I know this has been posted on jest, but this is slander.
marxists.org is not only perfectly fine, it's a sight to behold and replicate.
Hell actually, if anything I still believe it can be improved because https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ is peak web design and if you think otherwise you're simply wrong.
CSS is bourgeois decadence and JavaScript is fascistic techbro overreach into my computer.
The person may have been sarcastic but I sure ain't. I also was for some really extatic when I visited https://blowback.show/ because I loved their relatively simple website design. It's fucking great.
I dont know much about web design but the site is probably burdened by being very old. The layout is executed using a combination of classes and CSS but most of what an article needs is baked into the HTML spec these days. For example <aside> tags and stuff. There are custom CSSs for the website on GitHub and they turn out to be more complicated than expected because of how the pages are designed.</aside>
It's not. Works by various authors have different html formatting that make it very difficult to consistently scrape. Splitting works into several pages makes it impossible to send them to pocket (or FOSS equivalents). It sucks for anything other than reading in their website.
Tbh, I love minimal websites. This could be my nostalgia speaking, though. Nevertheless, small websites means less bandwidth requirements for our comrades with slow internet.
Plus, text-focused websites tend to be higher quality and actually have meaningful content.
I'm all for minimalism, but I don't think that has to be at odds with the site looking nice and clean. Lemmy is a good example of a site that looks pretty minimal, but also looks nice visually.
The only thing I look in a website for is an https protocol. Marxists.org has it, but there are some other sources of theory that are as ancient but were never updated, and thus remain http.