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Comment by zackbloom | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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