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Comment by kthartic | Hacker News Reader

Sorry to be completely ignorant here, but what is it with these sites that have absolutely zero styling?

15 years ago I would've put it down to lack of understanding how to write CSS etc. But today it's almost impossible to make a website that doesn't have at least _some_ styling (when using site builders like Squarespace, Wix, etc).

Edit: Turns out this site is from 1994 (see http://www.pbm.com/). How are you guys finding these ancient sites? :P

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I'm not your typical JS/CSS hater but for this document, I found the lack of styling perfectly fine. It also works without problems on any mobile device I tested (as expected). IMHO, not every page needs CSS and lots of breakpoints.

The text covers the full width of my 27" monitor which, while readable, is not nearly as comfortable to read as text that doesn't.

Make your browser window narrower.

That's not a valid design decision. Car seats too small? Lose weight.

Look, I realise now it's a site from 1994, I'm just astounded by the number of people that seem to think this design is still acceptable by today's standards and that I'm some sort of new-age hipster for suggesting otherwise.

Why is your browser maximized on a widescreen monitor?

Why wouldn't it be? Yes, I certainly can reduce the width of my browser, but that's not the point. Bad design should not put the burden on the user to fix it.

It’s something a noob would do. The page was from ‘95, widescreen didn’t really exist, and free-flow was the best practice.

Honestly, 1994 or not, styling a passage of text with CSS just isn’t as useful anyone would like to imagine it being.

I don't mean styling for the sake of looking stylish, I mean styling for readability. Line spacing, page width (reading text that takes up full width of a 27" is not nice), section grouping/separation, title size, use of colour (e.g. for titles to increase visibility of section grouping, for background/font to decrease stark contrast), sans-serif font (greater readability on a screen vs on paper), etc are all valid design considerations.

Rather I wonder why Browsers display such non-CSS sites in this primitive way. Pretty sure browser vendors could slap on a primitve CSS limiting the text width and tweaking a few defaults when a site does not load any CSS or JS.

cf. Reader mode.

This is one example of many instructional resources that people in the SCA have put online over the decades.

Spending time perusing knowledge sites other than the latest JS framework tutorial does tend to produce sharing of this kind.

I formatted that site. I'm sorry I didn't find this discussion soon enough to downvote your comment.

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