3 ms·

I beg to differ. The first website looks horrible on widescreen displays. A lot of old websites follow the style of first website and their readability could be

I beg to differ. The first website looks horrible on widescreen displays. A lot of old websites follow the style of first website and their readability could be improved 10 times by adding 10 lines of CSS.

danShumway 6y ago
> The first website looks horrible on widescreen displays But you were able to read it, right? You didn't have to go find a separate computer to use to figure out what it was saying. The text didn't get cut off when you resized your browser window. > The first website looks horrible I mean, yes? I'm not sure what you're saying by this though. Nobody (at least nobody worth taking seriously) is telling you that you should follow the style of the first website. You should have max-widths and throw some CSS on your page. To quote the original website: > I'm not actually saying your **** site should look like this. What I'm saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren't broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. There's this argument in all of the followup websites that seems to boil down to "it's easier to make websites look better than the original." And yes? But who is arguing with you that we should deprecate CSS from the browser? Who is arguing that it's a hard task to make something that looks and reads nicer than a completely unstyled page? It's a weirdly oblivious misreading of the original joke.
- fctorial 6y ago
  The problem is that people do build sites that look like the first website: https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/multiboot/multiboot.html https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/multiboot/multiboot...
  - danShumway 6y ago
    Fair, but using GNU's work as an example almost feels like cheating in a weird way ;). GNU is not building a hard-core minimalist website, they do include CSS on their page -- in fact they include more of it than this website does. So the problem isn't that GNU is too minimal or that they've sworn off of CSS, the problem is that modern GNU increasingly doesn't seem to know how to design anything at all when it comes to UX, and that there's probably somebody somewhere on their chain of authority for this page seriously arguing that line-wrapping is bad design or some other nonsense. But I don't know. To the extent that GNU's design aesthetics actually represent a web design trend, then I do concede that it's a bad trend, and everybody who's following it should add `body { max-width: 40em; margin: auto; }` to the top of their CSS files.
    - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
      GNU docs have good design in accordance with W3C best practices: rendering is user agent's job, and if it doesn't do the job per your preference, you change the user agent to the one that does or submit an RFE to your user agent vendor to support your preference.
      - danShumway 6y ago
        > GNU docs have good design Who's side are you on here, stop proving fctorial's point :) > rendering is user agent's job GNU uses more CSS than the joke website in question for an uglier result; they're putting in more effort to make something that's less readable. I don't see how anyone can call that good design. It would take literally 2 CSS declarations to improve their website's design for >90% of the people looking at their page, at no cost or inconvenience to any other user. Good user-interface design incorporates sensible defaults. It is a very GNU-like thing to look at the current web ecosystem, notice that basically every browser acts a certain way and has a certain standard default styling for HTML, and then to still argue that it's the user's fault that their website looks the way it does. I don't see any W3C best practices anywhere that argue column widths should be avoided, and GNU is clearly comfortable overriding default agent behavior for other parts of this page when it comes to indenting lists and styling code blocks. Edit: actually, I stand corrected. GNU is including a bunch of styling code and then commenting it out so it doesn't work. What the heck, who is maintaining this page? Why is that stuff being shipped to the user if it's unusable? In any case, W3C best practice is very much NOT to avoid all CSS, that's a massive mischaracterization of their positions.
        minitech 6y ago
        > Edit: actually, I stand corrected. GNU is including a bunch of styling code and then commenting it out so it doesn't work. Where do you see that? If you’re referring to the  in the <style>, that’s an old standard compatibility hack and doesn’t stop the styles from being applied.
        6y ago

danShumway 6y ago

> The first website looks horrible on widescreen displays But you were able to read it, right? You didn't have to go find a separate computer to use to figure out what it was saying. The text didn't get cut off when you resized your browser window. > The first website looks horrible I mean, yes? I'm not sure what you're saying by this though. Nobody (at least nobody worth taking seriously) is telling you that you should follow the style of the first website. You should have max-widths and throw some CSS on your page. To quote the original website: > I'm not actually saying your **** site should look like this. What I'm saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren't broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. There's this argument in all of the followup websites that seems to boil down to "it's easier to make websites look better than the original." And yes? But who is arguing with you that we should deprecate CSS from the browser? Who is arguing that it's a hard task to make something that looks and reads nicer than a completely unstyled page? It's a weirdly oblivious misreading of the original joke.

fctorial 6y ago
The problem is that people do build sites that look like the first website: https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/multiboot/multiboot.html https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/multiboot/multiboot...
- danShumway 6y ago
  Fair, but using GNU's work as an example almost feels like cheating in a weird way ;). GNU is not building a hard-core minimalist website, they do include CSS on their page -- in fact they include more of it than this website does. So the problem isn't that GNU is too minimal or that they've sworn off of CSS, the problem is that modern GNU increasingly doesn't seem to know how to design anything at all when it comes to UX, and that there's probably somebody somewhere on their chain of authority for this page seriously arguing that line-wrapping is bad design or some other nonsense. But I don't know. To the extent that GNU's design aesthetics actually represent a web design trend, then I do concede that it's a bad trend, and everybody who's following it should add `body { max-width: 40em; margin: auto; }` to the top of their CSS files.
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    GNU docs have good design in accordance with W3C best practices: rendering is user agent's job, and if it doesn't do the job per your preference, you change the user agent to the one that does or submit an RFE to your user agent vendor to support your preference.
    - danShumway 6y ago
      > GNU docs have good design Who's side are you on here, stop proving fctorial's point :) > rendering is user agent's job GNU uses more CSS than the joke website in question for an uglier result; they're putting in more effort to make something that's less readable. I don't see how anyone can call that good design. It would take literally 2 CSS declarations to improve their website's design for >90% of the people looking at their page, at no cost or inconvenience to any other user. Good user-interface design incorporates sensible defaults. It is a very GNU-like thing to look at the current web ecosystem, notice that basically every browser acts a certain way and has a certain standard default styling for HTML, and then to still argue that it's the user's fault that their website looks the way it does. I don't see any W3C best practices anywhere that argue column widths should be avoided, and GNU is clearly comfortable overriding default agent behavior for other parts of this page when it comes to indenting lists and styling code blocks. Edit: actually, I stand corrected. GNU is including a bunch of styling code and then commenting it out so it doesn't work. What the heck, who is maintaining this page? Why is that stuff being shipped to the user if it's unusable? In any case, W3C best practice is very much NOT to avoid all CSS, that's a massive mischaracterization of their positions.
      - minitech 6y ago
        > Edit: actually, I stand corrected. GNU is including a bunch of styling code and then commenting it out so it doesn't work. Where do you see that? If you’re referring to the  in the <style>, that’s an old standard compatibility hack and doesn’t stop the styles from being applied.
        6y ago