Sourcehut's design seems inspired by terminals and line-oriented interfaces more so than early 2000's boxy HTML, so some choices are head-scratchers. The lack

Sourcehut's design seems inspired by terminals and line-oriented interfaces more so than early 2000's boxy HTML, so some choices are head-scratchers. The lack of visible bounding boxes or ("old-style") underlining around the core navigation links draws inspiration both tab-oriented keyboard navigation and very modern, ~201x UI design, but lifts only their outward look without incorporating strengths from each: it neither has strong indicators of a series of menu items that can be stepped through (like a right-facing triangle to the left of the menu item's text), nor does it evoke the Metro-style UI, where UX-meaningful text is king on a sparse field. Underlining each link in the top bar would immediately communicate that many of the words are clickable but not all; as would the use of background shading and color to set the static top bar apart from the rest of the page content. Or even just a 1px bottom border. Similarly, visual suggestion of tabs for 'summary', 'tree', etc, is not very convincing in a browser. Desaturated borders around the inactive tabs would clearly communicate that there's a tabbed interface here. Bolding of the text of the active tab would reinforce that further. EDIT: When I think about minimalism on the web, I'm inspired by the box model and by occasionally-visible borders, which help translate the tree structure of the page into a coherent interface. Borders have gone out of fashion in mainstream design, and so has the use of text decoration for links, so it's harder now to distinguish between interactive and static elements in an interface. Sourcehut's 'spartan' take on this misses an opportunity to clarify a distinction that's been lost in other schools of design.