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by ilamont·17d ago·view on hn ↗
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).

10 comments
It highlighted something that I hadn't realised had been impacting me. The latency of the modern web.

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.

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.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"> is the only thing keeping this page from being mobile friendly.

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

It wasn't a good idea even in 2008.
Never understood why we need to add this ridiculous tag for mobile. CSS/HTML are responsive by default.
But tables are not. The widest row overrides the rest, making everything else tiny.
I don't have a smartphone to test on. What happens without this?
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.
And mobile browsers keep this defective by design default even they now all have an actual desktop mode that does pretty much the same thing but more consistently.
If you want to see it for yourself: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/device-mode
> not mobile friendly.

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).

You don't need any responsive CSS as HTML is responsive by default. It's just mobile browsers that have decided they know better and you need to add a meta tag to tell them to actually follow the standard.
In this pages case, I disagree. I feel like when pages try to force their 'aspect ratio / styling' to fit the view port I have to fight more with it. at least as it stands I can zoom as needed on this page, I can appreciate the web devs 'vision' as in how it probably appeared on their machine. I honestly hate mobile sites unless they are done just super super well which is harder than expected. https://rockauto.com is one such site that I think works really well on mobile.
A page like this, with minimal styling, the whole point is the author does not care, the author expects the user's agent to style the document optimally for it's dimensions., the optimal in responsive design. this was the original vision for the web, the agent supplies most of the style.

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.

As mentioned above, adding a viewport meta tag will make most unstyled pages look much better on mobile.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

> Why are mobile browsers defaults so wrong?

History. When mobile browsers first appeared they had to default to a desktop page width to avoid breaking exisiting content, much of which was either built in layout tables or used CSS that assumed a wider window. The viewport meta tag was introduced (by Apple in Mobile Safari when the iPhone first came out, IIRC) so developers could override that behaviour. I think the defaults made a lot of sense at the time, and Apple made the right choice.

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.
This sounds like a critique of mobile browsers. Make friendliness the default!
> The main drawback with the page's unstyled design is that the page is not mobile friendly.

Then fix mobile browsers to display it correctly.

They’re already fixed, just add the meta tag if you give the slightest semblance of a shit. Otherwise don’t and people may be less inclined to engage with your content on their phone.
Add what in a meta tag?

Why should web developers change their content to work on defective browsers?

Exactly, all the meta tag does is tell mobile browsers to follow the standard as written before they existed. They should just do that by default.
Because it wouldn’t work for every website and the web almost never breaks backward compatibility.
It would work a lot better than what mobile browsers are doing now. The only websites that can be argued to be helped by that were those with fixed table layouts - but those are still pretty unusable even with the standards-noncompliant hack. And websites that were mobile-compatible before like plain HTML sites like the TFA are needlessly broken.
So if I have a block of totally unstyled HTML, why wouldn't a phone browser just display it in the most sensible way possible?
Firefox's reader mode works really well on the article, I wonder why it's not the default for unstyled pages.
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.
If you need to scroll the viewport left and right to read a line of text, that seems kind of unfriendly.
On my screen it fit perfectly after double tapping
I mean it fits, but i don't find the text size particularly usable for mobile

On vivaldi mobile on an android phone (with an approximately 6x3" display), i see this as the first line:

> On 2026 August 5, within a few minutes of 06:35 UTC, an upper stage (section) of a rocket used for a lunar mission will hit the

And for me, reading a 124 character wide line on a 3" wide screen (75mmish) is not particularly comfortable.

When oriented horizontally, the text becomes larger than a lot of the ios system text size
With Firefox Reader Mode (also available on a few other browsers) it's perfect.

Though that rather invites the question of why browser defaults are so poor.

I used reading mode on Safari and it was perfect for reading.
The page is great on my phone. Loads instantly unlike any other mobile website in existence, seemingly.
I read it on a mobile device and found it perfectly legible. I like small text though.
I kinda think it's more mobile friendly than desktop friendly (although it isn't great on either.)

It's sorta hard to read text that spans the whole screen and at least on mobile, that's not nearly as wide.

You don't have to make your browser as wide on your screen on desktop either.
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.

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

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.
I wish the entire web was in this format. Really. May need a bit of work to navigate around but very fast, no BS, no tracking.
The author's email obfuscation holds up well against small local models too, just for kicks neither Qwen-9B, Gemma-12B, nor GPT-OSS-20B could read it, giving results like "poc.otulptcejorp@otulm".
> What are the drawbacks to reverting to this type web publishing?

It's nearly impossible to get overlapping text without css...

Gotta love the instantaneous load
I miss FTP man… let’s go back
Nothing stopping you — it's still there and still works. I use it for one of my sites.
Yeah but when I wear my FileZilla shirt at concerts I never get the girl