Obviously this is a matter of taste (and I'm starting to pile up down votes, so I may very well be in the minority). I can't give you a date, but consider for

Obviously this is a matter of taste (and I'm starting to pile up down votes, so I may very well be in the minority). I can't give you a date, but consider for example the ongoing discussion in the Perl community about the look of PerlMonks, the new Perl blogs site and the updates to the online Perldoc site and the main Perl site. Again, I want to stress that I'm not talking about decorative fonts or elaborate colorschemes. A webpage with no margins and very tight line-spacing is not in my mind anywhere near perfectly readable. As far as the hackers thing goes, I've rarely seen a hacker without a preference for a carefully-crafted PS1 (colors and all) or a good Vim/Emacs/TextMate theme. So it's not the case that hackers don't care at all about appearance in all circumstances. Edit: Here's a good comparison site: http://diveintomark.org/ http://diveintomark.org/ The layout is dead simple, but the margins, font choice and line spacing make a huge difference.