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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

> It actually is very hard to design a responsive UX that can handle anything from the smallest smartphone up to ultrawide monitors.

A motherfucking website made with plain html, no css and no javascript is responsive and works everywhere. Any problems found when you go beyond this are entirely self-inflicted.

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A text column the whole width of your screen is readable on phones and tablets (portrait) but unreadable on notebooks and desktops. So columns are necessary… Also firm design usually is better if labels and fields are inlined. That’s just the beginning… you can’t avoid design decisions even if you want to favor functionality and content over form.

And that website does nothing. It’s just text, and it has one image that’s too small on a mobile view.

Now try to do the same thing with a complex app like your bank’s website, which needs to handle every type of account including credit cards, checking accounts, and investment accounts, rewards, and a travel/shopping portal.

> And that website does nothing. It’s just text, and it has one image

Which is pretty much what 99% of websites need to be able to display. That includes many sub-sections of web applications.

> Now try to do the same thing with a complex app like your bank’s website

Fun story, my bank has a website that works great on both my phone and my PC. On the one I can navigate it fully with one thumb, on the other it is information-dense and respects that I have a high precision pointing device available. They also offer different Apps for Phone and Desktop.

9 of the top 20 most visited websites primarily deal in video and multimedia. I disagree that “99%” of websites “just need text.”

Those are the outliers, and winner-take-all ones to boot - they ate most other websites that "primarily deal in video and multimedia". Everything else deals primarily with text.

So what you’re saying is that the websites with the fancy videos and interactive content ate all the text-based websites, but that the customer is wrong and they’re going to the wrong websites?

Sounds like you’re the right person to convince everyone to buy cars with manual transmissions and crank windows. After all, they are more reliable and simple, and everyone is wrong for not buying them anymore.

I’d also like to know how you expect all of our serious business productivity apps to work as text-only or server-side rendered plain HTML web pages without being seriously compromised. Google Docs/Sheets/Slides? Jira? Google Meet? draw.io? Tableau? PowerBI? Gong? Notion? Slack? AWS Console? I honestly don’t even know how I would avoid getting fired if I only used text-only websites.

> So what you’re saying is that the websites with the fancy videos and interactive content ate all the text-based websites, but that the customer is wrong and they’re going to the wrong websites?

No. I'm saying that there are only few websites that "primarily deal in video and multimedia". They may take 9 spots in a top 20 list, but that 9 is like half of all such websites. The rest deal primarily with text (which includes formatted, rich text).

A bank is a bad example. The only thing we use bank websites for is to check our transactions and transfer money.

My business checking account has started offering partner promotions from the transfer screen and I’m tempted to switch to another bank because of it. Their developers and designers were tasked with delivering that component. At the same time they took away their mobile app and mobile check deposit because it was not secured properly.

Most bank websites and apps are examples of teams and organizations focusing on the wrong thing in my opinion.

Banks are basically the ideal "this is just text, tables, and forms" website that html 4 was perfect for.

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