A part of me wishes all websites were like Berkshire Hathway [0]. No javascript. No jquery. No bullshit. Fast, legible, and unpretentious.

At the same time, we also love creative expression and individualism/branding.

Perhaps we've swung the pendulum towards the latter, which caused it to spin out of control in utter unpredictable chaos. Hijacking keyboard in a browser should NEVER be allowed. I don't care about any reason.

[0] http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

Most of the actual content (the letters etc) on the Berkshire Hathaway site is in PDFs. Many are long documents with no navigation built in that are very awkward to read on mobile... As much as it's a nice example of a functioning barebones UI, it's not overall a great experience if it's main thing is serving PDFs. Unless I'm missing something, which I wouldn't mind learning, of course.

I agree with you about just leaving the damn keyboard alone though.

Perhaps BH is a bad example.

How about these:

http://text.npr.org/

http://lite.cnn.io/en

http://valentinpapon.com/

More at the following link, but I warn you some of the websites go to a great extent in the favor of functionalism/brutalist expressions to the point where the damn thing is completely unusable. Cool though, very.

http://brutalistwebsites.com/

Also note the recurring themes:

  - Monospaced fonts
  - Full saturated blue #0000FF everywhere
  - unexpectedly large fonts
  - Retro 80's vibe (cursors, fonts, gifs, etc.)

:-) I find all of this very interesting.

Those are definitely better examples! And I take your point that we may be in a period that will be looked back on as overkill when it comes to design.

For some reason, I can’t scroll http://valentinpapon.com/ on iOS.

Wow, I just though that was the end of the content but you are right!

I’d agree with the example if it also adjusted to fit mobile correctly. As it is now, it just looks like a website stuck in the past.