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Comment by anonfunction | Hacker News Reader

There is no css being loaded on http://thin.npr.org, just the default browser styling for html elements.

Oh I know. I'm lamenting the fact that default browser sheets suck (any sane developer/designer is going to import a CSS reset as the first step, so there's no reason to make the default look so ugly).

Of course, depending on the reasons behind the existence of thin.npr.org in the first place, NPR could add something really simple that doesn't add more than a few bytes and make it look several orders of magnitude more palatable.

I like that it's just user agent styling. I think that was what they were going for. Also, you can change the user agent stylesheet if you want.

Does this work on Chrome? I found some old articles but none of the instructions work for letting me change the user agent stylesheet in Chrome.

You complain of 'ugly', but your 'beautified' version is harder to read, and I have normal vision and am using a big screen. It's a typical example of "designing for me", not "designing for everyone".

Screw the CSS, let the thin page stand as a thin page.

What's wrong with 'designing for me' when it's his own stylesheet for the page?

Because he's wanting the source to implement it server-side, for everyone. No-one would give a rat's arse if he was designing it for his own consumption and leaving the source alone.

I don’t know. All the objective literature I’ve read to date (sorry on a phone right now) has been to avoid harsh contrast, increase line spacing, avoid extreme contrast, and set a cap on max width. Just because you have a big screen (I wrote it on a 30” 4K monitor myself) doesn’t mean it’s wise to extend the content from Edge to Edge (not that this content is long enough to do that).

Some people need the whole size of the screen to be able to read. If you put a hard limit on the width, they will be very unhappy when they blow up the font-size to 200... But I doubt this works on any modern homepage anyway. Was a long time since I met these users last time. At that time there was still Netscape.

If you want to accommodate people with impaired vision who use large font size, define your content width in ems. I believe 90 characters per line is recommended but that's off the top of my head and I could be wrong.

I haven't seen anyone advocate to avoid "harsh" contrasts. Just people complaining about how it makes stuff harder to read. Which it does.

Actually, the viewport meta tag is (being made) CSS [1], and it’s way beyond me why unstyled HTML is rendered unreadably small on mobile devices without it (and without any fixed layout to speak of)...

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/css-device-adapt-1/

> it’s way beyond me why unstyled HTML is rendered unreadably small on mobile devices without it

Because browsers that did that would be both breaking spec compliance and introducing vendor-specific rendering, two things that IE proved were very very bad.

Every browser in use today has a default stylesheet that injects styles into every site (if not explicitly overriden). Even for sites that have their own stylesheets.

It's just that a) they're really ugly, and b) the mobile ones are ironically not mobile optimized.

They’re not necessarily overridden. Percentages and ems are units that are derived relative to their inherited style. If you make your browser default have a base font of 24px instead of 14px and someone back in 2010 made their site css defined as

    html {
      font-size: 2em;
    }

Then your site’s 28px default font size that worked just fine on every browser now becomes 48px on mobile and breaks everything.

That’s actually the original purpose behind the relative sizing, so people could choose a base text size that best suited them.

That was before the pixel-perfect designers got full control over how I read stuff on my own computer :-)

What spec compliance is broken if the browser renders unstyled HTML with a font big enough most humans can read it?

The text size on the linked npr pages was perfect for me on firefox mobile.

The problem arises without the viewport meta tag, and not on all browsers or devices. This site does use this tag, which has become sort of mandatory even when there’s no layout.

Google's Pagespeed gods approve! https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

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