You probably build websites and think your shit is special. You think your 13 megabyte parallax-ative home page is going to get you some bloody award banner you can glue to the top corner of your site. You think your 40-pound jQuery file and 83 polyfills give IE7 a boner because it finally has box-shadow. Wrong, you stupid bastard. Let me describe what constitutes a kick-arse website:
You. Are. Over-designing. Look at this shit. It's a bloody website. Why the bloody hell do you need to animate a trendy-arse banner flag when I hover over that useless load of bollocks? You spent hours on it and added 80 kilobytes to your bastard site, and some sad bastard jabbing at it on their iPad with fat sausage fingers will never see that shit. Not to mention blind people will never see that shit, but they don't see any of your shitty shit.
You never knew it, but this is your perfect website. Here's why.
This entire page weighs less than the gradient-meshed facebook logo on your poxy Wordpress site. Did you seriously load 100kb of jQuery UI just so you could animate the bloody background color of a div? You loaded all 7 fontfaces of a shitty webfont just so you could say "Hi." at 100px height at the beginning of your site? You piece of shit. I've got seven lines of CSS to add the merest hint of presentability and that's all you bloody need.
You total wanker. You thought you needed media queries to be responsive, but no. Responsive means that it responds to whatever bastard screensize it's viewed on. This site doesn't care if you're on an iMac or a bloody Tamagotchi.
Look at this shit. You can read it ... that is, if you can read, you dickhead. It makes sense. It has bloody hierarchy. It's using HTML5 tags so you and your stupid-arse browser knows what the hell's in this bloody site. That's semantics, dumbarse.
It has content on the bloody screen. Your site has three bylines and link to your dribbble account, but you spread it over 7 full screens and make me click some bobbing button to show me how cool the jQuery ScrollTo plugin is. Piss off.
Cross-browser compatibility? Load this bastard in IE6. I dare you. I double dare you!
Like the man who's never grown out his beard has no idea what his true natural state is, you have no bloody idea what a website is. All you have ever seen are shitty skeuomorphic bastardizations of what should be text communicating a bloody message. This is a real, mostly-naked website. Look at it. It's bloody beautiful.
I'm not actually saying your shitty site should look like this. What I'm saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren't broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. It's you, the stupid-arse web designer, that actually breaks them. You utter bastard.
"Good design is as little design as possible."
- some German bastard
That said, this shouldn't be taken as an excuse to leave the default browser styles in place so that the whole thing looks as if it was designed by Stevie Wonder. All it takes is a line or two of CSS to make the thing easier to read and not look total shit - 209 characters of CSS, in this case. So take that 30 seconds to do that, you bastards.
"You're a bloody moron if you use the default browser styles"
- Pope Gregory the Ninth
This is an unashamed copy and paste (for the most part) of this site here. The CSS and the final point was stolen from this follow-up site here. All I've done is slightly Britified some of the bastard swearing and turned the profanity level down just a tad to make it more suitable for use in teaching (in Higher Education - it's probably still not appropriate in a school setting! 😁). I do not claim that this is my material at all. I've even kept their Google Anal Tics Analytics script code so visits here still count as a view of their original bastard site.
The original version of this site was written by the guys who created txti. The least I can do is encourage people who come here to to try txti today to make your own lightweight bastard websites.