I've done this for years, with Slate and Salon — I scrape their home pages and link directly to the print versions of the articles. It's so much faster to load and easier to use it almost makes them worth reading again...

Some friends and I rearranged the data from the Pittsburgh transit authority's informative, yet rococo, site into a more straightforward, minimal, and handheld-friendly form.

Interesting you should mention this the very same day I read about "ReUSEIT" an initiative to redesign usability guru Jakob Nielsen's notoriously unattractive useit.com.

The boingboing layout is fine, I think. Only chnage I can
think of suggesting is dropping the sidebar from the Suggest
a Site page, to make it more compact.

One of the things that _really_ annoys me about certain web sites (mainly news sites such as cnet), is when the page layout has the column widths pre-set (just like the 'before' link in the article). As it happens, I have noticed this more since I started using Mozilla, and its text zoom function (really nice for sites that use ridiculously small fonts, or for tired eyes!). Of course boingboing is fine in text zoom :)

I've been thinking about this, and it seems that CSS now offers
us the right way do do this, not that any (many) commercial
sites will ever pick it up.

Consider the example of the CSS Zengarden, blogged in bb back
in May, but since moved to http://www.csszengarden.com/. All
layout and design details are done via CSS. Look at it in a no
CSS browser, or with a suitablely minimal CSS file and it looks
like early websites:

http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=http:...com/~eli/C/null.css

but other designs can completely change it. Modern websites
should make it easy to specify a user-chosen CSS sheet from
anywhere on the web. Thus a /. enthusiast who doesn't like
the look of that site could redesign it, post the link to the
CSS file and others could reskin the site with the new CSS.