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Comment by ainar-g | Hacker News Reader

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ainar-g

Some examples of what I consider timeless (and good) UI on the internet:

* Hacker News (duh)

* c2 wiki

* Wikipedia (it changes, but thankfully not radically)

I would have added Reddit, but alas. Seeing how they plan to change to that... other thing makes me really sad.

Anything else?

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Hacker News is a miserable experience on mobile. Even on desktop, the upvote/downvote buttons are needlessly small and give no confirmation; I often find myself clicking "unvote" because I wasn't sure if I upvoted or downvoted.

I agree with you. Partly this is because mobile browser vendors have made some really annoying decisions (zoom doesn't reflow text).

But an upvote gives you an [unvote] button, a downvote gives you an [undown] button.

Don’t forget how Code snippets require lots of horizontal scrolling on mobile. It’s bad but understandable when it’s actual code, but it’s just aweful when someone is using code formatting to represent a quote.

> It’s bad but understandable when it’s actual code

My 80 column terminal does not need horizontal scrolling on wide code. Why does my browser need it?

The materialistic hn app is what I've been using for a while (and right now, actually). But i also saw several other readers for the site. Worth looking into one of them if you look at posts on the go a lot.

But haven't c2 wiki changed for a slightly worse? Don't get me wrong - it's still better than most. It's now client side rendered. Also there was a short time after it introduced this change, when it looked far more wonky.

It's not a coincidence that all those pages could as good work with minimal CSS. That's why I would like to see a pure HTML cross-platform web browser. With nice proportional fonts and good support for media. It could even try to do some more complex typesetting. So links/lynx and other console browser do not cut it. Dillo AFAIK is no longer developed and it's not available on mobile.

Side rant:

I hate the recent trend with adding those obnoxious position:fixed or sticky bars at the top. All this fight to reduce browser chrome (from which Chrome takes it's name) has given web-designers more space to waste. It's horrible when one has: a wide-screen monitor, a small monitor, not full-screen window, a smartphone, a smartphone with a virtual keyboard visible. So pretty much always...

On this hypothetical HTML-only browser it wouldn't obscure the content. Just as all those newsletter, cookies and GDPR consent overlays.

>That's why I would like to see a pure HTML cross-platform web browser. With nice proportional fonts and good support for media.

I assume you are not using Firefox? Then you should, because it has Reader View mode, which removes all the JS BS, but leaves the text and the figures in. Not sure about <audio> and <video>, but it's a real blessing. I don't know how Chrome people go without it.

More info here: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/reader-view/.

Firefox is close. But. I would like a permanent reader mode. There is an extension like this [0], however it does not yet work on Android, per author.

Also I like the idea of a small, simple and lightning fast package. It would just work and would have a miniscule attack surface. At least comparing with all other browsers.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...

FYWD; https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/ubkidr7yuc7azg9hdnl7lq

Stack Overflow/Exchange is pretty good...the UI doesn't get in the way of doing things. Unfortunately, they have also been making moves away from the content being the most important thing.

The SO UI for participants (rather than people looking for an existing answer) is mediocre-ish to weak. They seem to be a thoughtful lot so I imagine some of it is deliberate but that itself points to more fundamental design problems - making things annoying is better at annoying people than it is at discouraging certain types of user activity.

* Google search (esp. the non-JS version)

* GitHub

* ia.net and some of their work

* dict.cc

Not gonna lie, I find them all pretty bad. Their styles seem optimized for the coder, not the user.

The CamelCase of c2 was efficient for the writer. Not so much for the reader.

c2 before they rolled out their new ridiculous client-side rendering design, yes. Otherwise, I agree with you.

Timeless design is one that exposes the nature of the tool and helps use it to achieve its purpose, with no superfluous elements added.

mcmaster.com is on my shortlist of timeless designs.

IETF RFCs

Oh, that's a good one. Also W3C documents.

TPS Reports.

"Timeless" in the sense of "unchanged for a long time", but IMHO not as "unchanged because they are still great". They are optimized for different times, and needlessly bad to consume today.

suck.com

craigslist.com

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