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>> Only thing I don't like about reading them on a modern wide monitor is that the lines get too long. It's HTML where the whole point is to reflow to fit your

>> Only thing I don't like about reading them on a modern wide monitor is that the lines get too long. It's HTML where the whole point is to reflow to fit your window. YOU determine the page width and the content reflows to fit. The problem was when it took off and a bunch of publishers and print people came along and demanded control over the layout. Now they even have custom fonts FFS.

civilized 3y ago
I grew up with simple HTML pages. I love them to death for this reason and others. I'm still very happy every time I come across one that seems to still be alive. I'm sure it was done for a reason - popularity, A/B testing, money, an IMHO misguided sense of aesthetics - but personally, I definitely never asked for the "design"-ization of the web.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  [flagged]
- lstamour 3y ago
  The real problem is viewport meta and how you have to opt in or opt out: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Viewport_meta_tag https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Viewport_m... If you opt in, a simple page like this ends up looking pretty modern anyway, but plain, while if you opt out, your site is often rendered as if made for an older desktop monitor, like this one. Another way of putting the problem, we preserved old desktop styles rather than invent new default responsive styles for touch-based browsers. Without a standard like grey backgrounds and blue links to fall back on, websites had to start making decisions, especially when sites go responsive. At that point it is easier to invent new styles… there aren’t that many useful defaults to fall back on. This is particularly true for HTML5 form controls, which rarely look good in any browser without styling… But perhaps there’s hope for the future as new design language becomes HTML tags. E.g. details has an arrow, datalist builds a native autocomplete, and so on. It’s a shame that dialog doesn’t have native formatting tho, or that the idea of creating new, modern default styles hasn’t caught on yet in a cross-browser way.

civilized 3y ago

I grew up with simple HTML pages. I love them to death for this reason and others. I'm still very happy every time I come across one that seems to still be alive. I'm sure it was done for a reason - popularity, A/B testing, money, an IMHO misguided sense of aesthetics - but personally, I definitely never asked for the "design"-ization of the web.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago
[flagged]
lstamour 3y ago
The real problem is viewport meta and how you have to opt in or opt out: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Viewport_meta_tag https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Viewport_m... If you opt in, a simple page like this ends up looking pretty modern anyway, but plain, while if you opt out, your site is often rendered as if made for an older desktop monitor, like this one. Another way of putting the problem, we preserved old desktop styles rather than invent new default responsive styles for touch-based browsers. Without a standard like grey backgrounds and blue links to fall back on, websites had to start making decisions, especially when sites go responsive. At that point it is easier to invent new styles… there aren’t that many useful defaults to fall back on. This is particularly true for HTML5 form controls, which rarely look good in any browser without styling… But perhaps there’s hope for the future as new design language becomes HTML tags. E.g. details has an arrow, datalist builds a native autocomplete, and so on. It’s a shame that dialog doesn’t have native formatting tho, or that the idea of creating new, modern default styles hasn’t caught on yet in a cross-browser way.