Notice How Old websites look better than new websites | Hacker News Reader

Notice How Old websites look better than new websites

yingster.net

33 pointsMINTYSTAR1229 comments

"Better" is subjective a lot of the time, but load times are not. Modern web is so. slow.

It's like watching that Sloth in Zootopia sometimes browsing the modern web.

I agree better is subjective to be fair.

This is not even the modern web generally but the abstracted one where everything is rendered trough multiple cycles of JavaScript.

I was trained to be a web dev back when React and co were still shiny new things and we still did stuff with serverside code, HTML and CSS. And my god am I glad I never went into it professionally, instead getting trained up in mobile development where I've been since.

And the absolute STATE of web development is just atrocious. I maintain a number of sites for smaller businesses local to me, and all of my sites are absolutely lightning fast compared to everything I have to use on the day-to-day. Like I'm sorry the fact that our confluence pages at work genuinely take upwards of 15 seconds to complete load/DOM jumbling/and be ready to use should be a fucking five star embarrassment to everyone who works there. It's fucking TEXT you guys. Rich text, and pictures, and occasionally files, but none of this shit is hard and the fact that your pipelines crash out on it so often and make this take numerous seconds to render is absolutely ridiculous.

And then there's stuff like Smartsheet where it feels like half the time the pages just DON'T LOAD. AT ALL.

I have similar experience with Conflu and Jira in big organizations. I believe it is because they are integrated on every other bullshit system available. Not because the rendering it self is slow.

> I maintain a number of sites for smaller businesses local to me, and all of my sites are absolutely lightning fast compared to everything I have to use on the day-to-day.

I'm ashamed to admit I became so used to our molasses web, that when one website loads instantly, my first thought is "This website must be very old and unmaintained". Having reached this stage, I've brought dishonor to my entire bloodline.

> Having reached this stage, I've brought dishonor to my entire bloodline.

A warrior when subjected to so many sub-par weapons himself becomes dulled and broken. This is not dishonor at all; it is the greatest battle of wills one can engage in: to remember that websites, like all software, can indeed be great. They can be fast, reliable, made well and maintainable, and in fact should be all of these things, no matter how much dull-witted managers may be upset at the cost.

(I tried my best to channel Kratos for that one and I think I was decently successful)

And half the sites have so many ads that I nope out.

I’m slightly perplexed when seeing an HN user not using an ad blocker.

It is subjective but it's certainly more readable with less useless overhead.

OP's site was very slow to load though. Maybe there is something to modern Astro on Cloudflare so your site doesn't die when a couple dozen people want to read it in the same hour.

What is this engagement-bait headline? The content of the site is simply an old-looking site.

Agreed.

not only is it old looking, it actually IS old

Crafted websites look better than thoughtless websites. Age has nothing to do with it, unless you're going way back to dial-up and the very beginning when WWW was competing with Gopher and BBS. Webmaster was a real job. Go find out what happened to webmasters; it answers a lot of questions.

The only thing that makes older-style websites harder to browse is the full-width text. My monitor is 24 inches wide, and while the text isn't super small, if my browser is taking up the full screen, I have to physically swivel my head side to side to read the text, and if this was multiple paragraphs, it would be pretty difficult to keep track of where I am. (Which is why most of the time, my browser is sized to be about half of the screen, anyway.)

(The blog portion actually does keep it to a nice width, though - it's only the landing page that has this problem.)

> Which is why most of the time, my browser is sized to be about half of the screen, anyway.

Same here, and I find that preferable. Instead of the web page prescribing line length, have the user fully control it via their browser.

> My monitor is 24 inches wide

43" here.

Amusingly, Firefox' Split View helps here.

I have the opposite preference -- I prefer full-width text so I can have two pages up side by side on a 16:9 monitor, and usually 3 up on a wider format. I feel like I'm constantly grumbling about all the wasted white space on pages and their general total failure to be responsive to a half width screen that _isn't_ a mobile phone/tablet. Maybe we should just have an open standard for default display settings so we can both (all) have our cake?

Is there a list of websites with really really spartan design that function very effectively on any platform? Sort of the apogee of "work smarter not harder". I like https://decoded.legal by way of example.

What is this, a webpage for ants?? This need at least.... 3 times more javascript frameworks.

This website didnt load well on mobile

when this site was made it wasn't meant for mobile.

Clicking the back button and having it work as expected was nice, also.

I've missed you, gradient navigation bar with a dropshadow

Nostolgia

All nostalgia is a longing for youth.

Honestly, I think whether a website looks good or not is subjective older websites do not necessarily look better than new sites it just depends on the creativeness of the developer.

HTML 1 forever! Max: HMTL 2.0...

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