There are a lot of hyperlinks on there and clicking around on various related articles was near instantaneous. It actually made navigation very useful and not feel like a burden. I will take that over any visual flair any day.
Publishing web pages by manually editing HTML files is still very common today; any GitHub Pages blog does this.
Having that not be the browser default was a good idea in 2008, but not now.
Except it does not, for some weird reason unstyled pages like this which should look great on mobile look like ass. Why are mobile browsers defaults so wrong?
This hits hard because this is how I build my pages (you can probably tell I am not a front end designer) I just want to put well structured content out and let the users agent display it in the manner that suits the user best. And it mostly works, it will not win any awards but it looks fine. Until someone asks why it looks like the dog's breakfast on mobile.
It’s not what I’d call mobile unfriendly either.
I had to zoom in slightly but then it’s perfectly readable in landscape.
Some very basic inline responsive CSS would make it work great in portrait too.
But the thing is, with no ads, complex layout, or other bullshit, it’s perfectly usable on mobile as is.
I’d certainly take this over any website from any major media outlet, other than those that are publicly funded like the BBC (and, even then, only in the UK because they show ads everywhere else).
It's sorta hard to read text that spans the whole screen and at least on mobile, that's not nearly as wide.
Then fix mobile browsers to display it correctly.
Edit: I'm forgetting about certain accessibility issues, although I'm not sure this plain page isn't a good fit for accessibility tools.
The main drawback seems to be that larger communities than HN will, at best, not care.