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Comment by schmudde | Hacker News Reader

"HTML is the kind of thing that can only be loved by a computer scientist. Yes, it expresses the underlying structure of a document, but documents are more than just structured text databases; they have visual impact. HTML totally eliminates any visual creativity that a document’s designer might have. — Roy Smith, 1993"

Seems like an odd request in 1993. Sure, Prodigy had visual impact, but it was pretty hard to read. HTML's starkness seems in part due to the fact that styling options were limited by the technology and the ones that existed were easily abused.

Writing long sentences as headers (<h1>) or all-caps (caps-lock) were styling options at the time... and often misunderstood and abused.

/ü

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You also have to think about who the audience was (Unix users) and what they were used to (Gopher, irc, plaintext email). With all of those technologies they were used to being in control of the styling of what they consumed. One person's styles for irc could be completely different than another's, and that was fine. The idea that things should be published with one rigid style which must be used to consume it was foreign and not all that attractive.

You could make a case that the only reason any of this happened when it did was because the browsers were reducing the amount of control the end users had on the page styling. If Mosaic had been super configurable in it's styling, it's possible it would have taken even longer for CSS to come about.

I suppose this explains why I've never really liked CSS or the design-heavy web: I was never willing to give up that control over my machine. I still resent the way modern "user-agents" aka browsers give every jackass designer out there more control over what my machine is doing than they retain for me.

I feel your pain due to a different reason. After seeing how the major Linux UI toolkits support consistent theming of all the programs using them, original styles/themes be damned, the lack of a consistently-applied theming system/mechanism among web applications is all the more obvious. With web pages this generally isn't an issue (barring annoying/just crap ones) but with web applications, why should their visual appearance and design be arbitarily (from my perspective anyway) decided by a developer/designer with no effective way to alter/change/override this either cleanly or consistently over multiple applications.

What burns me up is that CSS was supposed to allow site authors to have sensible defaults for their pages while enabling me to override them, and yet when I set a dark theme in Firefox all hell breaks loose.

Honestly, the web was better end-user experience for me on links in a terminal: I was able to read text and submit forms, and that's all I really need.

You can do that (of sort) in Firefox by

Preference | Content | Colors

* change the Text & Background colors

* uncheck system colors

* always override

Yeah, but the problem is that modern pages are written in such a way that that almost always displays garbage. I tried to do it for a few weeks, but it was terrible looking.

I've set it up to follow Solarized dark color scheme.

Yes it'll take some time to get used BUT totally worth it, especially when you're reading text a lot :D

I did test with light themes, I have to agree it looks worse compared to dark themes

> With all of those technologies they were used to being in control of the styling of what they consumed. One person's styles for irc could be completely different than another's, and that was fine. The idea that things should be published with one rigid style which must be used to consume it was foreign and not all that attractive.

It's still not attractive to me, which is why I force my styling in Firefox on all website I visits. Though there's not much styling can be done in Firefox by default, but pretty happy with it

Quite. I strongly dislike sites that cram the article content into 1/3 of the screen, while the other 2/3 is taken up by ads and previews of "relevant" content. Reader mode may well be the best thing to come to Firefox in ages...

PDF, TeX, MS Works, and even images with styled text in them were all around in 1993. Edit: I just realized that TeX and Word were mentioned right at the top of the article.

oh man...Prodigy. I remember using my ole 1200 bps modem to load up those .. EGA? VGA graphics? I can't even remember. I do remember my prodigy user ID though.

Yeah, I was a CompuServe guy, but it was pretty innovative and looked great at the time.

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