I love this page. Text, photos, links. Straight up HTML 4, maybe even using a template in a text editor and FTPed to go live. I didn't see any inline or referenced CSS. No scripts. No ads. No social junk. The home page even has a <table> just like it's 1994.

What are the drawbacks to reverting to this type web publishing? That's how I used to do things before publishing tools and CMS and platforms took over, but I know the security landscape has changed quite a bit, and such pages are always in the deep long tail of Google results (and therefore practically invisible to AI summaries, which often surface complete junk as sources).

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sheept 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The main drawback with the page's unstyled design is that the page is not mobile friendly.

Publishing web pages by manually editing HTML files is still very common today; any GitHub Pages blog does this.

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xnx 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Having that not be the browser default was a good idea in 2008, but not now.

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zahlman 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I don't have a smartphone to test on. What happens without this?

	▲	xnx 8 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If you want to see it for yourself: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/device-mode
	▲	oakesm9 27 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You essentially see the desktop version zoomed out by default with tiny text. You need to zoom in, but the line length is still desktop sized so you need to scroll left and right as well as up and down to read it.

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account42 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It wasn't a good idea even in 2008.

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recursive an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This sounds like a critique of mobile browsers. Make friendliness the default!

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burkaman 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's obviously not designed for mobile but I wouldn't call it unfriendly, it's still fast and pretty easy to read. It also works perfectly with Firefox reader mode.

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childofhedgehog 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What part of this is actually not mobile friendly? I’d argue this is laid out pretty well compared to some websites that are “mobile friendly” but load poorly or make it impossible to scroll.

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Krssst 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Firefox's reader mode works really well on the article, I wonder why it's not the default for unstyled pages.

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barbazoo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's a feature for me, not a bug. Not everything has to be everything-friendly all the time, especially if it makes it easier to consume content or stuff.

Edit: I'm forgetting about certain accessibility issues, although I'm not sure this plain page isn't a good fit for accessibility tools.

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zahlman 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We get submissions like this fairly commonly (we also get ones that are "modern" but use hand-crafted CSS, use only un-minified first-party-written JS for progressive enhancement, etc.). But a large fraction of them are about the style as well as exhibiting it.

The main drawback seems to be that larger communities than HN will, at best, not care.

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barbazoo 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And it's so fast even with pictures. I miss the old internet.

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deadbabe an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You could easily make a browser extension that passes each page through an AI agent that will rewrite the page in the given style. It’s fun.