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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

I love the design of that website.

I didn’t design it but my HTML 3.0 skills from the 90s could have. That being said, it’s not laden with ads and is fairly easy to navigate which is pretty nice. The mobile view looks like a desktop version scrunched into my phone but is still alright, I guess.

What do you like about the design?

Gives me nostalgia for learning about random subjects on the early web, pre-Wikipedia. Stumbling upon a site like this would be a treasure trove if you were interested in these back in the day.

I like that it's unassuming and content-driven. It doesn't communicate an aspiration to be a design object or project focus group assumptions about user experience.

It just presents a lot of information and makes that information appropriately navigable. The lack of trendy design language makes me believe that the operator knows and cares about the subject matter itself, which I find reassuring and refreshing in a world that's become saturated in blogspam, SEO, subscription sales, and ad engagement.

I like how it feels unique and themes itself around the content it contains. Instead of just being yet another website with a flat simple design. We need more websites like this.

Authenticity.

Straight out of 1990s!

Many of the pages have:

  <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.7 [en]C-CCK-MCD NSCPCD47 (Win95; I) [Netscape]">

which would place them around 1999.

The website itself is like a fossil.

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