All you may need is HTML

> * Easier to navigate?

Resoundingly, the first. The second one is full of huge tiles that take up so much screen real estate, it's hard for me to scan over what is available. Crammed at the bottom are a ton of links, in no particular organization that was immediately apparent. The entire site is plastered with huge images everywhere, that don't really add to the content and just distract from whatever it was I was theoretically there for, and really don't help me understand the site at all. Also, the zoom effect on tiles keeps grabbing my attention when I was really just trying to move my mouse across them to get to something else that I'm now distracted from.

> * Nicer to to look at?

Depends on what you mean I guess; if you came to soak up pictures of smiling faces, I guess the second. But personally, I don't dislike the first.

> We don't live in a HTML only world because no one wants to live in a HTML only world. Some techies might but 99% of ordinary people do not.

I'm afraid this is a really awkward statement. There's no way to argue against it or really say anything to the contrary. You've framed it such that anyone who disagrees with you is "a techie" who in your definition does not represent any norm.

>What is this, if not appeal to authority?

It is extraordinary claims, require extraordinary evidence, or experience/proven competence.

>And this seems to be, "follow the crowd".

And this seem to be, reactionary.

> It is extraordinary claims, require extraordinary evidence, or experience/proven competence.

But they don't. All they require is for you to evaluate the claims, on their own merits, without examining the speaker for their credentials. Evaluating a claim based on the credentials of the speaker is quite exactly an appeal to authority.

> And this seem to be, reactionary.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, or how to take it, so I'll try again with more words. Nobody is claiming that the best way to get a job at a large company is to build an experience base consisting solely of pure HTML websites. Nobody is even claiming that this is a good way to get a job at such, or that it will work at all. This seems rather orthogonal to the claim that, depending on what you are building and what you are trying to accomplish, "All you may need is HTML".

Yes. Yes. You can use HTML and write just fine. It's a markup language, like old runoff, which could be used to generate nice, fancy prospectus documents for a major gov. agency in a far northern country I worked in, when I was a wee child. A good markup language is all you need. It makes for better writing, because the writer focuses on content, not the pretty presentation, which should be done after the content is written.

I am getting my nose rubbed in this truth - about the benefits of basic minimal website design. Most websites are useless. Mine is pretty useless. I write it to have a web-presence, promote my consulting business, and because I feel a need to write (maybe that is an illness? - not sure..). I find writing forces me to think better, and the investment side of our business, requires I think well, or we die quickly. It's a harsh world now.

I found this Hackernews post, by researching how to update critical browser stuff, which has been borked for us, by our trading platform provider. Updating browser on Linux - and guess what? - lose all bookmarks, all customizations, everything. Arrrrgh!!! (happens EVERY update, of course).

Simple is often better. And the Web (most of it) has become crap, mostly. Or dangerous, toxic vector for economic assault. Bloody awful, nasty and sad. So it goes.

I am converting our crappy website from a provider (one.com) which bought our simplesite.com website builder thing, which worked pretty good. But the site had all this fancy stuff for menus and images and videos, and a truckload of .css stuff - sure, nice and fancy. But the conversion to the One.com builder stuff, does not work, of course. We cannot update (at all) our site from the data-description that one.com has in it's website-builder software. As of the forced conversion, we were complete off the air. Borked.

SO, this is stupid. Complexity and fancy design - is mostly stupid, and it also creates contrived dependency (keeps customers locked, makes them be forced to open their wallets and send you cash - good for providers, bad for customers.)

I got so pissed off, I decided to do it all ourselves. We built our site at AWS as an EC2 instance. Fucking website-building software is a scam, mostly.

The original poster is right. All you really need is HTML (AND some stuff to render videos and audio and maybe code to get paid for stuff, maybe...). Most of the .css stuff is fluff. And people are getting REAL tired of being dusted with fluff. OP is right.

Our old website is https://www.gemesyscanada.com It was a mess - a long bunch of stuff, posted over the years, research-logs, blogs, notes, etc. But now that it is a One.com, we cannot update it. The websitebuilder software gets to 90%, and then hangs - and we do not even get any error messages telling us what the problem is. Arrrgh.

We are building a simpler version - using AWS-EC2 - we have one free EC2 instance which I am experimenting with: http://35.182.107.190 and that is it. We have not even got a domain set up yet - it's all hacking & testing for now. But it looks like we can go this route. The whole thing is an exercise in vanity and ego. It really is, honestly. But why not? It is what our tiny little business does, and it is what I am. I've been doing AI since I went to Dr. Geoff Hinton's classes, and got a copy of Xerion working on a P/C running Linux - back in the 1990's. One must not hide one's light under a bushel, right? So, we need a website.

And a bad one, that looks goofy, and is honest, is better than a really fancy one, full of obfuscation, deception, dis-information and old-fashioned lies. (Kinda like - oh - just about most things now?)

All you may need is HTML. Yup. Mostly true. - M. Langdon, Director, Owner, Floor-cleaner, Barn-builder, Portfolio Manager GEMESYS Ltd.