[aruggirello]

HN has a purposely minimalist stylesheet / layout, with NO icons (except the one Y on the upper left corner), NO images or other media, NO fanciful animations.

Not all websites can do without all of that - imagine a photography site, or an e-commerce site, etc. without pictures?

I agree though that this is great advice for landing pages; load times are probably among the reasons of most bounces.

[coldtea]

>Not all websites can do without all of that - imagine a photography site, or an e-commerce site, etc. without pictures?

No, but I can imagine an photography site, or an e-commerce site without useless non-content pictures and shit-loads of CSS and JS.

[totalcrepe]

Yes, and HN is in violation of Google's performance guidelines for putting those sensible rules in a sensible place.

> Not all websites can do without all of that - imagine a photography site, or an e-commerce site, etc. without pictures?

How does HN's CSS enforce a ban on img elements in pages pointing to a photo's canonical location? Or preclude putting your standard frames into it?

Imagine a photography site where no photo link is shared across any pages (but 90 page base64 encoded URLs are repeated randomly), an ecommerce site where a product is shown in a strange new light at every step in the checkout process using a mishmash of entirely different CSS.. Google's advice is approving the most idiotic behavior on sites that are barely keeping their head above water in terms of technical understanding, letting them hold onto strange ideas because they are "fast."