The thing is you can still do all of this. But we have since built tools and frameworks to let you still do this, while giving you superpowers. I think Svelte is the best example of this. You can create a dead simple site with it and have the result you are talking about, but the real power is now you can employ many of those advanced techniques that were reserved for large web apps in the same dead simple site.

> Is tailwind really easier to work with something like - let's say - pico.css? Of course if you want to do super-elaborate layouts, then probably yes - but if you embraced a more minimalist approach?

I've used tailwind quite a bit, it's killer feature is the fact that it's just intuitive. With most CSS frameworks, even minimal ones, I always refer back to the docs to see how they do a specific thing. With Tailwind you refer to the guide a few times but very quickly pick up how it does things. I think that's why it's so popular, I've typed out classes thinking "is this a thing", and almost every single time, it was.

I absolutely loath frontend developments in companies with more than 5 engineers. In the past you may have found some spaghetti code and various abuses of jQuery but you could probably grasp the codebase in an afternoon. Nowadays every mid company codebase is a spaceship. For sure, you'll find a pseudo technical VP of engineering which enable whatever cool technology to be used and resume driven developers happy to pile on the latest Big Tech framework - which is likely to be an over-engineered, over complicated exercise in engineer retention and engineer roles marketing.

Then you have Pieter Levels pulling a mil per year with PHP and jQuery.

My first job out of college involved a Rails codebase littered with conditionally rendered jQuery snippets. It was a nightmare to figure out what code was even loaded on any given page. Give me a modern JS codebase over that any day.

Might it be possible that those expectations, and those requirements for doing "more", are not coming from the actual users/visitors to the websites - but rather from the companies owning the websites?

Because I, as a visitor of HN, come here for the IT news and the nerd stuff. I happily put up with the layout - because the sites actually meets my expectations for content. At the same time, the best, most modern, snazziest website ever... why would I go there (more than once), if there's no content of interest to me?

And that - to my experience - holds true for almost ALL visitors. They come for the content, and they put up with the layout. And this table-based layout with spacer gifs right here, imho is a lot easier to put up with, than some desing-heavy website that's perfectly optimized for conversion, engagement and retention rates and whatnot.

I think the actual problem is, that when we talk about "expectations" and "requirements" - we talk about what the HOST/SELLER wants - not what is best for the visitor.

I don't know. I just tried to use Netlify to upload a simple static Html/Javascript page I made. Now I'm trying to figure out CORS errors. Pretty sure that didn't use to be a thing. For better and worse.

CORS will eventually click for you and then it will always make sense. Until then, sorry you’re going through the muck.

(1) Tailwind uses utility classes that feel like syntactic sugar over full CSS, so I don't feel like I'm "using Tailwind for layouts" as much as "using useful CSS grid presets"

(2) Much like with margins and paddings, text sizes, and colors, Tailwind helps me "pare down" the number of different values available to me. Much like having preset "m-1", "m-2", etc. values helps me be more consistent, having preset grid columns and gap spacing helps me stay consistent and not go too crazy.

(3) Because I'm using something closer to CSS-wrapped-in-classes rather than a set of components built by someone else, and because tailwind gives both a naming convention and an easy mechanism for adding my own classes that fit right in to Tailwind's, if Tailwind doesn't give me the exact values I want for grid spacing, then I can modify theirs. If I need to add a couple new presets in addition to Tailwind's, then I can do so easily.

(4) Early on when CSS Grid was new, I got bit by some bad layout bugs that were very hard to find, and impossible to fix (they were browser bugs). So, while I'm sure the bugs I encountered have since been fixed, I'm a bit gun shy on grids. I occasionally use Grid when it makes sense (via Tailwind), but more often than not I find it easier, more flexible, and safer to just use nested flexbox cols and rows. For which I also use Tailwind, if the project is of suitable size.

To sum it all up better, I view Tailwind more as syntactic sugar over CSS that helps me build my own design system. So, I would totally use vanilla CSS for small projects that don't need a design system. But for anything more than that, I like Tailwind for the same reason I like using web frameworks on the back end: it helps me keep things structured and consistent and more maintainable, even if I could do it all on my own without the framework.

For (2) however I usually use CSS custom properties to reach for preset values, e.g. setting "column gap" to "var(--margin-inline-wide)", and "row-gap" to "var(--margin-block-short)" etc.

I would also point out that Tailwind only makes sense to me when I'm also breaking up each individual UI element like cards or buttons into reusable components, either using a reactive framework like React or Vue, or a server-side template system. I'm not sure the maintainability of Tailwind survives with more monolithic HTML pages.

Easier to remember and quicker to type. Centering content on a screen is class="place-content-center" which makes things easier.

    .container {
      grid-template:
        "nav    .      header header header" auto
        "nav    .      .      .      .     " 1ex
        "nav    .      main   .      aside " 1fr
        ".      .      .      .      .     " 1em
        "footer footer footer footer footer" auto
        / 40ch  1em    1fr    1ex    15ch
    }

I was in high school.

That was the best time to build websites.

(Though at least "flat" trends and terrible UX out of several major companies mean my shitty designs are back to looking about as good and working about as well as "pro" designers, so that's, kind of, an improvement over ~2005-2014)

But it always loads super fast, and it just works.

We figured out how to display text on a web page decades ago. It's a shame more people aren't just doing it the direct way anymore.

(Applications are a different matter obviously)

A good contrast is Reddit vs hn. Reddit’s current site is basically unusable and sluggish on modern hardware that can you could train ML models with.

(Yes I get that webdevs' personal sites are their playground)

But my argument never was about the layout or design of Hacker News being "better".

What I meant to argue was, that content is king, and that everything else should serve the actual content - not distract from it.

Thank you! So many sites have utterly garbage contrast, making content unreadable - it's so annoying.

I spam this excellent discussion of color and usability as often as I can: https://designsystem.digital.gov/design-tokens/color/overvie...

but getting stupid 20 something designers with perfect vision to pay attention is almost impossible :p

Let's not treat HTML tables as being some super special ability.

If HN were implemented exactly the same but with flexbox or grid for layout, it would be objectively better with no drawbacks I can think of.

Trying to understand how so many people are reaching the conclusion that HN works well on mobile. Maybe 25% of the time I try to upvote or downvote a comment on mobile, I fat-finger the wrong arrow. That shouldn't happen in a mobile interface.

I feel like just for the sheer number of comments I'm seeing saying that they don't know what the problem is, there must be something I'm missing. To me it's pretty straightforward, you have to zoom the screen in 20-40% to press any of the buttons or accurately target on any of the links, and when you do that you have to interrupt reading flow because the text doesn't wrap during that zoom.

When I turn off the mobile site and request the desktop version it's even worse, so I don't think it's a browser setting. I don't think I have particularly large hands, but the links on the top of the site are still only about 1/3 to 1/4 the size of my pointer finger.

What are you all seeing that I'm not? Is there a font-size setting you have checked? This is a pain to use without a precise pointer.

People complain about Reddit on mobile, and I totally agree, Reddit mobile is awful, but it's also a really small part of my life, I generally don't visit Reddit on a phone that often -- so it's easier for me to think about Reddit's mobile site(s) as being some kind of outlier?

My experience has been I read a lot of blogs on my phone, I do searches (that go through duckduckgo, which I don't really have a ton of complaints about as a mobile site), I look up quick pieces of information on the fly from random sites, I look at MDN documentation, trying to think what else...

I also spent a long time turning off Javascript entirely on my phone browser and I've only very recently started changing that practice (largely because of Gorhill deprecating uMatrix), which probably biases things even more, because a lot of the browsing I do on my phone works without Javascript, and that gets rid of a nontrivial number of annoying behaviors from more aggressive sites, and so I wonder if I'm just not giving the same amount of "credit" for HN not doing the Reddit bullcrap where it pops up a notification asking me to install an app, and that makes it easier to stare at the flaws.

If I was doing a lot of Reddit browsing on my phone, I would appreciate HN more on mobile, I will give people that HN is much better on mobile than Reddit.

> no drawbacks

Would it be slower or use more CPU or memory to render?

With flexbox layout, probably (?), but likely imperceptibly (don't quote me on that, I haven't actually done the math to check if the benefits from decreased DOM elements would outweigh the increased cost of flexbox, maybe it would get faster just by virtue of shipping less HTML).

That being said, GP is being kind of extravagant, there is arguably nothing on HN that requires tables or flexbox. I always felt like inline spans and maybe a few floats/margin:autos for stuff like headers/menus would probably handle the majority of the layout.

This is part of my criticism of "HN picked the simple answer" takes; even if you go back over a decade and even if you take flexbox off the table, tables weren't really the simplest answer after CSS `margin:auto` was invented. This really isn't a website with columns of data, it almost doesn't need any layout tool at all.

I think the, "now flexbox exists so we can do it correctly" takes are also wrong in their own way; HN is a single-column reading experience with very simple menus, why bring flexbox into this? I always try to temper this claim because I haven't technically ever sat down and built a pixel-perfect replica using normal HTML, I don't technically know there's nothing that wouldn't require modern CSS. But I have poked around at different pages of the site and messed around with resolutions, and I've never seen a situation on the site that I felt required all of that extra HTML and complexity.

I almost wonder if the point of the embedded font tags and image spacers and crud is that site is trying to make it sort of render the same even with CSS turned off. But if so, that's bad practice and the site should stop doing that. Anyone who's turning off CSS is doing that for a reason and the site should just respect that and ship them the pure content.

Quotes don't sidescroll to infinity for you?

I could go on and on...

It's okish, but it's no pinnacle for usability, that's for sure.

Going to push back on this line specifically, HN has a number of issues. They're not dealbreakers, but they're also not particularly hard to fix with modern HTML. HN has generally kind of bad accessibility/semantics, it's pretty frustrating to use on mobile, and it degrades kind of poorly without Javascript (collapsing thread buttons still appear even though they don't work, also, collapsing thread buttons don't work without JS).

HN is (unironically) a great example of how kind of hacky you can make something and how little you can iterate on it while people still are mostly able to use it for its intended purpose. And (with the exception of maybe its blind accessibility problems) it should be held up as a great example of that.

But it's not a good example of "do things simply and they'll just work well." If anything, HN is a great example of why stuff like tables were abandoned. And the HTML isn't even that simple, this must have been a royal pain to build, everything everywhere is another embedded table. It's a weird dig at how bad some major websites have become that people don't see HN's HTML as bloated or convoluted.

Ever really dug into how HN threading works? Everything is a top-level comment, and it inserts transparent images to create the illusion of indentation. It's a wildly out-of-left-field solution that makes parsing out and styling threads way harder than it needs to be. Seriously, I've spent way too much time trying to figure out how to make CSS selectors for custom user-styling work on child comments/replies on a site that is supposed to be displaying a comment tree in the DOM tree. There's a one-to-one mapping there, you don't really need a complicated visual slight-of-hand to display this information; just put the comments in the tree.

Again, not to get mad at HN; but I think people use it as a positive example in the wrong situations. HN has bad HTML with obvious downsides that would be pretty easy to fix, but it turns out that creating an elegant website and filing off the rough edges is actually a really small part of running a community, and doesn't matter that much in the long run when compared to other things you could be doing to foster that community (like moderation/curation), and that is a very good lesson for tech people to learn from HN. But nobody should praise the HTML on this site, there are much better examples out there on the web of sites that use simple HTML to great effect.

----

> (Applications are a different matter obviously)

Much more minor push-back but I actually would love to see more applications embrace the interactive document model even when fully native and fully offline. Not all applications, but a bunch of them. Stuff like calculators, calendars, even bigger applications like database software/image viewers/file browsers, etc...

User-accessible stylesheets for applications, user-accessible scraping tools for applications, etc... I think there's a lot of potential for user computing hidden behind a willingness to say, "no, many applications are just text displayed in tree/table form when you think about it, and the app/document divide was always sort of nonsense."

Having worked on an implementation of comment indentation before, I think it's a technical design choice rather than wildly out of left field. From the backend perspective, it's more performant (and simpler from as far as code maintainability) to have a flat db table with a number representing indentation level, rather than have each comment point to its parent, and then have to recursively build the html.

When you're getting as much traffic as HN, such design tradeoffs can make a huge difference in site responsiveness.

  result = reduce(comments, (result, comment) => {
    return result + build_comment(comment);
  }, '');

  indent_level = 0;
  result = reduce(comments, (result, comment) => {
     missing_lvls = indent_level - comment.indent_level;
     close_str = missing_lvls > 0 ? repeat_str('</ul>', missing_lvls) : '';
     indent_level = comment.indent_level;

     return result + close_str + build_comment(comment);
  }, '');

I guess I haven't ever read through HN's clientside Javascript, maybe it's calculating how to minimize threads on the fly completely clientside by iterating over the DOM, and maybe that's why the buttons don't work with JS disabled. But.. oof, I wouldn't hold that up as an example of good, simple clientside code if that's the case.

----

But again, I'm not going to argue with your conclusion, I assume there's something I've missed, I assume you're right.

This is still a bad example to use for "see, simple HTML is better". What you're describing is a good example of why it makes sense to say, "see, convoluted table setups that are worse on the client are faster overall than clean, simple output."

Which is not a bad lesson to learn from HN. It's a great lesson, sometimes performance requires us to do hacky things. But it is a very different lesson from where this thread started. You still would never point at that and say, "this is a good example of what HTML should look like", you would say, "these are the kinds of messy sacrifices that might be necessary to maintain a performant backend."

Holy crud, I just opened the JS up and this is actually what it's doing. Heck me and my little 'not going to contradict you' statements, you might just be completely entirely right about what's going on I guess.

  function kidvis (tr, hide) {
    var n0 = ind(tr), n = ind(kid1(tr)), coll = false;
    if (n > n0) {
      while (tr = kid1(tr)) {
        if (ind(tr) <= n0) {

It's also definitely not easier on the client, I've seen some comments on here argue that HN might use all this weird stuff to save client battery life, and I feel more confident now saying that's not the reason, because if someone is somehow, someway legitimately in some incredible situation where they're actually worried about the battery drain of a browser rendering a table vs a some extra CSS, then this is not the code you would want to run every single time you press a button on the page.

But yeah, the "we just base everything off of an indentation integer and comment order" theory does seem a lot more plausible to me now, because I'm having a somewhat difficult time thinking why else collapsing comments would work this way.

I mean you still can, it's just that nobody's going to hire you to do that and nobody is going to be impressed by it. Even back in the 90s when it was that easy, it was all hobbyists. By the time the dot-com boom started taking off, it was complicated. CSS + JS, no responsive design (remember designing 3 different sites to deal with the 460x640, 600x800, and 1280x1024 resolutions? Frames and no frames? Different sites for each browser [or ones that only worked in one bc things were even less standard than now - 'this site only works in IE'?] etc.)

Now it's the tools adding the complexity, but back then it was hardware, browsers, etc.

Using media queries with breakpoints, and doing exactly what you describe, was the original “responsive design”. What you have in mind (I think) is what might be called “fluid design”—responsive design without media queries. You could always do this to some extent with such things as inline blocks, auto margins, and other ancient CSS technology (and an unstyled site also reflows responsively), but flex and grid allow more elaborate fluid designs.

There is also some advantage to making separate designs carefully crafted for a variety of screen shapes, that you give up with fluid design techniques.

I remember when media queries came out. It was so nice. Amazing. 10/10 for the time. You can do a lot with auto-margins and other ancient CSS, but there are definitely quite a lot of limits. (Sighs in someone who does a lot of email design and academic CMS design... let's party like it's 1999...)

> There is also some advantage to making separate designs carefully crafted for a variety of screen shapes, that you give up with fluid design techniques.

I agree strongly with this from a UX/UI point of view and as an educator.

Nothing is stopping someone from doing that today, but that's no longer the only option, thus it seems accurate that it is easier today than ever before.

So, in some ways, its never been more difficult to build a website. Thankfully FOSS lets us outsource a lot of the work.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/OAyZWnZ.png

I don't think I'd have been so cocky five or ten years ago. Bootstrap solved real problems with cross browser layouts, jQuery fixed serious holes in some browsers' standard libraries. But the things they did then are things I'd happily freehand now.

In short, it's easier because 99% of browsers in use aren't awful and flex and grid make the float mess of the mid-Naughties irrelevant.

20 or so years ago you had microsocft frontpage - anyone could build a site with little learning. heck microsoft word could spit out the doc as html I dunno how long ago.

some 15 years ago or so, I ran into a 'junk hauler' I found via google, asked who did his site, he said he did. I was like wow you were #1 in google organic, that's amazing - he said he opened microsoft publisher, put in the text, added a picture of his truck and clicked publish.

A lot has changed since then of course - google demands responsive layouts to rank well, and most people use a phone to surf.. which for a while made frameworks the magic since css grid was not baked into word/publisher/ie...

anyhow as far as 'easy' the are many other easier tools to use than tailwinds to make a site, and have been for more than a decade.

Now that browsers can auto fit via flex and grid - tailwind and similar are the bloat, not the easy-button.

Hacker News is an aesthetic that would be unacceptable to the majority of businesses in the world. The login page alone would cripple sales on any e-commerce site.

If a webpage is meant for presenting textual content and is actually _improved_ by a reader view, that means the design has failed.

There actually are websites out there that don’t benefit much from that view HN being a prime example.

The only way to debug was "alert("foo")" placed in strategic locations!

We also had to handle significantly varied browser differences.

You can do a 90s style site today and vastly benefit from modern tech.

Those old page hosting services also served to get non-technical users to dip their toes into writing HTML, setting them on a path of learning, whereas newer page hosting services are either skewed no-code (e.g SquareSpace) or technical (e.g. GitHub Pages and Netlify) with little in-between, which keeps non-technical users locked into the WYSIWYG tools to a greater extent.

But everyone reading this knows it, and it does serve as proof that you can build a successful website with extremely little design & features. Therefore it seemed a good choice to illustrate my point.

I suspect if you are wanting to create interactive things scratch is a gem.

I see that the example websites from Tailwind look much better than those from Tachyons, though I'm not sure whether that's just a matter of taste.

Pico.css is for zero customize website. Once the website requires customization, it does not work. Tailwind is easier.