I wish sites were still designed this way. Not the animated gifs or the font size 1, but the fact that once the site is loaded, it's completely done. And if I refresh the page, or bookmark the link and come back later, I'm going to see the exact same page. According to the Chrome developer tools the page took 2ms to render and 4ms to paint.
I write JavaScript professionally but not all web sites need JavaScript, in fact most do not. Compare this site with a random page from the ReadWrite's new design[1] which doesn't even load its initial content until after the page has loaded (!) and gives 50% of its x axis to ads and links to other unrelated pages on the site (which contain more ads of course).
I don't want informational websites to continue to load stuff a second or five seconds after the page has loaded. I don't want them to load new content when my mouse floats over a div. I don't want a sitemap that is omnipresent as I scroll down an article.
I'm a big fan of the Contrast Rebellion[2] and kind of feel like something in the same spirit is needed for static websites. I miss the non-interactive web.
I'm in the same boat as you. I absolutely _love_ developing sites JavaScript-free on the first pass. It really makes you realize how much of a crutch it's been that you've depended on, and how much you can get away with these days without it, especially with the rise of newer CSS features in the last couple of years.
At the end of the day you're left with a very fast and clean site that you can, after careful consideration, add very tiny JS snippets to in order to improve UX in places.
Various publications tout low intensity, medium/low-contrast as a tool to reduce eyestrain. IMHO, default font size, line spacing and column width are more important than high contrast (somewhat of a problem on this site too)
Thought: should we aim to vary contrast by device?
On my mobile phone I prefer sites with higher contrast, especially when out and about, on my retina iPad however, sites with white backgrounds and lots of text are much more tiring/difficult to process (plus bright screens, incl. tablets and phones are shown to result in insomnia [1]).
At the risk of going completely O/T here, f.lux [2] has helped me a lot in this respect.
I code my site by hand... each and every page... for these same reasons. I need to figure out templating because it has become quite tedious to update links and I'm only at <50 pages!
MacOS X people might want to investigate Eastgate Systems Tinderbox. Can handle the navigation links for huge ad-hoc Web sites using a local template then generate the Web pages.
I use Linux at home, and use a couple of bash scripts to make the index page and navigation links on individual pages that I write in markdown (but can hand edit html if the mood takes me).
Windows: powershell? A few scripts for indexing?
There are also large, flexible applications such as jekyl that can generate static Web sites.
It's one of those things that every time I look at templating, I get overwhelmed and my procrastination says that the time it would take me to learn templating would be better served coding the site...
I was even more impressed by the original WWW documents posted by Tim Berners-Lee that hit HN a few months back.
The pages had no rendering or layout, just strictly semantic markup.
They were an absolute joy to read.
The present-day Web is climbing a tower of Babel and reaching baroque levels of ostentation. I see a great re-settling, quite likely as the Web bifurcates into a documentation platform, for information, and an application platform. Most of the Web is still really just static docs.
I'm with you for the most part but I find that #fff background with #000 text is pretty harsh on my eyes. I think there is a sweet spot somewhere in the middle.
The biggest problem with readability for me lately is awful Google Fonts which never render right.
I write JavaScript professionally but not all web sites need JavaScript, in fact most do not. Compare this site with a random page from the ReadWrite's new design[1] which doesn't even load its initial content until after the page has loaded (!) and gives 50% of its x axis to ads and links to other unrelated pages on the site (which contain more ads of course).
I don't want informational websites to continue to load stuff a second or five seconds after the page has loaded. I don't want them to load new content when my mouse floats over a div. I don't want a sitemap that is omnipresent as I scroll down an article.
I'm a big fan of the Contrast Rebellion[2] and kind of feel like something in the same spirit is needed for static websites. I miss the non-interactive web.
[1]http://readwrite.com/2012/11/14/if-foxconn-replaced-its-huma... [2]http://contrastrebellion.com/