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Comment by ryloric | Hacker News Reader

> 7 fucking declarations. That's how much CSS it took to turn that grotesque pile of shit into this easy-to-read masterpiece.

Such drastic difference with basic adjustments, damn

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I honestly prefer the original version without css. Plain browser styles have a kind of raw beauty that it's very hard to surpass.

In my mind "raw browser" look corresponds with "almost insane details coming" as the only sites still using that are often run by people who are WAY more concerned with the content they want to talk about than with the presentation.

Um, shouldn't all people be WAY more concerned with the content than the presentation? I don't want to read stream of consciousness with occasional lack of spaces and random case, but I'd really prefer to only read websites by people who give zero effs to presentation, and I had prior to this moment assumed everyone agreed, but that it was fun to do presentation, so people did. There are people who care about the presentation of what they are reading on even close to the same level of the content itself?!

If you care about your content, you should care about readability and navigability.

You would be astounded how many people care about the form and not the function. They live among us. They vote.

Totally agree. For me, the original is far easier to read than the "better" or "best" versions.

Initiate rant mode:

- The gray on gray is like a joke, except it's not. I get the theory and alleged benefits. I get that some do prefer it, especially for IDEs. I get that some are happy to see (or at least apply) it all over the web. It just does not seem to apply here. Man alive. Literally making it harder to differentiate the text.

- I don't mind adjusting the browser width to get the lines exactly the right length for my screen and reading preference. Actually, I far prefer it over all the other options. This is like a tragedy-of-the-commons or lowest-common-denominator or dumbing-down-on-the-false-premise-of-being-smart issue. Instead of utilizing what we have, and encouraging people to learn and become capable with the simple and flexible tools, it's one size fits all (or, you pick the size you think I want). Only it's not.

End of rant. Sheesh.

I would agree, with the exception of the text lines being too long.

I flipped over into reader mode and it's much improved, solely because of line length and dark mode.

Yes, the only reasonable css I'd concede is a max width in ch. But this should really be a browser standard to begin with.

You and me both. Perhaps we're relics of a bygone age where tech people cared more for function than form.

The older version is very difficult to read.

Good thing you can just block styles and get exactly the style you prefer.

Too oversimplified ... no images (with captions), no other media (video, audio), no tables or grids, etc.

almost gasp like a book.

I have quite a few books with a pretty cover, pictures, charts, pullquotes, etc.

LaTeX predates HTML by a decade and supports pictures, charts, quotes and far more, and doesn't force me as an author to make finicky decisions about presentation. I just write the content, and then set the document class to whatever the publisher wants.

Who reads books with no tables, graphs, images, or maps? ;)

My immediate thought was The Machinist's Handbook or a similar publication for chemistry that is pretty much all tables.

Have you any idea how much work goes into typesetting a book?

Presented 'like a book'. Its a blog, not a 400 page novel.

That gray text is very bad for legibility, and so is the line spacing. 1.2 tops, and stick to black on white or very very light gray.

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