Alexis Bouchez

~ / research / The Web That Still Works: Old School Websites With No CSS, No JS, No Bloat

The Web That Still Works: Old School Websites With No CSS, No JS, No Bloat

The median webpage in 2026 weighs 2.6 MB. That's heavier than the original Doom game (2.39 MB). A single New York Times article was recently audited at 49 MB and 422 network requests. The average page has grown 5.3x in 14 years.

And then there's technovelgy.com.

3,300+ entries. 6,400+ articles. 300+ authors cataloged. Science fiction inventions cross referenced with real world technology. The entire site runs on plain HTML. No framework. No build step. No JavaScript. It loads instantly on any connection, any device, any browser made in the last 30 years. Bill Christensen has been running it since the early 2000s and it just works. It will probably outlive every React app deployed this year.

Technovelgy isn't an anomaly. There's an entire parallel web out there: sites that never "modernized," sites that chose simplicity on purpose, sites that are still running two decades later precisely because they have nothing to break. This paper is a catalog of those sites, organized by what they teach us about building things that last.

1. The Hall of Fame: Sites That Refuse to Die

Berkshire Hathaway (berkshirehathaway.com)

Warren Buffett's $900B+ company. The website is pure HTML. No CSS. No JavaScript. Four colors. A list of hyperlinks. 281,000 page views per month. It gives shareholders exactly what they need (annual reports, quarterly filings, news links) and absolutely nothing else. No hero image. No animation. No cookie banner. No chatbot. The most valuable company in the world, by some measures, with a website that looks like a 1996 Geocities page. And it's perfect.

The Berkshire site is a masterclass in knowing your audience. Shareholders don't need a beautiful experience. They need a filing. The site delivers filings. End of story. Every pixel of design on a corporate website that isn't Berkshire Hathaway is, in some sense, a concession to vanity.

Craigslist (craigslist.org)

Handles millions of daily transactions worth billions of dollars. The design hasn't meaningfully changed since 1999. A wall of blue hyperlinks organized into categories. Zero images on the homepage. Minimal CSS. An event calendar widget that feels lifted from a different era. But it works. It works so well that despite decades of startups trying to "disrupt Craigslist," most of them are dead and Craigslist is still here.

Craig Newmark understood something that most designers don't: for a classifieds site, the CONTENT is the interface. The listings themselves are the design. Everything else is noise. Craigslist's "ugly" design is actually a feature: it signals that this is a place for real transactions, not a place for aesthetics. Trust comes from utility, not from gradients.

The Drudge Report (drudgereport.com)

One of the most trafficked news aggregation sites in the world. Single column layout. All caps headlines. Blue and red hyperlinks on a white background. No navigation menu. No search bar (or a hard to find one). No images except for occasional editorial photos. Matt Drudge has been running this thing since 1996. The site looks exactly like it did when Clinton was president. It still drives more traffic to news sites than most social media platforms.

The Drudge Report works because the format IS the editorial voice. The all caps headlines, the dramatic link placement, the lack of surrounding context: these aren't design failures. They're editorial choices. The site feels urgent, breathless, slightly unhinged. That's the product. A redesign would kill it.

Paul Graham's Essays (paulgraham.com)

Over 200 essays that shaped Silicon Valley thinking. Plain HTML. No CSS to speak of. A list of links sorted by date. Individual essays are just text on a white background with a narrow column width. Someone once redesigned it to be "beautiful" and posted it on Hacker News. The comments were brutal: people preferred the original. Why? Because the plain formatting says: "the ideas are what matter here, not the container." The lack of design is itself a design statement.

Graham's site loads in under 100ms. It's readable on any device. It will render in Lynx (a text only terminal browser). It has never gone down because of a dependency update. It has never needed a migration. Every word Graham wrote in 2004 is still at the same URL, loading the same way. That's a 22 year uptime on zero maintenance.

Dan Luu's Blog (danluu.com)

One of the most respected technical blogs on the internet. Dan Luu writes about computer science, engineering management, and systems thinking. His site is aggressively plain: no CSS beyond what the browser defaults provide. No images. No analytics. No JavaScript. No fonts. The HTML is hand written.

Luu has written extensively about web bloat. His site loads in about 10KB. For comparison, the average "simple" blog built on a modern framework loads 1 to 5 MB. Luu's site is 100x to 500x lighter. It loads instantly on 2G connections, on old phones, in rural areas with terrible internet. His argument: if your blog post is 5,000 words, the HTML for that is about 30KB. Everything else your site loads is overhead that serves the developer, not the reader.

Technovelgy (technovelgy.com)

The site that inspired this paper. Bill Christensen built a dictionary of 3,300+ science fiction inventions cross referenced with the real world technologies they predicted. The content spans 1,000+ novels and stories by 300+ authors. Navigation is through an alphabetical glossary, a timeline, author indexes, and category pages. All server rendered HTML. All fast. All functional.

What makes Technovelgy special isn't just the design (or lack of it). It's the DEPTH. This is a site where someone clearly spent thousands of hours reading science fiction, cataloging every invented technology, cross referencing it with real patents and products, and writing original analysis for each entry. The content is irreplaceable. No AI could generate this. No startup could replicate this. It exists because one person cared about one thing for a very long time. The plain HTML is just the natural container for that kind of obsessive craft.

Heavensgate.com

The website of the Heaven's Gate cult, frozen since 1997 when 39 members died in a mass suicide. The site is still maintained (someone pays the hosting bill) and has never been updated. It's a time capsule: animated GIF stars, table based layouts, colorful text on dark backgrounds. It's the most unsettling website on the internet, not because of the design, but because the design IS 1997 and the context is death. The fact that it still loads, exactly as it was, makes it one of the most powerful pieces of web preservation in existence.

Text Files (textfiles.com)

Jason Scott (now at the Internet Archive) assembled his personal collection of BBS era text files and put them online in 1998. 58,000+ files as of 2005, many more now. The site is a plain HTML directory structure. No styling beyond default browser rendering. 350,000 to 450,000 unique visitors per month. It's a living museum of the early internet, and its form (plain HTML, directory listings, raw text) is itself an artifact of the era it documents. Styling it would be like putting a modern frame on a cave painting.

Space Jam (spacejam.com/1996)

Warner Bros. kept the original 1996 Space Jam promotional website online at /1996 even after launching the sequel's modern site. Image map navigation. Repeating star background. Screen resolution optimized for 640x480. It's now used in web development courses as an example of 90s HTML. The site works perfectly. It loads fast. Every link still functions. It has outlived Flash, Java applets, and three generations of web frameworks.

2. The Intentional Minimalists: Sites That Choose Simplicity

The sites above are (mostly) old and stuck in time. But there's another category: modern sites that CHOOSE to be minimal. These aren't accidents. They're philosophical statements.

Motherfuckingwebsite.com (and its descendants)

The original manifesto site. Pure HTML. No CSS. No JS. No images. Just text making the argument that the default browser rendering of HTML is already responsive, already readable, already fast, and that everything web designers add on top is, by default, making things worse. The page weighs 63KB, which is 93.7% less than google.com.

This spawned a series of responses: bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com (adds a few lines of CSS for readability: max width, line height, font size). Then thebestmotherfuckingwebsite.co (adds a few more tweaks). The whole chain is a philosophical debate about how much design a text document actually needs, conducted entirely in plain HTML.

Low Tech Magazine (solar.lowtechmagazine.com)

A magazine about sustainable technology that practices what it preaches. The website is self hosted on a solar powered server in Barcelona. When it's cloudy for too long, the site goes offline. That's intentional. The design uses dithered images (drastically reducing file size), system fonts (no font downloads), and a static site generator (no server side computation). The battery level is displayed on every page.

This is the most radical website on the list because it ties digital infrastructure to physical reality. When the sun doesn't shine, you can't read the articles. That constraint transforms a website into a statement about energy, technology, and the hidden costs of "always on" digital services. Average page weight: about 100KB. Every other website you visit today pretends that electricity is free and infinite. This one doesn't.

100 Rabbits (100r.co)

A two person creative studio operating from a solar powered sailboat in the Pacific. Their website is hand coded static HTML. No JavaScript. No external dependencies. Their entire computing setup runs on two 100W solar panels feeding four 6V lead acid batteries. They've developed their own programming tools, fonts, and creative software, all designed to run on minimal hardware.

100 Rabbits coined the term "permacomputing" (inspired by permaculture): building software and systems designed for long term resilience, minimal resource use, and graceful degradation. Their website is the proof of concept. It works on any device, any connection, any era of browser. If civilization collapses, 100r.co will probably still render.

Suckless.org

The suckless project builds tools that "suck less": a window manager (dwm), a terminal (st), a browser (surf), and more. Each tool's source code is intentionally kept under 2,000 lines. The philosophy: software should be simple enough to understand completely. If you can't read the entire source in an afternoon, it's too complex.

Their website follows the same philosophy. Static HTML. Minimal CSS. No JavaScript. The documentation is the product. The plainness is the point. Every modern framework tutorial that spans 47 pages and requires 12 dependencies is, by suckless standards, a failure of thought.

Cat-v.org

A collection of essays, quotes, and rants about harmful software practices. The site design is intentionally from another era: plain HTML, default fonts, blue links. The content catalogs everything wrong with modern computing: bloated editors, over engineered build systems, languages that add complexity without value. The site itself is the first argument: look how fast this loads. Look how readable it is. Now explain why your app needs 400MB of node_modules.

Wiby.me

A search engine that only indexes the old web. No Reddit. No TikTok. No YouTube. No Stack Overflow. Only small, lightweight, personal websites. The ideal indexed page uses HTML 4, minimal or no CSS, and is maintained by one person writing about one subject they care about. The "surprise me" button takes you to a random result and it's genuinely delightful: you end up on someone's 2003 page about medieval siege weapons, or a retired professor's astronomy notes, or a hand coded encyclopedia of butterflies.

Wiby is the anti Google. Google ranks pages by links, authority, and freshness. Wiby ranks pages by smallness, simplicity, and personal passion. It's a search engine for the web that was, and the web that could be again.

Text Only News Sites

Several major news organizations maintain text only versions of their sites:

  • text.npr.org: NPR's full news coverage, text only. No images. No ads. No JavaScript. Just headlines and articles.
  • lite.cnn.com: CNN's lightweight version. Top headlines in plain HTML.
  • CBC Lite: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's low bandwidth version.
  • Human Rights Watch text site: launched specifically to reach audiences in countries with slow internet and expensive data plans.

These exist because the "normal" versions of these sites are so bloated that they're genuinely unusable on slow connections. NPR's main site loads multiple megabytes of ads, analytics, fonts, and JavaScript. text.npr.org loads in kilobytes. Same content. Same journalism. 99% less stuff.

3. The Personal Web: One Person, One Subject, Forever

The best old school websites share a pattern: one person, obsessed with one subject, maintaining a site for years or decades. No team. No funding. No content calendar. Just passion and HTML.

Gwern.net

Gwern Branwen's site is one of the most cited personal websites on the internet. Long form research essays on AI, genetics, statistics, psychology, and more. The site uses minimal CSS (custom, not a framework) and loads fast. But what makes it relevant here is the ethos: one person, writing about what they find interesting, for over a decade, with no monetization, no newsletter funnel, no social media strategy. The site IS the output. Everything else is noise.

The Pattern

Across all these sites, the pattern repeats:

  • Technovelgy: one person, science fiction inventions, 20+ years
  • Textfiles.com: one person, BBS history, 25+ years
  • Paul Graham: one person, essays on startups and thinking, 20+ years
  • Dan Luu: one person, systems engineering analysis, 10+ years
  • Gwern: one person, research essays on everything, 15+ years

None of these people set out to "build a personal brand." They set out to write about something they cared about. The website was just the most convenient container. The fact that these sites are all still running, still relevant, still cited, while millions of "properly designed" websites have come and gone: that tells you something about what actually lasts on the internet.

4. Why Old School Websites Survive

Technical reasons:

  • Zero dependencies = zero breakage. A plain HTML file from 1996 still renders perfectly in Chrome 2026. A React app from 2020 is already struggling with deprecated APIs. The fewer dependencies you have, the longer your site survives without maintenance.
  • Tiny files = free hosting. A 10KB page costs nothing to serve. A 5MB page costs real money at scale. Many old school sites have survived for decades on $5/month hosting that would buckle under a modern SPA.
  • No build step = no build failures. You can't get a broken deployment if deployment means uploading an HTML file via FTP. The entire DevOps industry exists because we made websites too complicated to deploy by hand.
  • Bandwidth resilience. Old school sites work on 2G, on satellite connections, on rural internet, on old phones, in developing countries where data costs real money. A 50MB news article is a luxury good. A 10KB text article is universal.

Cultural reasons:

  • Content over container. When the design is invisible, the content has to be good. You can't hide mediocre writing behind parallax scrolling and hero images. Plain HTML is accountability.
  • One person's taste > committee design. The best old school sites feel like visiting someone's home. They have personality, quirks, opinions. Modern websites feel like visiting a hotel: polished, generic, forgettable. Personality is a moat.
  • Time as filter. A site that's been running for 20 years has proven something: someone cared enough to keep it alive. That's a stronger signal of quality than any design award.

5. The Numbers: What Bloat Actually Costs

Some concrete comparisons:

SitePage weightRequestsLoad time (3G)
Dan Luu blog post~10 KB1<1 sec
Paul Graham essay~15 KB1 to 2<1 sec
text.npr.org article~20 KB2 to 3<1 sec
Low Tech Magazine article~100 KB5 to 101 to 2 sec
Median webpage (2026)2,600 KB70+8 to 15 sec
NYT article (audited)49,000 KB42230+ sec

The median webpage is 260x heavier than a Dan Luu blog post. The NYT article is 4,900x heavier. For delivering, in both cases, text and maybe a few images. The extra 99.6% is ads, analytics, fonts, frameworks, polyfills, A/B testing scripts, tag managers, social embeds, and third party trackers. None of it serves the reader.

6. A Directory of Old School Websites Worth Visiting

Organized by subject. All of these are still live and functional as of April 2026.

Reference and Knowledge

  • technovelgy.com — 3,300+ science fiction inventions cataloged and cross referenced
  • catb.org/jargon — The Jargon File: hacker culture dictionary, maintained since 1975
  • perseus.tufts.edu — The Perseus Digital Library: ancient Greek and Latin texts, online since 1995
  • gutenberg.org — Project Gutenberg: 70,000+ free ebooks, plain HTML catalog since 1996
  • sacred-texts.com — Internet Sacred Text Archive: every major religious text, free, since 1999

Essays and Writing

  • paulgraham.com — 200+ essays on startups, technology, and thinking
  • danluu.com — systems engineering analysis, aggressively minimal
  • gwern.net — long form research on AI, genetics, statistics, and more
  • aaronsw.com — Aaron Swartz's writings, preserved as he left them
  • paulford.com — Paul Ford's personal site, essays on technology and culture

Archives and History

Tools and Philosophy

Search and Discovery

Still Frozen in Time

7. What Would a New Old School Web Look Like?

There's a growing movement. Permacomputing. The "small web." IndieWeb. The Yesterweb. Neocities (a modern Geocities revival with 700,000+ sites). People are actively choosing to build plain HTML sites again, not because they don't know better, but because they do.

If you were starting a new website today in the old school tradition, here's what it would look like:

  • Static HTML files. No React. No Next.js. No build step. Just .html files you can edit in Notepad and upload via FTP (or rsync, or git push).
  • System fonts. No Google Fonts. No font downloads. Use whatever the reader's browser already has. It's already readable. The 300KB you save is 300KB the reader doesn't wait for.
  • No analytics. You don't need to know how many people read your page. If you do, use server logs. Every analytics script is a third party tracker that slows the page and compromises privacy.
  • No JavaScript unless absolutely necessary. Most websites use JS for things HTML already does: links, forms, navigation. If your site is primarily text, you need zero JavaScript. Zero.
  • Images only when they add meaning. Not decoration. Not hero images. Not stock photos. A diagram that explains something. A photograph that documents something. Compressed, served at the right size, with alt text.
  • One person, one subject, a long time. The sites that last aren't the ones with the best design. They're the ones where someone cared about a topic for decades. Pick your thing. Write about it. Keep writing. The HTML is the easy part.

The web doesn't need more frameworks. It needs more people who care about something enough to write about it for twenty years in a plain HTML file. Technovelgy isn't impressive because of its technology. It's impressive because Bill Christensen read a thousand science fiction novels and cataloged every invented technology by hand. The HTML is just the paper. The obsession is the ink.