[bryanhogan]

I would be careful with calling that kind of design function over style. Modern UI design has its merits.

But yes, good designs are not flashy, e.g. I love the design of Astro Starlight ( https://starlight.astro.build/), a starter kit for documentation pages.

So I also took inspiration from "simple designs" for my personal site: https://bryanhogan.com/

[Yhippa]

> I would be careful with calling that kind of design function over style.

Why?

[Esophagus4]

For one, it is awful on mobile.

We can have bare, simple sites while still making them accessible.

[Dansvidania]

Why is it awful? Most barebones websites are naturally responsive..

[dfxm12]

Talking about the url provided in the OP, one click on Firefox for mobile and it should be obvious. Text wider than then the screen, yellow text on white background. line spacing that's too tight, a background image that obscures text...

[zadikian]

I don't usually see this because it seems to require intentional design to work on mobile. The original post has an example that doesn't lay out well on mobile, or just a very tall and thin desktop window.

[MajorBee]

I, for one, found reading the text under the News section quite difficult to read. The combination of the font color and the spacing/kerning made it all appear like a character soup to me. It's possible this is something that has variable impact across populations though.

Generally speaking though, I do think trying to paint 90s websites as some sort of utopian ideal of function and design is purely an exercise in nostalgia and nothing else. It is entirely possible to make fast, responsive, accessible, well-designed rich websites today, all without writing a word of JavaScript (not that including JS by itself is bad or anything). Do not mistake anti-user functions like heavy weight analytics and user tracking libraries, or poorly optimized and ill-architected code bundles as the current "state of the art".