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This website is a refreshing breath of fresh air. There's no "sign up with your email newsletter," it's a traditional webhost (not a Medium or a Substack), there's almost no styling / images / branding, it doesn't churn and stutter due to the behind-the-scenes gyrations of the latest monstrous multi-megabyte JavaScript framework with hundreds of dependencies.

Simon Tatham (the author of this article) is the developer of PuTTY [1], an open source Windows native SSH client, and Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection [2], a bunch of simple games implemented in portable C (with OS-specific frontends, or you can play them in-browser via WebAssembly).

The website has been updated in ways that improve it (this just-written article is a huge amount of informative content, and being able to play a puzzle in-browser via WASM is very welcome), but it never jumped on any of the 21st century design bandwagons that have taken over most of the WWW (many of which, I suspect, only exist to create jobs for web developers and branding consultants).

[1] PuTTY https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

[2] https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/




Agreed.

Also it could benefit from a modicum of CSS.


While Firefox displays it badly, Dillo displays it quite nicely, as does my home-rolled web browser. It used to be that, if you wanted something better than black-on-white left-aligned sans-serif, you'd configure your browser to your own tastes; I wonder why it doesn't work that way any more?


Because the inconsistency carries some risk.

And 97% of web users don't know CSS.





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