Wow. This page is actually strangely appealing. It loads fast. I don't have to click off to another page to get the news headlines. Ads are restrained to just a couple square boxes.
> I'm going to start a new trend in web design. I'll call it 56k design.
That was pretty much my criteria when I was making forum software: https://www.lfgss.com/
It's still too heavy and slow, and there's still some things I could do better. But that's nitpicking, it's pretty good and when I finish re-structuring all of the code it will be a single binary install for those who want to use it, or a split-binary Web-UI + API for those who want to only do certain parts (i.e. customise and host the front-end and not care about the back-end, or to scale the background for heavy mobile use without that being serving front-end traffic).
My goals for that software in the next few months:
1. Same-origin everything
2. Eradicate as much JavaScript as possible (graceful degradation to the extreme)
3. What JavaScript cannot be eradicated, do natively (not using jQuery, etc)
4. Single codebase, single binary install from a single `go install` command
We've built the Thredded forums engine (https://thredded.org) with the same goals in mind. The entire CSS is 10KiB, JavaScript loads asynchronously and is optional.
Oh, people have already tried this. Very recently I think someone posted their website on here saying it was amazingly fast etc. Anyone who used the web back in the 90s just remembered it as how things used to be. A Google search was virtually instant over a 56k modem. Now it's noticeably laggy on a broadband connection. If you used Firefox then web pages started rendering the instant enough HTML had been downloaded. None of this waiting for the entire thing and then running over it all with Javascript to generate the "real" render.
I'm going to start a new trend in web design. I'll call it 56k design.