Eric Sad news that The Independent is moving online only, always enjoyed their print edition, their website not so much.

Mark Dain All news websites seem to be awful, I never figured out why there isn't some clean, minimal, fast to load site that just shows you the article and perhaps some adverts for revenue (journalists are expensive), but only static images, nothing flashy. Is this really so much to ask?

Adam Douglas This is the goal of Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages project: to force publishers to offer rudimentary web pages for their articles. Google will feature AMP pages prominently in mobile search results and delivers all of the content from one of their CDNs. I'm writing a book about it for Packt Publishing at the moment. AMP does make a pretty significant difference and doesn't create a walled garden. Unfortunately, they will still be enabling adverts, but at least it should be more responsible in terms of performance.

Simon Janes Problem really is the floor of value is so low there's no reason to try. If you ask for anything in a news site, most people just go somewhere else where they can get it for free. News has become simultaneously worthless and ubiquitous.

🦿 Lucian Marin Because they refuse to pay good developers to do their job. It's all part of their cost cutting plans. These news sites are based on complex and complicated CMSs that no sane programmer wants to deal with.