Poll: Is Dan Luu Right About Website Styling?
> Just as an aside, something I've found funny for a long time is that I get quite a bit of hate mail about the styling on this page (and a similar volume of appreciation mail). By hate mail, I don't mean polite suggestions to change things, I mean the equivalent of road rage, but for web browsing; web rage. I know people who run sites that are complex enough that they're unusable by a significant fraction of people in the world. How come people are so incensed about the styling of this site and, proportionally, basically don't care at all that the web is unusable for so many people?
> Another funny thing here is that the people who appreciate the styling generally appreciate that the site doesn't override any kind of default styling, letting you make the width exactly what you want (by setting your window size how you want it) and it also doesn't override any kind of default styling you apply to sites. The people who are really insistent about this want everyone to have some width limit they prefer, some font they prefer, etc., but it's always framed in a way as if they don't want it, it's really for the benefit of people at large even though accommodating the preferences of the web ragers would directly oppose the preferences of people who prefer (just for example) to be able to adjust the text width by adjusting their window width.
Now, I trust Dan Luu; his stuff is meticulously done, even if I don't agree with his methodology.
But I do prefer a little more styling; I just checked my two main sites, and one has 9.3 kB of CSS while the other has 4.7 kB of CSS.
These are not "bloat" to the extent that he was testing, but according to Dan Luu, perfection is when there is literally no CSS. (I checked; his website has zero CSS on the front page.)
And he lays out a good argument for no styling: users can change it to how they want. This is good for many reasons, but top is accessibility.
Is Dan Luu right? Where is the perfect amount of styling?
Also, as a bonus, if anyone has tips about how to build a website that is styled, but overrideable by users, please comment below; I am building a web app, and I want it to be stylish, minimal, accessible, and hackable style-wise.
[1] https://danluu.com/slow-device/
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39729057
[3] https://danluu.com/slow-device/#appendix-articles-on-web-per...