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This whole "responsive" design (slow, bloated, ajax-on-meth pile of shit) shift and "mobile" revolution has been a wholesale disaster.

• Websites are slower, less usable, less useful, and even more ad and spyware ridden than they were so much as 3 years ago.
• Mainstream, text-only websites now take 20s to load on i5s, need megabytes of css and and javascript code to even display images.
• Even the best Web 2.0 sites have degraded, losing functionality, common sense, text on buttons, borders on buttons for Christsake.
• Mammoth advances bandwidth, storage, latency, processor power and memory are mullified as fast as Node.js can devour them.
• Every page is now an app

Brutal reality: Websites were better when IE6 was still around.
When we didn't have standards. When "Designers" didn't have the ability to treat the browser as a turning machine and hijack everything about it. When sites pretended to give a shit about bandwidth.

Web 3.0 is a pile of shit.
http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

motherfuckingwebsite.com

Nothing. It is less efficient.

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

2.7 KB

Yes. Some people just want an MFing website. Others are willing to spend an extra 151 bytes on making it readable.

Even showing and hiding replies can be done without script in 98 percent of browsers, using a small amount of CSS3 to restyle a checkbox.

whaddayagonnado?

Not hire either one of them and compose my own motherfucking website.

> A return to 1990s web would be an improvement.

like this motherf*cking website

Every single time I make a web site, I dread fighting with the limitations of HTML and CSS, especially when I can't just require the latest and greatest browsers.

Has it occurred to you that you're the problem here, not the browser?

Here's a http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ renders just fine on Lynx. If you want to use CSS, you can also make a http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ that renders well on every browser written in the past 20 years.

Whatever happened to failing gracefully? I've been using the web since the days of "This Page Best Viewed At 800x600 In IE4 / Netscape 3". The problem, then as now, isn't the browsers, it was the web designers who decided to implement everything in Flash and Java because HTML 3.0 wasn't fun enough.

Your summary is great! But I'm lost on one point so would someone be kind enough to describe what http://motherfuckingwebsite.co... does? I'm at work so visiting that site, searching for it, etc. will not do.

It uses HTML 3.0 tags (there's a http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ that demonstrates good usage of CSS) to create a fully responsive, cross-platform web experience, aka., a motherfucking website.

This is a motherfucking website.

And it's fucking perfect.

Seriously, what the fuck else do you want?

You probably build websites and think your shit is special. You think your 13 megabyte parallax-ative home page is going to get you some fucking Awwward banner you can glue to the top corner of your site. You think your 40-pound jQuery file and 83 polyfills give IE7 a boner because it finally has box-shadow. Wrong, motherfucker. Let me describe your perfect-ass website:

• Shit's lightweight and loads fast
• Fits on all your shitty screens
• Looks the same in all your shitty browsers
• The motherfucker's accessible to every asshole that visits your site
• Shit's legible and gets your fucking point across (if you had one instead of just 5mb pics of hipsters drinking coffee)

Well guess what, motherfucker:

You. Are. Over-designing. Look at this shit. It's a motherfucking website. Why the fuck do you need to animate a fucking trendy-ass banner flag when I hover over that useless piece of shit? You spent hours on it and added 80 kilobytes to your fucking site, and some motherfucker jabbing at it on their iPad with fat sausage fingers will never see that shit. Not to mention blind people will never see that shit, but they don't see any of your shitty shit.

You never knew it, but this is your perfect website. Here's why.

It's fucking lightweight

This entire page weighs less than the gradient-meshed facebook logo on your fucking Wordpress site. 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. It's responsive

You dumbass. You thought you needed media queries to be responsive, but no. Responsive means that it responds to whatever motherfucking screensize it's viewed on. This site doesn't care if you're on an iMac or a motherfucking Tamagotchi.

It fucking works

Look at this shit. You can read it ... that is, if you can read, motherfucker. It makes sense. It has motherfucking hierarchy. It's using HTML5 tags so you and your bitch-ass browser know what the fuck's in this fucking site. That's semantics, motherfucker.

It has content on the fucking screen. Your site has three bylines and link to your dribbble account, but you spread it over 7 full screens and make me click some bobbing button to show me how cool the jQuery ScrollTo plugin is.

Cross-browser compatibility? Load this motherfucker in IE6. I fucking dare you.

This is a website. Look at it. You've never seen one before.

Like the man who's never grown out his beard has no idea what his true natural state is, you have no fucking idea what a website is. All you have ever seen are shitty skeuomorphic bastardizations of what should be text communicating a fucking message. This is a real, naked website. Look at it. It's fucking beautiful.

Yes, this is fucking satire, you fuck

I'm not actually saying your shitty site should look like this. What I'm saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren't broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. You son-of-a-bitch.

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

TFA: We are surrounded by powerful, capable computers, and we use so little of their maximum capability.

No, we are surrounded by powerful, capable computers, and we run them into the ground interpreting (or JIT-compiling) Javashit frameworks to interpret/JIT-compile Javashit code, and then use that to manipulate the DOM on the fly, all to produce a little fade-in/out effect to make up for the delay while other Javashit contacts an ad auction amongst another few dozen offsite machines bidding for the right to serve yet more Javashit, when all we wanted to do was read static text on a http://motherfuckingwebsite.co...

Yes, we do. And the fact is that we like it that way. We could all be using command-line tools on CP/M to launch our single-execution sovereign application; but most of us don't, because we enjoy the benefits of a flexible system - where you can distribute software through the Internet, run many applications at the same time in a windowing environment, or port software between different architectures.

No, we are surrounded by powerful, capable computers, and we run them into the ground interpreting (or JIT-compiling) Javashit frameworks to interpret/JIT-compile Javashit code, and then use that to manipulate the DOM on the fly, all to produce a little fade-in/out effect to make up for the delay while other Javashit contacts an ad auction amongst another few dozen offsite machines bidding for the right to serve yet more Javashit, when all we wanted to do was read static text on a http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

We do it because programmer time is more expensive than user time, but the net effect is that we now employ sledgehammers to swat flies because flyswatters aren't clever enough.

What's your download speed? I can browse most of the web pretty painlessly

The download speed isn't the problem. The rendering speed isn't even the problem. The problem is multiple DNS lookups and TCP/IP setup/teardowns for craptons of, well, crap that add no value to the content in the first place.

Web "developers" need to stop fucking around with the latest framework and just build a http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/, and if that's not good enough, they can just build a http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/.

I've said it before and here it is again. Within a decade, perhaps within the next 5 years, some bright young web designers will "discover" new methods of making websites that will turn out to be almost identical to the usable, intuitive, and inviting websites we had in 2008. I'm talking side navigation panes, site maps, links with actual words on them, legible text and fonts, content borders, actual fucking dense, readable, clear content instead of a 2+MB page that take 5 seconds to fade in a single login screen. In short people will discover how to make a motherfucking website again.

I'll be glad when that happens. Webpages are getting slow and slower with more JavaScript crap that doesn't gain anything (fine if it's an interactive Office App, but just a blog post?) It's causing me to have to retire computers simply because surfing the web is too slow. The requirements of a web page are normally pretty simple: Show text, show pictures, show links, and in select cases show videos.

No. Google is being run by fucking idiots nowadays. Pretentious, hipster posers with no clue, riding on the wave of cheap credit. You don't split the userbase. This is basic shit. BASIC shit.

What do young people watch on Youtube nowadays? Fucking Everything! Gaming, Music, TV shows, Funny e-bin may-may videos, Pewdiepie, cat videos, popular science vids, fan remixes, movie trailers, etc, etc, etc, etc. They watch all this under one site. Youtube.com. You split shit off into gaming.youtube.com and music.youtube.com, and tv.youtube.com and you will split the userbase and reduce the appeal of the site.

Basic fucking shit. But here's the number one web company making a basic fucking mistake. Jesus fucking christ. This mobile "revolution", or more like "devolution", has produced an entire generation of completely retarded web designers and site administrators who have forgotten the basics of how people browse. Hint: No-one is going to spend all day in an App or a website that is basically an App, no matter how much you destroy the user interface.

I've said it before and here it is again. Within a decade, perhaps within the next 5 years, some bright young web designers will "discover" new methods of making websites that will turn out to be almost identical to the usable, intuitive, and inviting websites we had in 2008. I'm talking side navigation panes, site maps, links with actual words on them, legible text and fonts, content borders, actual fucking dense, readable, clear content instead of a 2+MB page that take 5 seconds to fade in a single login screen. In short people will discover how to make a motherfucking website again.

Hipsters are the cancer of tech. They are the creationists to our science. They must be purged before all is lost.

Note to self: don't use Google on mobile devices, change their default search engine to DuckDuckGo.

I search Google for sites with the best content relevant to what I am looking for, I don't give a flying f**k whether the site have a "mobile friendly" version or not. I can read any webpage on my phone just fine, I can zoom in/out when needed.

I would agree with you if it was just about zooming.
However, some sites are close to unusable on mobile. The worst offender is the popup (often an ad but not always) that you can close because the button is outside the screen. But there are also sites relying on mouseovers, text squeezed in a column so small that there is no more than one word per line, or sites that completely mess up the layout when you try to zoom. Good content is useless when you can't read it, and I don't want these sites to appear in my top search results unless there are no alternatives.

And BTW, Google doesn't recommend "mobile friendly" versions of sites although they consider it acceptable. They recommend making sites that work whatever your device is. Web designers call this "responsive design", I call this "not broken". Here is a motherfucking good example.

Yeah, the time for coding them from scratch probably passed about 7-8 years ago.

Uh huh.

May I suggest a counterpoint?

It wasn't that a lot of these things couldn't be done before, it was that non-realtime media, non-interactive media, and scripted pseudo-interactive media (cgi scripts) should not all be lumped together.

For example, the article on readwriteweb does nothing if Javashit is disabled, yet it's just a static piece of text with some images and could have been just as effectively rendered in HTML 3.0 like any other motherfuckingwebsite.com.

Sad thing is, HTML 3.0 is more responsive than most of the shit I see today. HTML 3.0 used to just wrap words at the end of the screen or the window, no matter what the "designer" wanted. Now, when the "designer" wants a 6-inch minimum width, the text is unreadable on mobile unless you're willing to scroll back and forth for EVERY FUCKING LINE OF TEXT. And when the "designer" wants a 500-pixel maximum width,
the website
looks like this
on the
desktop.

Fuck web design. Fuck web designers. And increasingly, fuck the web.

also, browsers can resize. It's not the server's job

It's the server's job if the user doesn't want to have to download an ultra-high-resolution image over a metered connection. It also used to be the server's job back when web browsers insisted on using nearest neighbor resampling instead of bilinear or bicubic resampling.

We don't have a bandwidth shortage.

You appear not to know what it's like to be stuck on the 10 GB per month cap of wireless (satellite or cellular) home Internet access.

If you know it's a mac or a PC, you know it's got a desktop range of pixels.

But is that 1024 pixels wide with huge distracting white areas on both sides when viewed on a 2560 pixel monitor, or is it 2560 pixels wide with complete inability to see the entire image at once on a 1024 pixel monitor like the one in my laptop?

Likewise any particular smartphone.

A tablet held in landscape orientation runs the same operating system as a smartphone held in portrait orientation, despite the latter having only about one-third the horizontal width.

Don't resize images with the viewport. That's very annoying. They should reflow with the window according to the browser's settings. If you set a constant width, then you're asking for scroll bars if the window can't fit that width.

So what should a designer who doesn't want horizontal scrollbars do?

HTML was intended as the content provider; the browser intended to be the content formatter

And CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) was supposed to be the instructions that the content formatter follows.

using only hints -- lines, paragraphs, font styling, etc. The closer you can get to that in web page design

I imagine that as of 2014, most people would not prefer that most web pages look like Barry T. Smith's MFing Web Site. They would consider the default styling that a browser applies to the MFing Web Site to be unprofessional.

Every time some whackjob decides that menus should drop or windows should open when my mouse pointer crosses some object, I curse.

How would you prefer that a menu be opened while JavaScript is turned off? To the best of my knowledge, CSS supports only hover-to-show, not click-to-show.

Every time I run into some page (like liveaquaria.com's) that won't run its cart or checkout through the usual standard ports and protocols

Could you describe what nonstandard "ports and protocols" liveaquaria.com uses? I tried to buy a coral to test what you describe, but it required me to create a username and password before I could check out. Is the need to register before checking out part of the problem you describe? I do know that some manufacturers, such as Games Workshop, have a policy of forbidding online stores from selling their products through a standard shopping cart.

I already responded to one of your comments, but I want to respond to this one specifically.

Take a look at this website. It's obviously verbally vulgar, but otherwise it is safe for work and it's funny. It also makes a very serious statement that I think a lot of Slashdotters would agree with. I suggest you read this in its entirety. It's short and won't take long.

I have other opinions, but I won't repeat what others are already telling you.

This is a motherfucking website.
And it's fucking perfect.

The mobile version of Slashdot sucks hard.

AJAX.

The more you try and make it "responsive", the less it works.

This is a motherfucking website. It renders in every browser. It doesn't require Javascript, Java, Flash, AIR, or HTML5. It doesn't load 100kB of jQuery. In fact, the entire website takes up less space than most avatars do.

It. just. works.

Slashdot: Please abort the failed beta. Give the guy his money and let him go. Give him a promotion, he's obviously learned a lot about the hot new thing that'll look good on his resume next time. But please, just please, don't put that beta into production. It doesn't even have a 'view all comments' option. It's less functional than the current AJAX failure of D2, which itself was far less functional than the classic/D1 version. Please. Just. Stop.

Here's the fix: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Oh - a website for those with Tourette's?

Here's the fix:
http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/