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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

I sort of find the "unstyled" html the best. All other examples seem slightly worse. But then, I may have a strong bias for this style in web-based text. Coming from an academic background, hand-written sites with no css nor js are a strong marker of ultra-high quality content. For science fiction, then, it seems a very natural choice; even more so for Egan.

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In terms of maximizing legibility, limiting the line length and increasing line height/spacing/leading is something so easy and so valuable. The rest feels stylistic (and that totally has its place) and not ESSENTIAL to legibility.

> Coming from an academic background, hand-written sites with no css nor js are a strong marker of ultra-high quality content.

Those non-features are also a hallmark of a site that hasn't been updated in 25 years -- or at any rate, a site whose tech stack hasn't been. The average quality of web content was probably higher in the 90s, if 'quality' means density of accurate information.

> Those non-features are also a hallmark of a site that hasn't been updated in 25 years

Spivak's calculus hasn't been updated either since way longer than that, and it's as fresh today as it was in 1967. What is your point exactly?

Still, what you say does not ring true to me. I was thinking about stuff like bellard.org , tygert.com or math.ucr.edu/home/baez/ ... All these sites are html-only, get updated regularly, and each update is a much larger achievement than the entire life work of an average person.

So more line spacing and paragraph spacing are not improvements to your eye? Paragraph spacing in particular seems to me an uncontroversial improvement over the default.

Paragraph spacing in the default browser style is alright. The example on this website is doctored to look uglier than it actually is.

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