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Comment by mdni007 | Hacker News Reader

This looks like one of those sites I made as a kid. What is the significance of this?

Many people seeing this weren't alive when you were a kid.

I heavily encourage people constantly demonstrating how to competently do things using conventional systems.

I've gotten into many arguments over this stuff. Not that these simpler approaches don't work, but they lack the formality and theater.

Some people need to see stuff like this every day until they stop creating giant towers of spaghetti that don't do anything

Well, there is an audience which likes to avoid websites with JS. I think their biggest motivation is tracking and bloat. So having a technique for a user experience without load times (after the initial load) without JS is what makes this somewhat special.

On the other hand, there have been solutions for this case for ages (like using radio buttons), so using :target is just a somewhat cleaner approach from my point of view.

Nobody else is really doing this, or was doing this. But you can't tell that it's different, that's what's neat about it. It works just like a multi-page site but there's not even any JS requirement.

A decade ago we have this niche vBulletin forum where members would self-publish news article regarding the hobby. vBulletin BBCode is pretty limited, but then the admin started to add more and more styling support via custom BBCode.

At one point we were able to create "interactive" content entirely in our heavily customized BBCode without a single line of JS, and this #target is one of the more used tricks.

That sounds like a pretty cool BBCode hack (and ultra-permissive by the admin considering...admins), I'd like to see it in action in 10-years-ago form.

I did a similar thing on my forum around 2005 but we even let members put CSS in their posts via BBCode… although it was rewritten, scoped and restricted.

But people made big “clubs” and then created these really cool semi-interactive posts using just CSS. It was really awesome what people can do.

Been doing this for over half a decade off of a template I boosted 8 years ago and have been modifying since.

Has made tens of millions in revenue.

Just assumed every developer or template seller in south asia was using this - or their clients. Probably more common than you think.

So you are using a single HTML file with no JS at all to deliver a multi-page site? Just to be clear.

To be clear, yes. With the section tag. Sometimes I even add javascript to the style section without any object orientation. Stop the presses.

That's the thing, I think most designers were probably using javascript even if alongside tricks like this without thinking it through. The current period in web design is one of the biggest "it's nice to have javascript turned off" moments we've had, so it's relevant.

If you already knew about this, the post seems like a joke, you've made millions off this for years now--that's really special, but that is also pretty subjective and doesn't mean it's not meaningful that one of the top CSS sites shared this article out this year.

Yeah, mostly its that people overestimate how much (or what kind of) tech prowess they need to convey to close a deal or offer a service that people want to pay for

Any examples you could point to?

The only slightly interesting part (which is why it's hosted on css-tricks) is not even explicitly mentioned in the article at all. It's the fact that it also uses no JS, and is all CSS based. Obviously that itself isn't crazy, though back in our days it would've been harder to do with old CSS. That is, having proper navigation/sections.

Multiple displayed pages, and potentially an entire website, are presented within a single source file.

There are no^W^W is one external dependency (the stylesheet https://john-doe.neocities.org/style.css). This could also be inlined, and is required for the concept to work. There are 75 directives and/or media queries.

The site can be browsed entirely offline once accessed.

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