This is what happens when UNIX terminal users bring their anti-gui baggage to the web. He doesn't even use pure html he's got all kinds of dynamic stuff going on.
Advocate for simple and easy to read UI if you want but come on now.
Advocate for simple and easy to read UI if you want but come on now.
When you're just relying on browser defaults and there no basic styles to make the text readable. The pages are a challenge to understand. You can have plain html but using CSS to create some visual hierarchy would go a long way. Feels like there's two text sizes and two colors.
With pure HTML and possibly some cleanly included JS he could get any visual appearance he wants, such as the common hero video or the effects you see where scrolling manifests differently as you scroll through different parts of the document.
In this case though, the author isn't submitting it, so it's not like they're the culprit. But even if they were it's also not really an indictment of any sort either; happens to everyone who writes online; it's the siren song of "engagement" with your work. (Lots of people here want to believe this site is somehow fundamentally different from Reddit or any other forum where "internet points" dictate the flow of content. It isn't; the tics and triggers are just different. Topics like this are a good example.)
> With pure HTML and possibly some cleanly included JS he could get any visual appearance he wants
With default browser font sizing and spacing? Yeah, sure, you can get any bad look you want from pure HTML and some JS. CSS is practically mandatory for webpage readability these days, but it's all a moot point since the OP doesn't seem to be arguing against CSS in any form anyway (and even literally admits he uses it.) Honestly the linked support site is mostly OK in this regard; though I'd blow up the font size a point/point-and-a-half more, add a tiny bit more line spacing, and make the margins bigger.
"our current support site [https://support.cs.toronto.edu/] is that most basic thing, a bunch of static .html files sitting in a filesystem (and a static file of CSS, and some Javascript to drop in a header on all pages)."
You mean dark grey text on light grey background?
Or a mobile stylesheet that displays one paragraph and half a photo on a 5k monitor and makes you scroll for the rest?
body { font-family: helvetica; line-height: 1.5; }