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Minimal Web

mnmlist.com

89 pointszacharykai55 comments

A good sized readable font is a bit funny though. That line of text is very small on my phone and I presume most people today browse on phones. I can also imagine some phones with a higher resolution show this text even smaller making it completely illegible.

I'm all about minimalism so long as it doesn't hurt UX but these examples of minimalism always end up going too far. It's like it becomes a competition for minimalists - "look how much more minimal I am than you! Therefore I'm a better minimalist."

Interesting, I'm also on my phone (Pixel 6) and I found the text on the site to be somewhat too big. Sounds like it's different for some reason?

But I agree, I don't think this website is revolutionizing readability by being extremely plain.

Interesting considering the Pixel 6 has 403 PPI and my phone Nothing Phone (1) has 402 PPI. So almost identical in that regard. Maybe it's a browser difference (Firefox here).

There are other styling bugs: on an iPhone, there’s no vertical space between a subhead the content below as well, and there’s too much space between a para and a bulleted list.

Why not be minimal in implementation, too, and just use default styling? Don’t fear Times New Roman…

Ah, yes, and my favorite: white text on a white background. Default to defaults.

In my minimal blog I use this, it seems to be working pretty well on a wide range of devices:

    /* styles.css */

    html {
      max-width: 70ch;
      padding: 3em 1em;
      margin: auto;
      line-height: 1.75;
      font-size: 1.25em;
    }

This page was created almost twelve years ago. Mobile phones were not the main way to consume pages at that time for most of the world. I think even meta viewport did not yet exist back then.

Looks good on my iPhone 11

Apparently the iPhone 11 is 324 PPI whilst my Nothing Phone (1) is 402 PPI. Probably why it looks bigger to you, but I still wonder whether it would look good on your phone to a person with less than good eyesight. In any case, readability shouldn't depend on the user device. There are plenty of ways to get responsive font sizes in CSS.

On the aspects of logging and analytics. Back in the dark-ages, before javascript was a thing, we relied on webserver logs and local database entries. Later came the infamous transparent pixel for cross-site tracking.

How many websites could suffice with such analytics today, I wonder? Has Google Analytics, and the likes, sold us on learned helplessness to support their own interests of getting cross-site data from everyone to power their advertising? Perhaps my idea of tracking value is stuck in the dark-ages as well…

Totally agree. I’ve found goaccess to be the perfect tool for this. No tracking at all on the user’s side and enough information in the logs for me to get a feel for how much traffic I’m getting.

There was a post here recently about anonymising the IP addresses in the logs to be absolutely sure that you don’t end up collecting any personally identifying information (PII).

>, we relied on webserver logs and local database entries. [...] How many websites could suffice with such analytics today, I wonder? Has Google Analytics, and the likes, sold us on learned helplessness to [...] to power their advertising?

No, it's not just serving Google's own interests for advertising. The GoogleAnalytics tags & tracking is also serving the desires of the content creators and authors.

Think of it as 2 different levels of data: (1) server connections data -- vs -- (2) demographics data

(1) Local server logs of anonymous users will have data like ip addresses and web browser user agent strings. One can use this for monitoring bandwidth, analyzing DDOS attacks, decide on Cloudflare, etc. It's "sysadmin" type of data vs "marketing" data. Yes, one can do some limited demographic info such as ip geolocation cross referencing and/or "mobile-vs-desktop-ratio" from user-agent strings but server logs don't have rich enough data to satisfy content creators.

(2) GoogleAnalytics has higher-level data such as demographics[1]. Content creators like to get extra insights into "who their audience is". Male-vs-female ratios, young/old, etc

That's why a so-called "simple" minimalist website such as https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ ... that lectures readers on avoiding useless tech ... still has the author motivated to embed GoogleAnalytics into it. (Ctrl+U View Source to see GA script tag at the bottom.)

Can't web authors just blog without giving a care about fine-grained audience demographics?!? Sure they can. But many of them don't. To them, getting insights into their audience helps them shape the next article or adjust their content, etc.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=google+analyltics+demographi...

> Can't web authors just blog without giving a care about

to wit: thats the whole reason for blogging... giving a care and hoping for audiance. (audiance - those that hear)

I could dive deeper into etymology... of the web.

>in the dark-ages, before javascript was a thing"

back in your day (and mine) -- there was never such a thing as 'product manager' (read marketing exec MBA - who runs the web show)

Bill hicks would have a word

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY

So I’m in the “I don’t give a crap about analytics” camp. I don’t use GA or similar tools and I occasionally run my server logs though go access if I want to get a sense of what’s going on.

From my experience, neither of the two methods is bulletproof.

GA clearly can’t track people with ad blockers and server logs don’t suffer from that problem. But they do suffer from extreme noise. RSS requests, bots, scrapers, you name it. There’s a lot of crap mixed with regular humans visiting my site.

At the end of the day, I think logs are fine if you just want to get a broad picture of what’s happening.

I do believe people with personal blogs shouldn’t care about analytics at all. Just focus on the content and ignore the rest.

> [...] server logs don’t suffer from that problem. But they do suffer from extreme noise. RSS requests, bots, scrapers, you name it. There’s a lot of crap mixed with regular humans visiting my site.

Looking at the raw logs is pretty pointless at any scale, unless you're investigating a specific production issue. There are analytics tools that ingest server logs, filter/aggregate the data, and make pretty dashboards. I used to use something that I found in the Debian repos long ago, can't remember the name now, coz

> I do believe people with personal blogs shouldn’t care about analytics at all. Just focus on the content and ignore the rest.

This.

Well I’m not suggesting that one should look at raw logs. I’m suggesting using something like https://goaccess.io/

Emails still make use of the transparent pixel.

It’s not about making use of archaic conventions. It’s more about hiring competent people who can perform analytics without disruption. That, though, like so much of the article, requires tremendous wishful thinking.

The commercial web is always going to be slow and bloated because the standards and browsers permit and tolerate unbelievable levels of gross negligence. The people doing the work also typically have absolutely no idea what they are doing and are super happy when they can just get text to display on the screen using the worlds largest frameworks.

The incompetence is so real that I refuse to do that kind of work any more. There is just so much whining and crying at the mere suggestion of mild improvements. It took half a year of unemployment last year, but fortunately I was able to find a new line of work that benefits from my prior programming experience. Maybe in the next few years AI will replace the whiners that require 10mb of code to put text on screen.

I agree with a lot of these ideas but I do not get the obsession with short urls. E.g., why not make it easy for readers to see the date of when something was published?

In this case I cannot even see a publication date on the post itself (looking at the archive it says it is from December 26, 2012). I would personally prefer a URL like /2012/minimal-web/ rather than /w/.

Depends on the post`s content whether the date is relevant at all.

Also, what if it's a technical post that was published a decade ago but updated last week?

Many people would probably dismiss the info just by looking at the date.

I would never add the date, but I agree with the shorturls.

A good URL should not be too long but also not too short. (Although intermediate paths can be short, e.g. /u/123 instead of /users/123 is fine)

Good point! There is a difference between blog posts and pages to take into account here. For blog posts, I would like to see at least the publication year in the URL, as well as the exact date in the post itself.

For pages, I am fine with leaving out the date in the URL, but I would still like to see a publication date + last update date (if not a URL to a changelog).

My issue is that it can often be difficult to evaluate whether a date 'is relevant at all' at the time of publication. For that reason, I prefer bloggers to be transparent about when something was published (and/or revised).

But that's exactly what I meant:

I am all for a very transparent "published at" and "last updated at"

BUT NOT in the URL

Because either you would update the URL to the last updated_at (which leads to complications if updated often, need to keep a 302 for each updated/outdated url although it's not moved permanently, rather temporarily until next update)

Or you would be stuck with the original published date in the URL and potential readers could dismiss it based on a wrong assumption (that it's outdated)

An alternative is to keep posting new entries for every update, but that gets annoying as well, because you still need to show somehow that the old versions are not the newest.

So I totally agree to be upfront about original publishing date as well as last update date, but I would not put it in the URL, not for blog posts or any other page.

Fair point. My personal preference is still for blog posts to share this information in the URL, i.e., to communicate when a blog post was published even before I click a URL.

Usually bloggers tend to write new entries if they change their mind or have any updates to previous blog posts. I personally prefer this approach rather than changing the content of old blog posts. But I agree that this might be more of a personal preference.

It may just be that we consume different bloggers is all!

I read quite a few who update texts, e.g. in the space of Rust or Webgpu

In any case, I got your point. Thanks for the respectful, interesting discussion. Have a wonderful day!

This kind of wonderfully civilised and respectful discussion between people who do not see something the same way is why I love hn. Thank you both, have a good Sunday!

I feel the dates of publication and last update should be readily available, that is in the content and at the beginning. Of course this goes against minimalism, and plenty of maximalist websites omit this information as well.

This looks great. I'm building a blogging platform sharing much of this simplicity: https://lmno.lol My blog is at https://lmno.lol/alvaro

You can drag and drop your entire blog from a markdown file https://indieweb.social/@xenodium/112265481282475542

You can read blogs from anywhere, even terminal (no JS needed).

No need to sign up or log in to try it out. You can edit ephemeral blogs.

I haven't officially launched, but if you'd like to start blogging now, I'll be happy to share an invite code. Ping help AT lmno.lol.

The emergence of business aspect on the web was the main mistake IMO. But it's probably a common pattern in every space. It's true that it shifts focus on being viewed rather than expressing or documenting something you care about in the form you prefer. In the old days it was a natural average.. lots of websites from classical to weird, on all kinds of topics, without a lot of structure. Everytime there was a lightness aspect.

Add Google/SEO on top of that and everything starts to conform to shallow metrics.

I'd pay a bit every month just to have tiny, light, non marketed websites.

Mostly sensible, but...

a minimalist website should leave out: [...] tags or related posts

That's taking it a bit too far. Those are what make the web a web!

You could replace those "tags" or "related posts" with something that I consider to make the web a web; hyperlinks! Put them inside the post when you mention said other post, and done :)

Yeah but tags are also useful, not just for the reader but the writer(s). If you have a nerds blog writing mostly about electronics, programming and rice dishes having a special hyperlink that shows you just the posts of that category can be useful. Whether it is, depends on the content, both in kind and amount.

I am a proponent of minimal websites, but not at the cost of usability.

All of these requirements only apply to some hobbies blog. None of this apply in real world web applications, you need comments, related post to keep your users active and engaged, you need analytics to keep track of your progress.

The author of the page is not exactly a hobbyist. He is making a living from his publications since 2007 and it allowed him and his family of eight to move from a small pacific island to California. He was in Time Magazine even.

I take issue with a lot of this advice, actually.

- The name of the site is not a necessity, the url makes it clear. Weird recommendation if you aim for a "pure reading experience".

- Having a comment section doesn't detract from the reading at all. It's after reading your content, and can then enhance the discussion. Fine if you want to leave it out, but encouraging discussion on Twitter instead isn't 'minimal'.

- Minimal images isn't something to strive for, visuals can greatly enhance your content.

- Short urls look nice, but just `w` as your slug is just confusing. No harm in normal length urls.

- Medium.com is used as an example, that site is 80% popups. Paul Graham's site is also awful to use (especially on mobile). Great content, hidden behind bad websites.

- Why would related posts, or even tags, be bad? Navigation doesn't have to distract, and is a tool for the user.

The author makes some fair points, nobody likes the bloat of the modern web. But you don't have to go "full minimalist" either, your website would be greatly improved if you change the #ffffff background with #000 text. It's the same with motherfuckingwebsite.com vs bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com; small changes can greatly increase the appeal, which will help your content get seen and spread. Like others mentioned, prioritizing a good user experience is probably what you want, not striving for minimalism.

No need to fetishize minimalism when you can target usability instead. Things can be too minimal but they cannot be too usable.

They probably may want to fix few things with their own design - https://imgur.com/a/xu9J1P3

Yeah the headings being teeny weeny is jarring.

Differentiating headings using smaller size than text is legit approach as hiearchy is created using difference (not size). Its often used in print.

But this is so badly executed it looks more like a mistake.

Judging also by the lack of padding around section headers I'm pretty sure them being in a smaller font was not a design decision in this case, but rather a lack of testing.

On my Android Firefox 129.0.2 the text only takes up the middle third of the screen horizontally. I get the same linebreaks as in your screenshot though. For me this is not nice to read and feels like way too much wasted space.

> tags or related posts

Definitely can’t get on board with this one. There’s nothing stopping some basic hyperlinks be at the top or bottom.

When I find a personal site I tend to spend a lot of time browsing around as I enjoy reading posts where I enjoy the technical content and/or writing style.

Having some navigation aids means I get to see what the author considers related and important.

This could be limiting for more complex content: forms with autocomplete, sortable tables, image galleries with navigation and zoom, etc.

That’s fine - the project intends to support a minimalist UX after all. My point is that maximalist UX has user friendly patterns too.

Some of the most useful websites on www are those of math and com sc faculty - typically older generation - that has C code for their famous algorithm, used freely by millions. These guys couldn’t be bothered with formatting. Nor do we care.

I agree with most of this, but the idea should be extended to the authoring side, which is usually the opposite of friction free and minimal, so then the author is less likely to post. Thus I created my microblog CMS

Minimalism definitely simplifies things, but ditching analytics entirely could be risky, especially for growth. Server logs are nice, but they don’t give you the same insights into user behavior

Same point made in a more entertaining and less pretentious way:

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

The idea of minimal web is appealing from some angle, but people add all the non-minimal stuff because it works. If you want to have readers, it is silly to avoid making basic optimizations. If you don't care about having readers - why not just write a journal?

You shouldn't be setting any formatting like the font or column width for a "real" "minimal" website. The browser should be handling that, in theory anyway.

In theory you can rely in the user’s default font. In practice because every site overrides those defaults you will get something they probably don’t want. Respecting font size by only using relative sizing is a good thing, but choosing a better font than times new roman is a good idea.

I do wish websites would stop using custom fonts and just use a stack from https://modernfontstacks.com/

But I know from experience that this is often not decided by the technical team.

Can we have a search engine that only indexes sites like this and does not index any site that does meet the requirements listed?

can we get all these "pure web" people to put their content on RSS or some sort of "pure information hub" like wikipedia? HTML clearly is not the medium for this anymore, have you seen how bloated and NOT content-centric (anymore) the spec is?

Safari's reader mode declutters any non-minimal website.

Disagree. A popup asking for email (contact info) is an essential part of building and maintaining an audience. Blog posts don't exist in a vacuum.

It's as important as ever to maintain direct relationships with your audience.

Just publish a book then? Let people be creative with the web, why not?

Motherfucking Website[1] Law: Every year, someone reinvents a minimalistic, no-nonsense website concept / CSS framework.

[1]: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

The better version was better:

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

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