Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

First impression: view-source ... "<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/main.css" />", OK then, way to deplete your own hypothesis before anything even renders to the page.

They're using Eleventy and Netlify, those are not HTML either; Eleventy implies they start with markdown too I think?

I'll forgive them image formats and the .js file for Twitter. But, they follow up with a heap of "lets use tables for design" examples, always hated that ... I'm nope-ing pretty hard there.

I started writing HTML in the 90s using Pico, my roots are purist, but no, not really ... you need styles for a11y, you want styles for user comfort and engagement, even minimal things like favicons and svg. We've come a long way, yes, bloated messes like Sharepoint spews out are abysmal, but to make a website that meets any reasonable standards ... you need more than just HTML in this dinosaur's opinion.

Are you talking about the site from the submission? To be fair, it never claims itself to be HTML only. It does say performance was improved by being much more mindful about how much other stuff, including CSS and javascript, is included. The linked blog post about the perf improvements goes into some detail about that. Doesn't smell like false advertising to me. The site then goes on to show by extreme example that you don't technically need anything other than HTML to make a website.

I do agree with your points about what is necessary these days. A dash of CSS, tables only for tabular data, other small touches. Like, that's a more reasonable standard for "what is necessary". And to me, I think your comments are in line with the spirit of the original post.

Hear, hear. Though I guess they could have gotten all their CSS into a style tag in the <head> (which might even be reasonable for reducing the number of requests for things that get hammered on, maybe, if you didn't also want them cached for other pages).

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