Hacker News Reader

Comment by astronautjones | Hacker News Reader

Hope this trend catches on.

It won't. No JS required so no targeted ads, no traffic stats and no money. That's the whole history of the web.

It won't.

It is ugly and harsh on the eyes. There's nothing wrong with a minimal no-frills aesthetic, but that doesn't have to mean literally ripping _all_ styling out.

Hundreds of years of typography, typesetting... and what do some people claim to want? Naked html, default styling like a friggin' typewriter! Ugh!

I'll disagree with you. We should be putting our own styling on once it hits our computers. There's no reason that we couldn't design systems so that the client can style it to their preference.

Then you get the best of both worlds!

Exactly. I use this approach all the time on mobile with text-only NPR. I can browse fast over crummy or spotty service, and when I find one that I want to read in depth, I go to reader mode.

>We should be putting our own styling on once it hits our computers.

99.999% of people don't want to design their own custom CSS for every website they visit, though. And the people who do could set custom stylesheets on any site they like. Nothing really needs to change in that regard, the best of both worlds is already here.

but we could make it a lot easier. Imagine FF having a large list of stylesheets to choose from, with a "try it out now!" button or something.

Additionally, If every site worked this way, you'd only have to set the stylesheet once.

But the vast majority of people view the complexity of modern design on the web as an extension of design in magazines - it's expected, and not a problem. Users would rather that work is done for them then have to do it themselves.

What you're suggesting might make a nice browser plugin, though. Stylish but with an integrated marketplace.

    > majority of people view the complexity of modern design on the web as an extension of design in magazines...

Yes, because that's sort-of what it is!

There's a reason for styling. It makes things more legible, aesthetically pleasing and more fully expresses the intent of the content creator. We have different fonts and layouts for the same reason that buildings vary in design and materials. All buildings could be made of cinderblock and in the shape of rectangles but they're not, why do you think that is?

That's... exactly the argument I'm trying to make, here. Most people don't want the web to be as stripped down and minimalist as the site posted here, and asking them to style their own sites would go down about as well as asking them to bind their own books.

The default stylesheet can be a lot better - good enough for the aforementioned 99.999%. The defaults that we have at the moment date back to, what, late 90s?

Why not just have a more pleasing default style? Why does everyone who wants to send you information over the web have to worry about typography and typesetting, when you could just have something reasonable by default?

Browsers can't change it, because it would break assumtpions of a lot of websites.

Unformatted text is much easier on my eyes than the grey crap that "designers" are so fond of these days. Its like they think everyone has an IPS screen or something...

Readability is hurt by having body text in different font families, different weights, different sizes, different shades of gray on every other fucking website. Web designer can't choose readable font for me, because readable font is any one font I use the most.

The good thing is that Firefox still has option to override all fonts and use a single one chosen by the user. What is missing though is option to limit font weight to 400 and more.

At the moment I simply don't use websites that use thin fonts. Also websites that abuse fonts to display non-standard (non-unicode) icons fail utterly with user selected font families.

Other than that, having single font family everywhere is much more pleasant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com