It's really not a great design. It's just nerdy in a HN way. A great website would list projects in approximate order of importance/notability, would use the tiniest bit of CSS to make the text readable on wide screens, and would have images for projects with a visual component. The only reason his site is appealing is because you already know who he is.
replyI agree it's not the most pleasant site to visit. I understand peoples desire to move the web back towards simplicity/html only with no js. But a little bit of css does not hurt and would make simple sites like this a lot more enjoyable to look at. Just my opinion..
replyI am on a 27" 4k screen and that website is very readable to me. Should the text all be in a single column in the center taking 10% of the screen like 99% of blogs now?
replyChronological or Alphabetical sorting would make more sense than importance.
Anything above ~1000px is considered difficult to read, yes. For example, the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines require that the site at least provides a mechanism to set the width to 80 characters, or about 1000px at a standard font size: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#visual-presentation
replyYou can push it if you want to maximize horizontal space utilization - the site you're on right now, for example, caps reflowing text to about 1200px - but reading is easier when you have to scan over less horizontal distance, and there's literally no reason not to set some max-width.
> A great website would list projects in approximate order of importance/notability
replyWhy?
I imagine they're suggesting that so someone who lands on the page and is unaware of Bellard can immediately know what he is (famously) known for instead of having to scroll through the long list of projects.
replyThe website of Daniel J. Bernstein is similar: https://cr.yp.to/djb.html
reply> Great programmers often also have great personal website design, everything is so clear and not one bit of redundance.
replyIt's literally just a list of <p> tags. This is ridiculous. It's running a single sentence across the entire window.
> not one bit of redundance
replyWhat about the url on the first displayed line?
Not saying it's bad - got me thinking about this self-reference that most modern websites do with the logo on the header.
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