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Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

Meta: I love these 90s-2000s website aesthetic. Simple HTML, less CSS, extremely good readability, very little telemetry and data collection (in general). I wish we could go back to that era. It felt like every website was a beautiful discovery journey than just the same old bland minimalist, flat design bs every site has today with "aCcEpT cOokIeS" banners with dark patterns throughout.

/endrant

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The site actively discourages readers by scrolling text in a semi-transparent window over an image. It's an awful aesthetic.

It is not an iframe. It is just a background image set to the body tag. This is their actual CSS code for body:

   body {
      font: 100%/1.3 Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
      background-color: #666;
      background-image: url("https://offbeatoregon.com/assets-2010/1012b_gorge-highway-crown-point/crown-point-1800px.jpg");
      background-repeat: no-repeat;
      background-position: center top;
      background-attachment: fixed;
      margin: 0;
      padding: 0;
      color: #222;
   }

I can understand it may not be everyone's cup of tea, though.

The iOS reader view is spectacular. Easy to read source code makes for a better experience for both humans and machines :)

The reader view is broken. Despite my other comment this is really bad web design. So bad that I couldn't share this article with normal people who won't put up with this. I really wanted to since the story is so interesting.

Haha this page uses google adsense and the CSS is so bad that the page source has apologies in the comments. I wouldn't doubt if they didn't add the GDPR banner simply because nobody cares.

This site would otherwise be fine and not lose any charm if it just had a media query to switch to a single column layout and larger font size for screens below a certain px width (768px usually for mobile).

I don't get why it's not implemented. I didn't really have to do much in my user styles except remove the float in the "barBod" class and set the width to 100% on the table elements.

Anyway the obligatory related guideline:

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

Relevant: https://justfuckingusehtml.com/

That site kind of defeats its objective by looking ugly and making it clear why people don't make sites like that.

The https://offbeatoregon.com/ one looks ok though if a bit busy maybe.

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