I'm firmly of the belief that a truly great site should be fully usable with no JS and no CSS.
Yeah, web page ought to be viewable in plain HTML; otherwise, that's not a real web page. I consider this requirement
mandatory for informational webpages I write: and I'm willing to adapt or compromise my designs to make it so. Usability under traditional text mode browsers like Lynx, Links, and W3M is an important litmus test for this.
it didn't show any of the CSS, It was all just plain HTML. This happens sometimes with different sites, and I always think it's fascinating to see. Is it the same for anyone else when that happens?
The most common cause of that happening in general is, of course, CSS file failing to load. But some egregious sites that web destroyers
(1) inflicted JavaS'creep infection upon would use scripts to assign styles to the page. So once in a while, when any of these happened:
- I disabled scripts (which I do so 99% of the time), and/or...
- One or more of the script files failed to load, and/or...
- The script made use of latest-and-worst web API-of-the day that my off-vintage browser doesn't have or doesn't have in a form it expected (so the script exploded and stop working)
...I would end up with unstyled page on such sites too. However, it would be more common for me to just see Blank Page Disease
(2) in such cases, because such sites also commonly abused scripts to populate page
content too; which is just despicable.
Anyway, for me specifically, the most-common cause of me looking at unstyled view on other people's websites, is that
I killed its stylesheet myself (3); either because the styling was obnoxious, pulling in heavy "aesthetics" resource that used too much memory or CPU
(4), or failed to work properly on my main and not-new browser, or failed to account for my non-HD screen.
And since you mentioned Low Tech Magazine: no offense to Kris De Decker (his writings are great), but ever since a redesign they made
(5) during a transition from Typepad to on-premise, that site has become one of the sites I have to explicitly kill its stylesheet (and SVG too in this case) in order to read it on my low-tech near-vintage setup with meaningful level of comfort.
If I have to be honest, a deserving term I'd use for calling minimal-looking webpage that failed to properly work on actual minimal/old system is:
chickenshit minimalism.
(1) I refuse to call many of such people "web developer".
(2) By "Blank Page Disease", I mean the symptom of webpage showing absolutely no content when client-side script was not available or killed. This is even worse than sites that shown "Please enable JavaScript to view this page"; because techno-discriminating web destroyers
(1) behind such abominations are no longer just refusing to accommodate people who don't accept drive-by programs like me... they now treat us as "don't exist" or "unperson"/bot.
I used to call this disease "Blank Page Syndrome" until I discovered from web searches that this word already have a different meaning (writer's block) to other people.
(3) By going to View > Page Style > No Style on my non-mainstream Mozilla-family browser. If you're using latest-and-worst version of English-language Firefox however, and you wanna have the hamburger(-menu) and eat it too, blindly press Alt+V and then blindly followed by typing letter "y" and letter "n". (To revive the style: do the same thing, but change the last letter to "b")
(4) Like villain image ("hero image" as called by its proponents), huge background wallpaper, gratuitous CSS animations, and so on.
(5) I think it was his girlfriend that was responsible for this offending style.
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