Say what? On the contrary, I think that it's splendidly simple to read LWN, because there's no distraction. It's a good, clean site; it respects the styling I instruct my browser to apply to it; it displays just fine in links, lynx, elinks, ewww, emacs-w3m, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Edge — if that's not professional, then what is?
The HTML is very clean and readable. They do use CSS.
Granted, it doesn't look trendy. Indeed, it looks like something from the 90s/00s. But once one updates to a20`6 style, one then has to spend money in 2017, 2018, spring 2019, summer 2019, fall 2019, winter 2019, January 2020, February 2020 — one will be paying designers and artists until the end of time.
Would I appreciate a somewhat more current look? Sure. Would I trade good HTML and universal readability for a more current look? Hell no.
2016 was a total mistake. Let's just revert, and then wait for 2020-LTS.
Argh, I blame an unfamiliar keyboard. And being half-asleep. Sigh
It's clean, very simple and renders fine in everything, even mobile. No distracting content, proper font and font spacing.
This would probably fail a basic Universal Accessibility test based on that alone.
Granted, the current trend to make everything feel like a shitty JavaScript application would be taking it too far, but lwn.net is definitely not a pleasure to read. Yes, it displays "just fine" in links, lynx, elinks, etc., if your definition of "just fine" is Fefe's Blog.
Hey, fefe has some pretty nice stylesheets for his blog
https://blog.fefe.de/?css=darkgreen.css
https://blog.fefe.de/?css=cold_blue.css
https://blog.fefe.de/?css=ascii.css
https://blog.fefe.de/?css=topaz.css
https://blog.fefe.de/?css=janvsfefe.css
This is how it looks if you visit the site without a CSS cookie.
And you're commenting this on Hacker News. A site built up on tables, inline style-definitions, and where it for half a decade refused to add a simple...
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
I'm not saying it's not a factor, but clearly this seems to be an issue you're able to overcome, given the right circumstances and content.
Also, I'd like to think of LWNs look and feel as a "solid" and clean web-page, the way they used to look and work back in the days when HTML was simple. Nothing excessive, and no overdone CSS/JS madness, which increasingly seems to be the norm.
You just point your browser at the page, the browser retrieves the HTML, the HTML contains the content, and the overall wastefulness of network bandwidth is way below 10%. It's the way I wished the web still worked.
I have never thought much about the design of the site and that's a good thing. It succeeds in delivering information quickly and efficiently, which I imagine is the most important thing for LVN's readers. I would consider almost any new UX feature a regression if there is even a small chance it breaks my browser or slows down page loads.
Really? I've always viewed plain HTML sites in the complete opposite way. They tend to have really good, well thought-out content. There's no filler or clickbait with them.
Excessive CSS is, well, excessive. That said, a tiny pinch of CSS goes a long way towards making a page readable and aesthetic.
On LWN there is unnecessary and redundant metadata accentuated!
Everything on HN is clearly thought out, and almost nothing on LWN is.
Ditto. Maybe I loaded the page yesterday. What does '1 hour ago' mean? Was it updated by JavaScript? Is it an hour from now, or from yesterday, or what?
Give me a timestamp, and I know.
"N minutes ago" is compact and does not require any client-side JS to provide an unambiguous value.
At least LWN includes the timezone, which is a step ahead of most of the sites I've used.
I love that phrase for all it implies about the point of view of the user thereof — to my knowledge, every site is an HTML site.
Underneath each comment's title is a full-height line with a font stating the UTC timestamp, and in the next line we can finally read the actual comment.
I can't be the first person to criticise those issues, and from the fact that they haven't changed it already I think they actually don't care about these kind of things.
I didn't downvote your post... but I relate to the frustration that when we DO get content in the former category, the top comment is always a critique of website layout or font kerning or something else that tries to pull it into the second category.
Can you just... not?
It most certainly is.
You acknowledge in your parent comment that you are not the target audience for this site. I assure you that the sort of crowd that's into Linux kernel development by and large prefers web design that other audiences would find archaic.
Conversely, were LWN to have switched to Bootstrap five years ago, or some Medium-like look today, or whatever the next transient fad will be five years from now... their audience would by and large viscerally hate it.
Designer types indulge too much in the fantasy of OBJECTIVE standards for "organized", "hard to access", etc. It's all subjective. Hence, fashion. For people who enjoy working on green-screen terminal applications, switching to a web app version is like giving their workflow a lobotomy. For people who prefer mobile-first minimalist web apps, the reverse is true.
LWN, and it's related subculture, happens to not be your scene. That's okay. But it's perfectly fine to just, well, not comment. Because it is so painfully lame how whenever a deep technical topic comes up on HN, half of the comment section deals with website aesthetics. Hey guys, if some topics just aren't for you, then it's... just... not... for... you... and... that's... okay.
For me, "design elements" tend to make content harder to consume.
> it just feels clunky
Pages that load megabytes of JavaScript to display kilobytes of text feel clunky. The modern trend toward large icons, large fonts, wide margins, and slow response times because everything has to go through JS/XHR makes websites that keep with today's design fads feel like toys, while websites that present information without a ton of JS and CSS baggage feel like tools.
I feel like design fads are partly a clever marketing ploy to keep web designers in business -- "it doesn't look modern" shouldn't be a justification to plop down the big bucks to redesign a perfectly functioning website every 3-5 years, but it is.
> large icons, large fonts, wide margins
I have 20/20 vision but even for me, all these are boons. It's the "design types" that want small fonts because they look cool. But for reading, give me a 14 or 16 font any day of the week, much more relaxing on the eyes.
All those things you're complaining about improve readability and discoverability.
I can't even imagine how people with bad eyesight think about this topic...
> and slow response times because everything has to go through JS/XHR
This does, indeed, look like a (software) design fad.
For me that's a feature, not a bug. I'm interested about the content itself, not about with what color or what font that content is presented as.
I don't know what the original commenter meant, but the text could be a bit bigger and the line lengths and spacing controlled.
The comment metadata could be shortened and humanized, though the audience may find it useful.
There's some bugs with the dropdowns on mobile (haven't been able to close one).
I don't know if that will get them subscriptions, but it'd make the site easier to read.
Ironically, if you look at the HTML classes, they are using a CSS library typically used to make "modern" sites many here revile: http://purecss.io/
The article's title is repeated throughout the comments list and emphasized. The other comment metadata has the same visual emphasis as the actual comments (except the link and author jump out more than the comment itself). The articles themselves expand to the full width of the window.
There is plenty of introductory material on visual emphasis around, not just covering emphasis in textual media, e.g.: http://daphne.palomar.edu/design/emphasis.html
I agree that line length according to more recent studies seems to be less consistent (some recent studies say speed actually increases with longer lines but there doesn't seem to be any data on comprehension/retention and preference seems to be biased towards shorter lines -- again all of these factors may be cultural). But visual emphasis is a thing -- it's hard-wired into how human visual perception works.
Most techniques for making metadata less emphasized make the metadata objectively less readable. I like having the metadata there. I like being able to read it. I have no trouble reading the text (because it's a decent size and the layout handles zooming without issue.)
Also, the title of the article is repeated throughout and drastically emphasised (considering nothing else is that visually distinct and it even has a solid background color).
Using a line break between meta data and content is also a familiar paradigm. Spend 20 years reading your email with mutt or mailx and you'll catch on. ;)
Good design makes the content more evident and less tiring to read. The two go hand-in-hand.
Do you favor poorly written articles simply because you're interested in the "content"? I expect not, so why the latent notion that "function = good" and "form = useless"? It's intellectually lazy.
LWN gets me what I want. It is the most important resource for a linux kernel or in general Free Software enthusiast. Average HN crowd perhaps does not fit into that stereotype.
You're right the LWN site is utter trash. It's 2016, why aren't they embarrassed of their own incompetence? What comes next? Are they going to tell me to read a book?
I wouldn't say that it comes across as unprofessional, though — rather the opposite. To me, LWN appears to be professional: no-frills, focused on substance over form.
But the kicker is, whether or not someone thinks the site looks professional, it's a subscriber-based service that's been running for nearly two decades, that has hardcore professionals subscribing to it. It's not FOTM.
> Nathan Willis, who has been an LWN contributor for many years and an employee since 2012, will be stepping down at the end of September to pursue an unmissable opportunity to study one of his non-journalistic passions: fonts and type design.
Related?
Nate is not going to be working on the fluffy parts of typography.
I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font). Also it seems like they don't use CSS to enhance the site's UX at all. If you look at the mobile site, they have some sort of dropdown to show the menu, which is then also way too small to properly click on. Issues like this are allover the site: Tables without any proper spacing / borders, mixing centered and left-aligned content with no reason, etc.
For me it just feels clunky and even though the information they aggregate seems to have some value for others, the presentation is just way off.