more important to me, than it is to them.

Some of them actually have fairly current-looking pages, because they work[ed] for companies (or schools) that have templates[0].

Also, he isn't my "hero." I mean, seriously...

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150312003109/http://research.g...

Way too wide paragraphs to be read comfortably on a standard Full HD monitor. I.e. form over function in order to achieve that vaunted “pragmatic and old school” aesthetic.

EDIT: On second thought though it seems that people are reading too much into it and just projecting this “branding” onto their hero (see my other comment in this thread). Ironically yes: they probably are too busy to craft their homepages in such a way that people on HN will be impressed by their couldn’t-care-less attitude!

> Way too wide paragraphs to be read comfortably on a standard Full HD monitor.

That's the users fault.

The Unix Way. I love it.

Most web pages aren't designed to be viewed on a full-width browser window for the exact reason you said.

Point of order: Resizable windows are the Xerox PARC way.

You know that you can change a browser window's size? The alternative is a thin strip of text with enormous margins, which I find about as annoying as overly long lines. Written pages aren't really mean to be displayed in very wide windows.

I didn’t know that you can resize windows.

Seriously though I have Firefox’ Reader Mode for subpar websites.

Doesn't HN give you paragraphs just as wide?

Shoot… :-)

Not surprising, really.

At their core, many of these people rose to prominence in an earlier era, before the web even existed. Most of their personal pages reflect this. The people Brian worked with at Bell Labs really were (first and foremost) programmers and probably either wrote their personal pages with simple HTML or used a tool to generate it from some other language. As a result it's usually not very pretty.

Stroustrup is a slight exception, as his page at Morgan Stanley is quite "corporate-looking"[1], but his personal site is very much in the same vein as the others.

When you think of the Old Guard of the web, it's usually names like Zeldman, Meyer, Marcotte, et al that have anything which resembles the web as we know it today.

[1]: https://www.morganstanley.com/profiles/bjarne-stroustrup-man...

My uni faculty had those until like 2015. They were awesome and everything was instant. Easy access old exams or querky fun programs etc.

Later the uni forced their crappy content management system on everyone and it was a login required bloated JS mess instead.

And the faculty staff never bothered to write bios or interesting stuff there.

Eh, this looks like most academic personal pages, heavy or lightweight. Some promo of their books, minimal content and links to papers or presentations that are at least 2 years behind the current year (whatever the current year is).

Some of it is probably generational. Kernighan will be 80 this year. Ritchie, gone now 10 years, was a little older.

Wall and Stallman are a generation younger -- true Boomers, if you will, born in the 50s.

The computing topics tackled by those generations were foundational, but they also predate the web as a Thing. So they're ON the web, to one degree or another, but it's not their focus.

By the time you get to the next gen of folks -- and let's just use GenX as the label; I mean folks born in the early 60s through about 1980 -- the people making contributions have the web as a MAJOR component of the computing landscape. These folks are "web native," and so it makes sense that they'd have fancier web pages/sites because the tools and technologies for doing such things are part of their remit, or at least close to it. Twiddling with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript was a big deal for a long time, and it showed in the pages of folks like (say) Eric Meyer.

I'm 51, born in 1970. I don't think I ever saw a web presence for anyone more than about 5 years older than I am that was elaborate, or the sadly-now-withdrawn-from-public-life Mark Pilgrim.

I like the plainness in general, but on contemporary monitors, this means that lines of text are very long, causing eye fatigue pretty quickly.

Typography is an art way more ancient than computers and I feel that it should be taken into account even on webpages; famously, Donald Knuth studied typography pretty deeply when designing TeX.

Works on any screen, desk, mobile. Works in Lynx from the command line.

Just narrow your window, maybe by changing the width of your sidebar.

This is from the old school of thought on the web, the HTML is only about content and semantics, and all the typography should be left to the browser (and user preferences). If the default font in your browser causes fatigue for you, you can change the defaults. This is hardly possible with most websites now without intrusive browser extensions.

Just double click on Safari's title bar and the window will automatically adjust it's width.

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