from Hacker News

Motherfucking Website

by titlex on 11/24/13, 9:50 PM with 129 comments

  • by hawkharris on 11/24/13, 10:10 PM

    The one thing I remember from economics class is the concept of marginal utility. It basically says — if I remember correctly — that the perceived value of a good declines as a consumer accumulates more of it. One cookie? Delicious. Ten cookies? Each one doesn't taste quite as good.

    I mention this because I think that fucks are like cookies....The first one: well, that's something special. It's funny. It makes a statement. The 70th one? Well, I'm not sure what to do with all these fucks.

    In other words, I can tell that there's a potentially poignant idea about web design in this post, but it was a little drowned out because of the way it was presented.

  • by ender7 on 11/24/13, 10:20 PM

    I can certainly relate, but please don't try to pretend that this is a pleasant reading experience on a desktop. Lines of text should be about 45–90 characters long (including spaces) in order to create a pleasant reading experience. Do not make me resize my browser window to do this for you.

  • by DigitalSea on 11/24/13, 10:31 PM

    Yeah, it might be responsive and nice, but the line lengths on my resolution are so ridiculously long, they're unreadable... How about setting a 550px/600px width on the body element to make the lines of satire actually readable, motherfucker?

    There are some very valid points here, especially the last part about browser problems being created by us developers and designers. It's all true, but honestly, I would rather put the effort in for a website that looks nice, has nice line lengths and heck, if the designers was gimmicky animated background colours, they can have them.

    One widespread problem I've noticed since the early 00's is the lack of hierarchy. Designers are trying desperately to break the mould of a conventional webpage design but forget to distinguish between headings and page content all too often. I don't remember the last time I saw a website that wasn't a blog that had proper content hierarchy (H1, H2, H3, etc).

    Internet connections are so fast nowadays that it doesn't even matter if your website is 1mb, even 3G mobile connections can load a page that big in a few seconds. The real problem with modern development is not page weight, it's the abuse of Javascript. Reflows and repaints are the real problem because people have a lack of understanding when it comes to Javascript, not 1mb of Javascript and CSS on a website.

  • by undershirt on 11/24/13, 10:29 PM

    This is basically the Web Site Guidelines for the GNU Project [1]:

      - Our goal is to get information to people. Keeping the site design simple
    helps accomplish that.
  - The use of graphics should be minimized, so pages load fast over slow
    links, especially animations. The GNU Project is for everyone, even those
    with slow Internet access and/or text-only WWW browsers.
    [1]: http://www.gnu.org/server/fsf-html-style-sheet.html

  • by markdown on 11/24/13, 11:33 PM

    > Yes, this is fucking satire, you fuck

    No. Not it isn't. I don't think you know what satire is. Satire would be if took a jab at the ridiculous 80MB TeehanLax page by making an 800MB one and pretending it was a serious endeavor.

    > Yes, this is fucking satire, you fuck

    Whatever it was, you ruined it by trying to explain it.

  • by mordae on 11/24/13, 10:05 PM

    And there he goes and spoils it with the GA script. Point taken.

  • by cjubb39 on 11/24/13, 10:21 PM

  • by gabemart on 11/24/13, 10:34 PM

        body {    
      max-width: 600px;
      margin: 0 auto;
    }
    Improves readability by an order of magnitude in my opinion.

  • by dredmorbius on 11/25/13, 1:43 AM

    Oh dear sweet good so much this.

    Not that the site is beautiful as specified (I prefer margins, a slightly narrower text width, and slightly different color schemes). But if the motherfucking idiot designer doesn't overload the sites' CSS in the first place I can simply drop my default style on the page.

    If the page is overdesigned, then I've got to tear it down and figure out what elements to re-style first. Worst: those Microsoft auto-converted pages with embedded styles. On. Every. Fucking. Element.

    And for the people saying "but it should be XXX px wide". Don't specify line widths in px -- you almost certainly* mean to use ems. In fact, you probably want pt and ems for _most_ of your dimensions.

  • by bjourne on 11/24/13, 10:25 PM

    Fucking anyone can pretend they have a fucking insightful fucking idea by using the fucking fuck word enough times. It doesn't fucking prove that you fucking know what you're talking about. Tt fucking only makes you look retarded because you fucking can't express your angry ideas using more fucking varied language. You motherfucker.

  • by jonobird1 on 11/25/13, 5:51 AM

    Definitely agree with some of the points in here and I understand that this is the extreme.

    One thing I would definitely say is that there is minimal structure besides for heading/paragraph and if I was selling something, this website wouldn't work.

    You need a basic structure through brand recognition > wtf the websites is doing > convince > call to action. Or something along those lines.

    Again, I understand this is an extreme so the straight up headings & paragraphs are there but I think a nice middle ground would work as long as people THINK about what damn content they put on their site instead of stupid parallax sites for the sake of it.

    /end rant

  • by vezzy-fnord on 11/24/13, 10:04 PM

    I guess it's better than the millionth blatantly obvious Bootstrap layout.

  • by Gertig on 11/25/13, 12:52 AM

    This looks like it was inspired by mijustin's post "This is a web page." http://justinjackson.ca/words.html

  • by r0ash on 11/24/13, 10:29 PM

    Funny but true. I believe that German was a Linux programmer :)

    May be not designers but hardcore programmers feel the same, why all the bells and whistles while the sole purpose is merely to inform your audience. There are people who still like the Linux black screen, instead of moving mouse or fingering the mobile devices, they love to key-punch the commands.

  • by reinhardt on 11/24/13, 10:40 PM

    From view source: <!-- FOR THE CURIOUS: This site was made by @thebarrytone. Don't tell my mom. -->

    So it's not Zed Shaw?

  • by rikacomet on 11/24/13, 10:35 PM

    I don't find this post funny, I agree with the points raised.. and the manner of satire. But its too much over the top. This is a good opportunity to say what I have been holding down for long.

    I usually substitute words like "FUCK" with "FREAK" .. "WHAT THE FUCK" with "WHAT THE HELL" .. or as Prof. Eric Grimson likes.. instead of "Pain in the ass" .. use "Pain in some part of anatomy"

    I'm talking about refraining from overexpression.

    JUST LIKE RIGHT NOW I'M WRITING IN CAPS, THIS WHOLE SENTENCE, IT MIGHT BE BECAUSE I'M EXTREMELY ELATED TO TELL YOU SOMETHING YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED, BUT THAT DOESN'T DO AWAY WITH THE FACT THAT SOME PEOPLE JUST HATE CAPS BECAUSE IT SEEMS LIKE SHOUTING TO THEM.

    Yes we all are pretty much very smart[SELECT * FROM DB BODY PARTS] to know that yeah.. use of swears is just a way of expression and not in this way---> a oh soo.. "COOL AWESOME!!!!!! WOAH~!!" type of thing these days.. specially with advent of english and its spreading acceptability as language of choice over [include <tim berners lee creation.h>] .. they are well at the end of the day still insults. So my point is that, yes its okay to use it sometimes to show how psychologically simulated you are.. but eventually its going to hurt someone out there.

    What disturbs me, is that use of insults have become too common these days. For example, A friend showing up late might already be crumbling over inside about keeping the other guy waiting, but upon late arrival.. if he just DUDE TALKS you and say "What the fuck were you at man?!!!" .. it may sound normal to the speaker.. but more than a few times it does hurt to be on the receiving end, try putting yourself in his shoes. No one makes a point out of it because life is too short to make the discussion about this, and not just get on with the day.. but as you see:

    #substituting insults with similar sounding words won't make you uncool!

    #but it might on that rare occasion save you from hurting someone you cherish.

  • by wowaname on 11/25/13, 2:57 AM

    Oh my god. To everyone complaining about the overuse of crude language: so what? This is the Internet, not meant to be taken seriously. So put your judgment aside and read the damn article for once without making a snide remark about it.

  • by aabalkan on 11/24/13, 10:35 PM

    There was a similar article on HN a few months back. It was saying, there's no fancy javascript, css and yet you are still reading... Does anyone remember that? It is closely related to this.

  • by Houshalter on 11/24/13, 10:42 PM

    Serious question because I am not a web developer at all, is it possible to make a website that looks decent with just raw HTML? And not have it look like this or like it's from 1999.

  • by cheeaun on 11/24/13, 11:28 PM

    Not relevant but I almost thought this is one of those Mother Effing websites :) http://mothereff.in/

  • by cgcardona on 11/25/13, 6:15 AM

    If you view source:

    `<!-- FOR THE CURIOUS: This site was made by @thebarrytone. Don't tell my mom. -->`

    And then at the bottom in the quote:

    > "Good design is as little design as possible." > - some German motherfucker

    There is the following cite:

    `<blockquote cite="https://www.vitsoe.com/us/about/good-design">`

    Which cites this article:

    Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design

  • by bane on 11/24/13, 10:46 PM

    I said it recently [1] and I'll say it again, there's nothing wrong with sites that look and function like this. I agree completely that most of the problems we have with web design today are ones we've made.

    1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6786902

  • by jamesk14022 on 11/24/13, 10:39 PM

    Source motherfucker, "<!-- FOR THE CURIOUS: This site was made by @thebarrytone. Don't tell my mom. -->".

  • by runn1ng on 11/24/13, 10:11 PM

    It would look better with Bootstrap though.

  • by Aardwolf on 11/24/13, 11:25 PM

    "This site doesn't care if you're on an iMac or a motherfucking Tamagotchi."

    Ha ha, best quote imho :)

  • by pirateking on 11/25/13, 12:48 AM

    My home page is currently 11 KB (no stylesheets or scripts), and any work on it can be done with one-liner scripts. I don't feel like coming back to the "modern" web again. I would rather continue experimenting with alternative hypertext systems.

  • by brianbarker on 11/24/13, 11:14 PM

    Now just make some t-shirts, maybe put up some google ads for the traffic your site could get, and make $$ off your rant. Just like http://programming-motherfucker.com/.

  • by Link- on 11/24/13, 10:11 PM

    This is one motherfucking 'extremist' message, but funny as hell!

  • by DustinCalim on 11/26/13, 5:16 AM

    The comments here are very typical HN... Too much semantics and nit-picking - and I think a lot of people missed the point the site was trying to make.

    Maybe that means the site failed by being too distracting...\

  • by julespitt on 11/24/13, 10:37 PM

    Just the other day I was wondering to myself: does anyone A/B test against no-nonsense simple 90s HTML? Because I bet there are some particularly unexpected cases where it would win out.

  • by Adrock on 11/24/13, 10:34 PM

    "Good design is as little design as possible." - Dieter Rams

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Rams

  • by dlsym on 11/24/13, 11:24 PM

    It just works.

    Btw.: Here is a very popular blog, that has always had this style: http://blog.fefe.de/ [german]

  • by websitescenes on 11/25/13, 3:44 PM

    Sure, this is a website but what the author fails to realize is that while this may work for the Hacker news crowd, it will not be affective if you are trying to target other groups. The general public likes pretty things and in most cases are willing to give up function for looks. Just look at fashion, I'm sure women wear heals because they function better than typical shoes. There's a bigger picture here.

  • by dictum on 11/24/13, 10:37 PM

    You know what's amazing? Every website made with HTML, CSS, JS and images can look like that and get all the listed benefits! You can choose to have your JS and your CSS, or you can choose to have only the JS or the CSS, or only have the HTML! "Wait, so you're telling me I don't have to try hard to be unimpressed with new web technologies to make my website look like that?" Yes! You can disable JS, CSS or images on your browser.

    > Did you seriously load 100kb of jQuery UI just so you could animate the fucking background color of a div? You loaded all 7 fontfaces of a shitty webfont just so you could say "Hi." at 100px height at the beginning of your site? You piece of shit.

    I try every front end optimization technique I can, and I hate when developers don't even try to optimize their sites, but honestly, I don't subscribe to a fast [1] connection and have a fast, capable computer just to see pages with the default user agent styling. I want the parallax scrolling, the animations, the typefaces, etc. I just want the right to turn them off when I need to, but when I'm just browsing the web, I want websites to look as crazy as they can. That's the beauty of progressive enhancement.

    [1]: You can hardly call low end DSL fast these days, but I don't have trouble with most websites. Maybe I'm just browsing well-optimized websites most of the time.

  • by Lockal on 11/25/13, 6:36 AM

    5 KB of html, and 22 KB of Google Analytics JS + 1 gif.

    It's 2013 and website owners still can't parse theirs motherfuckingwebserver's logs, extract browser info and apply GeoIP database for visitor counting. They speak about privacy, but prefer to send all the data about theirs 5KB motherfuckingpages to motherfuckinggoogle.

  • by lupinglade on 11/25/13, 1:53 AM

    While we're at it, why don't we just switch to fax? But seriously, this article does have a bit of a point.

  • by moocowduckquack on 11/24/13, 10:28 PM

    Has De Niro recently started coding HTML?

  • by johngrefe on 11/24/13, 11:28 PM

    "Load this motherfucker in IE6. I fucking dare you."

    -Always looking out for the PRC when I design.

  • by etler on 11/25/13, 12:46 AM

    Littering an unfunny writeup with profanity doesn't make it funny, it just makes you sound like a middle schooler.

  • by nullgeo on 11/24/13, 11:13 PM

    I use a handful of JS libraries in my website because I need to add stuff like equations (MathJax) and syntax highlighting (prism.js). His premise is wrong because he thinks sites only convey message using plain text and nothing else.

    Imagine how unreadable equations and code can be if they are presented as plain text.

  • by lispylol on 11/24/13, 10:51 PM

    this is motherfucking funny

  • by Kluny on 11/30/13, 6:46 AM

    I felt inspired and updated my own site. rocketships.ca/

  • by dsego on 11/24/13, 10:23 PM

    But does it scale?

  • by wrongc0ntinent on 11/25/13, 12:35 AM

    Reminds me of this, only not as funny : http://gradientsmotherfucker.com/

  • by amerika_blog on 11/24/13, 11:25 PM

    I love it. The original idea of the web was, like gopher, to detach content from presentation and universalize it. Custom design especially flash has gotten away from that.

    Then again, it was also fun to play with.

    http://www.anus.com/etc/prozakhistan/autoexec.htm

  • by anon4 on 11/24/13, 10:59 PM

    And yet there is javascript on the site. And it's not even in the head section. Now that's what I call humour.

  • by jbeja on 11/24/13, 11:16 PM

    I wouldn't make a similar thing to my clients XD.