I’ve never understood hn fascination with boring and ugly plain text sites. Reminds me of the infamous Dropbox comment.
For reference:
The IETF nails it with their RFCs, e.g.:
But already a RFC reader makes it a more pleasant experience than just the raw RFC you linked
1) that RFC reader is alright, but it still isn't good on a phone. If you view the PDF version of any RFC on ietf.org, it has a hyperlinked table of contents, so you don't need a javascript version of it like what rfcreader.com provides, and you can store that PDF offline. You can also hit the TXT version of any RFC and it's passable in Safari's Reader View, I'd say better than rfcreader.com (I also tried Reader View on rfcreader.com and it has other issues, so it's like trading one set of problems for another, but I see no clear winner, so for me the tie breaker goes to ietf.org);
2) the OP made the point that text is preferable to video–I happen to agree–and I was responding to the hyperbolic (and again, subjective) pushback regarding "ugly" text, explaining a way that it is still functionally superior to videos (which can have wildly diverse quality issues of their own);
3) I didn't link the RFC, that was someone else.
I don't see why the PDF should use the Notepad look - one can be too spartan.
However.
We're not talking about web sites here, we're talking about README files. They should be absolutely readable and understandable if you're displaying them in a console -- that's arguably one of the underlying tenets of Markdown as it was originally conceived (e.g., that its source be as easily readable as a plain text email or Usenet message is). I like that GitHub renders Markdown documents, but a lot of time when you're mucking around with source, you're looking at, well, the plain document.
I think this is a fun hack to demonstrate how you can do ridiculous things in technically-still-Markdown documents, but it's unequivocally not something anyone should actually do in their Markdown documents. :)