
Dude, What's with the Web Site? - drizzzler
http://heavycatweb.net/website.php
======
coldtea
Between the meme responses ("cool story bro" etc) and the misunderstandings,
this has to be the lowest value HN comment thread ever. It's like I'm reading
9gag.

For a site were tons of people speak of the value of simplicity, and every
other day they "Show HN" their own "static site generator", it's surprising
how many people do NOT get his message.

First, he is not a web developer. He is a busines owner that also had to
create a site for his business. He chose to follow the KISS principle, and
that's what he advocates: catering to content first, fancy stuff second (or
never at all).

The peripheral details to his post (if he personally uses Flash for some stuff
but you don't like it, or if he has a line about coding important apps in C
and you disagree) don't matter.

What matters is that for content websites --which makes most of them out
there, including all blogs and brochure-ware sites --, his advice is spot on.

As for his website "looking like crap" (as 1-2 people comment below). That's
the whole point. As long as it gets the job done he doesn't care. And it's not
worse than Hacker News (no paragon of great web design) or Paul Graham's site.

Would you rather read PGs eassays in his website, or some moron's zero-content
marketing fluff on a great looking, fancy-ass website, with CSS 3D transforms
and the whole works?

~~~
awj
> Would you rather read PGs eassays in his website, or some moron's zero-
> content marketing fluff on a great looking, fancy-ass website, with CSS 3D
> transforms and the whole works?

I'd rather read PGs essays on a great looking, fancy-ass website. Why the
false dichotomy?

~~~
coldtea
> _I 'd rather read PGs essays on a great looking, fancy-ass website. Why the
> false dichotomy?_

Because real life is full of dichotomies, and they are not all false. They
even exist in our profession -- we call them "engineering tradeoffs".

Have you seen many "fancy-ass websites" with great essay content?

Perhaps you can find 1 or 2. I doubt you can find 10. There's a reason for
that too. Most of the good writers I've read value simplicity, both in their
writing and in their presentation. And, as they believe in the value of their
content, they see no need to dress it on a "fancy-ass website".

That's what the whole "content first" / "minimalism" etc movement has been all
about, from the 37 Signals blog to the emergence in our community of stuff
like Jekyll.

And I don't see what the fancy-assness of the website would add to PG's
essays. Care to enlighten me?

~~~
awj
> Because real life is full of dichotomies, and they are not all false.

That doesn't justify the specific dichotomy you presented. Nor does the
general lack of (vaguely defined) "fancy-ass" websites with good content.

In my opinion 37signals has a "fancy-ass" blog with solid content. It has a
clean, pleasing look, displays well on mobile and browsers, and even provides
a search interface. PG's essays could be better presented in all of these
respects.

Maybe we should get your definition of "fancy-ass" so we can decide what we're
even talking about.

~~~
coldtea
> _That doesn 't justify the specific dichotomy you presented. Nor does the
> general lack of (vaguely defined) "fancy-ass" websites with good content._

Well, I'm a pragmatist. If I observe a "general lack" of a certain combination
of things ("fancy ass websites" with "good content") I assume there's a reason
for that.

It doesn't even matter if the connection is casual. It's enough that it
exists, because that means that the presense of one ("fancy-assenss") is
enough to predict with good success the lack of the other ("good content").

> _In my opinion 37signals has a "fancy-ass" blog with solid content._

I see nothing fancy ass about 37signal's block. It's "clean, pleasing and
displays well on mobile and broswers" not by some fancy-assness, but because
it's minimal and bare-bones -- the very opposite of fancy-assents.

Essentially it's merely styled text.

> _Maybe we should get your definition of "fancy-ass" so we can decide what
> we're even talking about._

Well, if we go by TFA's description, that would be anything that couldn't be
achieved with HTML 4 and no JS.

------
VMG
> Think about all the most popular, successful web sites. Google. Craigslist.
> YouTube. Facebook. Twitter. Even Apple's company site. What do they all have
> in common? Text and the occasional image. There's no animation, video, color
> backgrounds, textures, window decorations, animated drop-down menus, ambient
> sound, background music, gimmicks, gizmos or gew-gaws. They are all simple
> and functional, and those six web sites together represent about a trillion
> dollars in value.

With the exception of Craigslist, all of the sites he lists are complex web
applications.

The author conflates shiny gimmicks and modern web technology.

~~~
joevandyk
Yes. I'm not sure why he wrote that Youtube has no videos.

~~~
rickdale
Especially with the heavy cat home page having a youtube video on it.

Besides the slight hypocrisy, I understand the point the author is trying to
get off as simplify simplify simplify. When you have been doing it for as long
as he has, seems like the natural progression.

~~~
hamburglar
> I understand the point the author is trying to get off as simplify simplify
> simplify

That's not actually the point. The point is that the author wants to be seen
as a badass iconoclast. Unfortunately, he (or she) has no actual valid ideas,
so he's joined a cargo cult of simplicity-worship, as if eschewing everything
complex in a web design automatically makes it good.

The points made are hilariously ignorant. The argument about how it was dumb
of people to make Doom for DOS because "DOS wasn't designed for that" is jaw-
dropping. Claiming that you should write all web stuff in C, OMG. The
defensive explanation about why they build sites with Flash. Oh wait, I just
figured it out. These guys are Flash developers and nobody wants Flash these
days, so they're flailing, trying to explain why modern web development
practices are no good, but sites that consist solely of a Flash widget are
totally where it's at. All is clear now.

~~~
waps
Ah come on. He does have a bit of a point. Sure youtube has videos. Excepting
the page that actually plays a single video he does have a point. There's
exactly one piece of somewhat moving interface in the entire site. Like in
windows 3.1 (and they were hardly the first to do that). The rest is text and
a grid of images. Even the most advanced websites are not much better. I mean
I love how google has used moving gifs in the google.com/photos stuff to
actually show something moving, but that's about as advanced as interfaces
get. In some ways, including what can be done with interfaces, the web is only
at the level desktop interfaces were at 10 years ago.

I think the author of the article wants to compare that to, say, the starcraft
menu interface. Or windows desktop applications. Or, to a lesser extent, flash
interfaces. This would be a good example. Can you imagine doing this in HTML ?
[http://demo.northkingdom.com/gettheglass/](http://demo.northkingdom.com/gettheglass/)

And he does have a point. Recreating the starcraft interface in
HTML5+CSS+Javascript is possible of course. In the same sense that you can
write windows 95 in pure lambda calculus (frankly, I think the lambda calculus
rewrite would be easier since there's translation tools).

I'm with the rest of the people here. Those fancy interfaces have little
function, don't interact well with the rest of the world (e.g. search engines,
content aggregators, ...), they're accessibility nightmares, ... But they're
cool. But my opinion on them has exceptions : for some things, like games,
that's more important than all those other things.

~~~
hamburglar
> There's exactly one piece of somewhat moving interface in the entire site.
> [(YouTube)]

You are making the exact same mistake he is. You are picturing what you
remember of YouTube and in your recollection, it is simple. This is because
they have done a reasonable job of using a simple design, not because they
have avoided "moving" things. Go look and you will find plenty of menus, tabs,
comments, and other ui elements that are built of the exact stuff he says is
worthless. Holding any of these sites up as an example of being essentially
just text and a few images just indicates that you don't have much of an eye
for detail.

~~~
waps
I'm not claiming the youtube interface is not functional, I'm claiming it's
ugly. It's not about whether interface elements are animated or not (I am
criticizing however how hard it is to make them move). And I understand us
techies like a really simple design. The difference is that I don't see the
world as sharing my opinion. Simple websites are good for various technical
reasons, and I understand that. Scraping them (not that ggl makes it easy),
interacting, using the website as an API, all things that matter to techies.

But let's be honest : they're ugly. Youtube, for example looks like an ancient
file manager, at best.

Let's compare, a native application with a -somewhat- similar purpose versus
youtube.

XBMC:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34h_sQ7-G1s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34h_sQ7-G1s)

TiVo:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNvgoLVzijE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNvgoLVzijE)
(I realize it's an irritating commercial. But look at the interface)

Netflix on ios:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-4_ADXYT3E](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-4_ADXYT3E)
(sorry about the reviewer, and already much worse than XBMC or TiVo)

Youtube: [http://www.youtube.com](http://www.youtube.com)

This is a very nice animated interface (imho):
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCw0eWa-
LkA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCw0eWa-LkA) (not related to videos
though)

The sad part is, that you're right about Youtube as compared to some of it's
online alternatives. Compared to those, it's not bad. But the whole point was
to criticize online development tools like HTML and Javascript, as compared to
offline ones. Flash versus HTML and the quality of interfaces they enable.

I would even go so far as saying that, when it comes to native apps XBMC and
TiVo count as "good". They don't quite match my standards for "great" at all.
Youtube ... euhm ... is at the level where I'd have trouble accepting it from
a first-year programming student. Certainly wouldn't merit an A.

~~~
hamburglar
> But let's be honest : they're ugly. Youtube, for example looks like an
> ancient file manager, at best.

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say, but it seems fairly obvious
you don't agree with the OP's crazy pronouncement that websites should just be
text and a few images. We may be in one of those "violent agreement"
situations, so I'm just going to call this argument done. :)

------
crazygringo
This is the most bizarre thing I have ever seen to reach 50 votes on HN. Who
is upvoting this?!

I can't even figure out the point of it all, between the tangential boasting
of being one of the first sites on the web (is this even true?), saying to
write in C instead of HTML (is he programming-illiterate?), rants about how
bad "background music, gimmicks" are and then boasts that their site will use
Flash because it will "make our graphics, music, voices and games look and
sound good".

This doesn't even look like satire, it's complete nonsense as far as I can
tell.

------
Detrus
Twitter and Facebook front ends have as much complexity as any fancy gizmo FWA
site. And took even more work to get right, because most fancy gizmo sites are
throwaway internet flyers, see them once and forget. If they flop it's no big
deal. It's also why they get shut down, after the promotion they have no
useful traffic, so no one even bothers to pay for hosting.

I agree with their philosophical principle though, a content site shouldn't be
as complex as an application, but they often are.

------
badman_ting
> Here's a pro tip from a seasoned veteran of web development: if you want to
> do something really remarkable on a computer, you don't write it in HTML.
> You write it in C.

WTF?

~~~
smtddr
I stopped reading right there. I don't know if this is satire or not, or
what...

~~~
colmvp
Hmm well it's all inline styling...

------
Supermighty
I've seen too many people's solution for a problem is to throw Javascript
libraries at it with no regard for page load times. Or want to use something
flashy and sexy without a reason that improves ROI. They just want it to be
sexy.

I love the idea of simplifying until all that is left is the bare minimum to
get the job done.

~~~
ulisesrmzroche
jQuery minified is less than 100kb. Those ugly anime cats on this site are
almost 70kb together, each one making its own request.

How can someone simplify with so little understanding of the subject matter?

~~~
kcorbitt
And almost everybody will be pulling jQuery from a cached version of the one
on Google's CDN.

------
artumi-richard
He goes too far. Images should also be abandoned. And maybe colour. And in
this case, perhaps the text too.

------
thinkpad20
Some guy with a web site which I've never heard of, that looks like shit,
tells me that I should do web dev in C. Cool story bro.

------
ryansan
I can understand where he's coming from. I've always been amazed at how
carried away people can get with the their web designs and applications.
Several typefaces, a ginormous color palette, skeuomorphic stuff, wizzbang
doo-dads, unnecessary libraries, the list goes on.

I can appreciate a well-designed and well-built site. One that pays attention
to hierarchy and how the information is presented with an eye toward
performance and scalability. I always find that my favorite sites are the ones
that seem to take Edgar Allen Poe's advice for writing a short story. Every
component has a reason for being there (i.e., it is functional). If the
component or element's purpose is to be there for the sake of simply being
there (it just looks cool!), then it shouldn't exist.

I suppose that's minimalism. But oftentimes, minimalism goes against what
people think of in terms of "creating an experience." Most of the time when I
visit a website that creates an experience, I am left with a sour taste in my
mouth.

------
sugerman
> The original Heavy Cat Multimedia company site was likely one of the first
> 200 sites to go live on the web.

What?

~~~
davidandgoliath
Registered in 2008? I doubt it ;)

~~~
Killswitch
Could have let it drop and reregistered it.

Edit:: oldest Archive.org entry for this domain is 2009;
[http://web.archive.org/web/20090213172323/http://www.heavyca...](http://web.archive.org/web/20090213172323/http://www.heavycatweb.net/)

~~~
glomph
But that talks about them being online in 1996.

~~~
Killswitch
Yeah I am skeptical myself, but this isn't definite proof that the site isn't
as old as he says, just could mean IA-Archive bot was blocked from indexing up
to 2009...

------
aram
Dude, what's with this article being on the first page of HN?

~~~
rhizome
do u even web, bro

~~~
toomuchtodo
No time to web, lifting. /s

------
tylerlh
Let's be clear: web site != web app

I think the author forgot to check out the noted companies' other web
properties...

------
umario
I'll just leave this here: [http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dinner-table-
epics-fantasy...](http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dinner-table-epics-
fantasy-adventure-graphics-series?c=comments)

[https://www.gandi.net/whois/details?search=hikousenenterpris...](https://www.gandi.net/whois/details?search=hikousenenterprises.com)
and the parent company were both created in 2008
[https://www.gandi.net/whois/details?search=palaceinthesky.co...](https://www.gandi.net/whois/details?search=palaceinthesky.com),
so either the author has a time machine or is lying?

------
qqg3
That page is PHP, I thought he said he was going to use HTML...

------
etjossem
There are some very good reasons why modern designers don't use background
music. Elements don't blink and strobe like they did in the 90s. The time for
skeuomorphic visual design is over. We've learned from our mistakes. Instead,
we embrace technologies that help convey the site's meaning and purpose to the
user.

Sometimes that takes the form of a fancy JS single-page scroll
([http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/](http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/)) to give a
more natural flow to a traditional sales funnel. Sometimes that means robust
streaming video
([https://developers.google.com/youtube/](https://developers.google.com/youtube/)),
so people can watch live music or election coverage from home. Sometimes, it's
adding a Leaflet map widget to one of the most design-conservative sites on
the web
([https://twitter.com/LeafletJS/status/240820008605851648](https://twitter.com/LeafletJS/status/240820008605851648))
to help people find new apartments. All of these sites are elegant and work as
expected, and they rely on far more than HTML4 and inline style tags to do so.

------
octatone2
TIL youtube is text with the occasional image.

------
etjossem
Oh look, animated GIFs.
[http://heavycatweb.net/showcase.php](http://heavycatweb.net/showcase.php)

------
MrZongle2
Dude, what's with the pretentiousness?

~~~
michaelwww
I'm surprised he didn't say he writes HTML with a typewriter and has an
assistant scan it in.

------
klinquist
"Get off my lawn!"

------
msimpson
Dude, What's with the Lack of Knowledge

I've been in the Web business for over a decade.

The original Heavy Cat Multimedia company site was likely not part of the
first 200 sites to go live on the Web. Search engines then did not have the
analytics results to prove this because that's all there was. Yeah. They've
been around for a bit. They just weren't the first site with a background
color other than gray.

During that time, I've learned a few things. One of them is that probably half
of Heavy Cat's competition soared to amazing heights by building "cool" Web
sites to market their products. The reason is pretty simple. HTML is designed
to present text and the occasional image. When you spend money and time to try
to make it do more than that: innovation is born.

CSS is not intuitive. The only reason most people don't complain more about it
is because they learn to use it. HTML is not intuitive either, but at least
it's easy to learn once you realize there's a Box Object Model. JavaScript is
very useful, and also pretty amazing. You can spend days, weeks and months
cramming them together in new and innovative ways and ultimately you'll end up
with a lot of well spent time and a site made of unique functionality and the
occasional video.

You know those sites with the long lists of really amazing-looking Web
designs? Funny how all those links go to prosperous sites with a link trying
to sell you the products they've created.

DOS was the same way. It was a simple, quick shell and file system for PCs. It
took a couple of stone cold geniuses years to make the DOOM engine. Why? DOS
wasn't designed for that. Which is why they made it in C with their own
graphics library and only hooked into the system APIs they needed. All the
DOOM engine parts had to be invented from scratch.

I have decided after over a decade that I'm tired of trying to make bad
developers understand the abilities of the Web. HTML is amazing and full of
possibilities. It can be molded like clay into beautiful creations. That's it.

Here's a pro-tip from a seasoned veteran of Web development: if you're going
to write an article flaming Web technologies, learn to capitalize Web and
JavaScript correctly. And, more seriously, never use markup as a high level
imperative language.

Now I do get some benefits from doing Web sites this way. One, it's simple and
easy to update with the advent of modern technologies like content management
systems. Two, it's not cluttered with distractions like all the incoherent
blog articles. Three, they load ultra fast when you keep scalability in mind.
Why look at that! We've solved all the problems most "shitty" Web sites have,
at a portion of the profit they generate!

Think about all the most popular, successful Web sites. Google. Craigslist
possibly, YouTube -- I mean Google. Facebook. Twitter. Even Apple's company
site. What do they all have in common? Mountains of servers, load balancers,
support staff, etc. to preserve up time and availability. There's animation,
video, color backgrounds, textures, window decorations, animated drop-down
menus, sound in general, gimmicks like games and apps, gizmos like Google's
widgets or gew-gaws (whatever that may be). They are all complex and
functional, and those six Web sites -- well more like four -- together
represent about <a non-verified, completely shot from the hip> dollar amount
value.

Simplistic and forgotten. That's what Heavy Cat's site is going to be. They
have a lot of information, if you can consider seven main pages to be "a lot".
They have a choice. They can spend six months building a gee-whiz site, or
they can build more marginally profitable products. They chose the products.

They use Flash too, as a final insult. You know why they use Flash? Because
it's the only thing they learned how to use. The tools integrate well into
their established workflow and they interoperate well with all the tools
designed by the exact same software firm (somehow). They allow them to make
graphics, music, voices and games look and sound good. As they should, with
the monthly subscription costs.

Someday Heavy Cat might use HTML5 too. But Flash had a 16-year death, so
they're going to use what doesn't work with the majority of the world. If you
are on an Apple phone, or just don't want to run Flash, their site will look
even shittier. If you want to look at their Flash stuff, bend to their will.

They also no longer care about SEO, so you won't see their Web pages on any
search engines much. Searching for anything but "Heavy Cat" directly yields no
results referencing their site.

Matt

------
rhizome
Ahistorical braggadocio posted to HN with a green account.

I'm calling shenanigans.

------
vonseel
Without taking progressive enhancement into consideration, let's look at the
facts.

From the article:

 _Google. Craigslist. YouTube. Facebook. Twitter. Even Apple 's company site.
What do they all have in common? Text and the occasional image. There's no
animation, video, color backgrounds, textures, window decorations, animated
drop-down menus, ambient sound, background music, gimmicks, gizmos or gew-
gaws._

Let's see:

Google: Currently has a game on the homepage. Certainly could be considered a
`gimmick, gizmo, or gew-gaw.`

YouTube: Obviously has video, some fancy modals can be found by hovering over
certain things, I'm sure there's a ton that I am missing.

Facebook: The site is built on databases, JavaScript, and other technologies
the author apparently considers `slow, buggy nonsense`. Where do you think all
those user images are stored? Chat certainly requires either AJAX or
Websockets (I have not checked).

Twitter: OK, we are closer to `text and images`. Still, these guys released
Bootstrap [http://getbootstrap.com/](http://getbootstrap.com/) which changed
the web -- obviously huge proponents of CSS. I think the understanding today
is -- even if you are not a designer/front-end developer, it is unacceptable
to deliver work without minimal styling, since you can throw Bootstrap on
something with little effort. Do you prefer plain browser styled inputs to
that? Twitter also has a ton of infrastructure underneath that 'simple'
140-character messaging 'social network'.

Apple: [http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/](http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/) Enough
said.

\--

And finally, the comment `Here's a pro tip from a seasoned veteran of web
development: if you want to do something really remarkable on a computer, you
don't write it in HTML. You write it in C.`.

I'm confused whether you mean "do something remarkable on a computer" (as
written) or "do something remarkable on the web". Your essay appears to be a
rant on why, you think, the web sucks. I get it, most of the technologies we
use are somehow dependent on C (CPython, most databases, OS). So, we are
standing on the shoulders of giants. Those libraries written in C enable us.
What does that have to do with the average web developer doing something
remarkable? Most of us will never have to deal with the scaling problems of
Facebook, Twitter, etc. Python is fast enough for me. Ruby is fast enough for
most Rails users. If I ever need more performance, perhaps I will look into
Go. The key point is `if`. I'm not going to start a new web project in `C`,
when modern languages and frameworks ease the level of effort to write the
code, and contain features I would otherwise have to re-implement.

You sure you aren't trollin`?

