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Notice How Old websites look better than new websites

30 points MINTYSTAR12 59 minutes ago 22 comments

pavel_lishin 48 minutes ago | parent

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.)

layer8 45 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

justsomehnguy 36 minutes ago | parent

> My monitor is 24 inches wide

43" here.

Amusingly, Firefox' Split View helps here.

ed312 16 minutes ago | parent

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?

1970-01-01 47 minutes ago | parent

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.

trjordan 46 minutes ago | parent

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

darknavi 44 minutes ago | parent

"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.

Tryvrsakjo10 40 minutes ago | parent

I agree better is subjective to be fair.

herbst 26 minutes ago | parent

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

ToucanLoucan 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

hsuduebc2 16 minutes ago | parent

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.

analog8374 22 minutes ago | parent

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

layer8 16 minutes ago | parent

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

hsuduebc2 19 minutes ago | parent

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

blfr 12 minutes ago | parent

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.

exabrial 44 minutes ago | parent

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

Tryvrsakjo10 41 minutes ago | parent

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.

devin 31 minutes ago | parent

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

gvieri 27 minutes ago | parent

HTML 1 forever! Max: HMTL 2.0...

carabiner 25 minutes ago | parent

All nostalgia is a longing for youth.

aaronvg 21 minutes ago | parent

This website didnt load well on mobile

doboprobodyne 5 minutes ago | parent

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.