Hacker News Reader

> I still see personal websites that are almost unreadable on small phones, for instance.

My personal website is like that and I’ve made no effort to improve the phone experience. I really don’t care if phone users have access or not, on every other device it looks fine.

It’s a personal website, if it looks good on my machine that’s enough for me.

That was my opinion for a while as well. It depends on your audience but about 50% of hits to my site come from one mobile device or another and in the end I felt I had to put the effort in to support them.

What is this "audience" you speak of? I've run a blog for 25 years. First, it was FrontPage, then a custom PHP site, then a custom Rails app, and now Wordpress. The only thing that hits it is web crawlers. I do it because I must.

Ha! I run a simple hit tracker and most of my posts get single digit hits a year. I rent a server to run my blog and write a blog to have something for my server to do.

I do a good bit of my web browsing on my phone and I hate those web sites that are "optimized for phones" and thus typically lacking content and features. You can sometimes disable them with desktop mode but usually those sites ignore that and force the "mobile site" version.

If the content is too small on a phone, you can always just zoom in and scroll horizontally as well as vertically. Unless the creator of the site decides to "helpfully" create a phone version of their site in which case you have to go find a computer to use the site or download some app. A great example of this is Reddit which goes out of its way to make their "mobile site" unusable to force people to download the Reddit app so they can more easily spy on you.

I do think web sites should scale properly to different window sizes which means not using certain formatting misfeatures that force certain elements to always appear on the screen or that make your menu unusable on a touch screen. That isn't hard to do because you have to make a deliberate bad design choice to make your site unusable on smaller resolutions. A well-designed web site will also work perfectly well on Lynx or a screen reader without any additional work.

On the other hand, I hate websites that are built phone-only, meaning, you have to retract a few meters from a screen, in order to read it somewhat comfortably. (Then, you've to go back to reach for the mouse and scroll, since the screen page is already over.) And it doesn't stop with the presentation: On a mobile device, three to four paragraphs is already an article, while on a screen it's the beginning of an abstract…

So there's always a mobile-only, a screen-only, a mobile-first, a screen-first and only rarely a general media web. It will depend on the author and the intended audiences.

> Back then you could slap together some HTML, add a picture and an under-construction GIF and call it a day. Everyone with their huge 800x600 monitors would see the same thing.

How I remember it was that HTML standards were lagging far behind what browsers did. So you you put a "Best viewed with Netscape <version number here>" GIF there, or even "Best viewed with Mozilla" if you weren't afraid of turning back some people.

> many suspects in the "who killed the web" mystery

Obviously it is all the fault of Millenials (/s?)

> slap together some HTML, add a picture and an under-construction GIF and call it a day

You forgot the page counter, visitor country flags and auto playing music.

What is much much harder in using some css from bootstrap or css grid/flex that will handle it?

Everything.

Writing plain HTML used to be easy - if you could edit a text file you could slap in a few tags and be happy enough.

Having to learn CSS (there is nothing easy about grid/flex) just to get a good looking site is way more effort than most people want.

Hence the reliance on content managers/social media site that do this hard work for you, at the cost of personalization.