6 ms·

If you're into the monospace look, .txt is cool too.

• Ryan_Goosling 6y ago
  epic
• giantrobot 6y ago
  For the web plain text is pretty terrible. Web browsers are terrible plain text readers, mobile browsers doubly so. Browsers render content in a "viewport". On the desktop the viewport width is the width of the window but on mobile defaults to 960 CSS pixels (pixels adjusted for screen DPI). When a page is rendered it's as if the browser window is 960px wide. This can be controlled with the viewport meta tag where you explicitly tell the browser the viewport is the window width, on desktop browsers that doesn't change anything but mobile browsers use their screen width rather than the default. When it comes to plain text there's no way to tell the browser to do that. So if the plain text doesn't have a hard column wrap it's rendered as if it's in a 960px wide window. If it is hard column wrapped it's probably to some common terminal width like 40 or 80 characters. At 80 characters the default font size ends up causing really awful wrapping in the viewport. Pinch to zoom doesn't change the font size but the viewport magnification do that doesn't help readability. You also lose hyperlinks and in-line images. The web could do with fewer stupid images bulking up pages but without hyperlinks you don't really have a web. Putting all links at the bottom of a document HN style isn't a great solution. Visitors still need to copy and paste links which is a pain in the ass at best and inaccessible at worst. If you want a monospace "look" just put 'body {font-family:monospace;}' in a style tag and you're all done. You get all the benefits of a real HTML document and the terminal chic of a monospace font. Don't waste everyone's time with plain text on the web.