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Comment by butz | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's time to add some decent looking CSS defaults to browser, but only for websites without CSS includes. Page width, better fonts, maybe even mobile specific improvements could be added. Of course, I understand that would introduce incompatibility with old websites.

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> Of course, I understand that would introduce incompatibility with old websites.

Why, though? If the website has no styling (we can exclude sites that use <font> and friends), the whole premise of HTML from very early on was that it only specifies content and the user agent controls formatting.

The browser is the user agent, so I don’t see why changing the default styles would contradict that.

That's what I'm saying—websites that don't specify styling cannot have compatibility problems with changed default styles.

That sounds good, but it'd most likely end up as YACL (Yet Another CSS Library).

If the browsers implemented it officially it wouldn't be a library, it would just be a sane default style.

A "sane" default style would require "default" content coupled with a "default" viewing device. None of which exist. There can't be a one-size-fits-all solution.

In addition, content is more than just text - style, design, and layout are information, too.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that the new defaults be standardized. Each browser should pick defaults that make sense in the context they're used.

Doesn't the reader view already do this?

For completely unstyled sites, reader view should be the only view. What guidelines or rules should the other/s view/s be following? I say definitely not "nostalgic" view!

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