Side note: I love web design like this over the huge amount of white space + magenta gradients in contemporary react apps that take 9 seconds to load. The modern web app, what monster have we created!
Ok, some responsive design wouldn't exactly hurt (zooming in one-handed on my phone on a shaky bus took me longer than a bloated "modern" web site would take to load), but I definitely agree with your sentiment. No cookie warnings, no full-screen popups, no sluggish animations and yes, no huge margins that turn my rather large phone screen into a 3310.
I didn't find it difficult to use one-handed at all. Double-tapped on the text which zoomed it to perfect reading width, then double-tapped again to zoom out and double-tapped on the images to have a look at those. Not sure what phone you're using but I think those gestures are universal?
I was using the WebView in Materialistic (Android HN reader app) which is known to be rather janky. The double tap gesture just zooms to some fixed value there and I had to manually adjust it. Not a big deal and even less so with most browsers' intelligent zooming or various "reading views", but still, being readable by default is a substantially better experience.
I like the technology stack, the design, not so much: it looks like it assumes a certain screen width, so that I get either:
- Too much black space on the right if fullscreen
- An empty red column on the left, and I must scroll to the right to see the text if tiled.
Moreover, there is still a lot of javascript on the page for ads, tracking (google analytics), youtube, so it could be faster. I see a lot of minimalist, well-written contemporary blogs as well; it mostly seems to be marketing websites that have bloated out of proportions.
You're right, it does assume a certain screen width and doesn't scale at all in any way. I was also thinking when I returned to HN from the article that I couldn't actually read HN because the white-on-black was such an extreme colour scheme, my eyes took about 10 seconds to adjust.
