paulgraham.com's design is actually quite similar to the design of default templates for Viaweb online stores, the company pg founded. Every Viaweb site had a left-hand row of buttons with navigation elements and simple sans-serif text in the center.
I actually have a theory that the software running paulgraham.com is a sort of stripped down version of the original Viaweb content management system. You can see in the view-source that there is still "Y! Store" JavaScript running on his pages, and that, for example, the titles of each essay on his site are actually images hosted at yimg.com (e.g. for this essay, http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/paulgraham_2270_385).
pg has spoken about how one of Viaweb's major features early-on was that it worked around the limitations of browser fonts by auto-generating images (GIFs) with rendered anti-aliased fonts and served those in the browser. Looks like his site continues to do the same thing to this day.
If my theory is true, I really hope pg never redesigns it. It serves as a pretty cool historical reference to the company he founded, that made him wealthy in the sale to Yahoo, and that ultimately allowed him to start YC / HN.
The left-side navbar is also an image map! (remember those?) My guess: Viaweb generated a single image out of the navbar description and markup for an image map. In those days, browsers didn't handle parallel downloading well. A single navigation element with an image map probably loaded faster in browsers than several navigation image buttons.
Yes, image maps are out of vogue and text-as-images is unnecessary with modern browsers. But, if the software running paulgraham.com truly has lineage to Viaweb, then that is so much cooler than any modern redesign could possibly be.
I actually have a theory that the software running paulgraham.com is a sort of stripped down version of the original Viaweb content management system. You can see in the view-source that there is still "Y! Store" JavaScript running on his pages, and that, for example, the titles of each essay on his site are actually images hosted at yimg.com (e.g. for this essay, http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/paulgraham_2270_385).
pg has spoken about how one of Viaweb's major features early-on was that it worked around the limitations of browser fonts by auto-generating images (GIFs) with rendered anti-aliased fonts and served those in the browser. Looks like his site continues to do the same thing to this day.
If my theory is true, I really hope pg never redesigns it. It serves as a pretty cool historical reference to the company he founded, that made him wealthy in the sale to Yahoo, and that ultimately allowed him to start YC / HN.
The left-side navbar is also an image map! (remember those?) My guess: Viaweb generated a single image out of the navbar description and markup for an image map. In those days, browsers didn't handle parallel downloading well. A single navigation element with an image map probably loaded faster in browsers than several navigation image buttons.
Yes, image maps are out of vogue and text-as-images is unnecessary with modern browsers. But, if the software running paulgraham.com truly has lineage to Viaweb, then that is so much cooler than any modern redesign could possibly be.