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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia seems like it would be one of the very hardest challenges for a portfolio project. That's because Wikipedia is almost certain to be around 50 years from now. We don't think about it all that often, because we live our lives in its presence, sort of like the people in Rome who live near the Colosseum probably spend most of their days seeing it as just another big stone building.

I wouldn't want to be the architect proposing gleaming flowing metal facades and LED screens for the Colosseum, either.

Whatever you do to Wikipedia has to make sense not just today, in the way a magazine cover design might need to work as a valid UX and an on-trend design, but also 10, 20, 40 years from now. Wikipedia is conservative in a way that very few Internet sites are; they're the caretakers of something --- I feel weird writing this, and maybe I'm wrong, but here goes --- world-historically important.

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To put it more bluntly: I think it's reasonable to argue that Wikipedia is the single most important product of the Internet to date.

This seems especially true considering (a) how much web design has changed in the last few years due to mobile devices and the responsive web and (b) how unprepared we were for that change.

I'm frequently reminded that the most readable and accessible (albeit, admittedly, boring) websites out there are ones that are just plain old-school HTML–no javascript, no CSS, or anything like that.

> I'm frequently reminded that the most readable [...] no CSS

I doubt it.

CSS can be a whole lot less than just fancy floats and parallax scrolling.

Yep. Namely: typeface, font size, line height, margins, font color, background color. Those are some pretty basic properties you'll want to set for even the most minimal design. CSS is how you set them. (I suspect that almost nobody would want to use the browser defaults for all these values.)

I'm not saying I disagree, but there is a benefit to default values, and that's a unified design throughout the web. For the technically inclined, we can always use custom CSS, but often the people who would benefit the most from it are the people who would have the least idea how to do it. Edit: To put it another way, and bring it back on topic, it's no surprise Wikipedia uses black text on a white background with blue hyperlinks, and I doubt that will change any time soon.

I do realise I'm basically describing Gopher here, and there's possibly a reason it didn't take off...

> there is a benefit to default values, and that's a unified design throughout the web.

If only browsers provided better defaults. As it stands, very few people would consider the browser defaults acceptable.

> it's no surprise Wikipedia uses black text on a white background with blue hyperlinks

Yes, Wikipedia does use black text, a white background, and blue links. But they do not merely rely upon the default browser stylesheets. They use custom font-face, font-size, line-height, and margin properties even for the basic <p> tag. And that's saying nothing about all the other elements that often have borders, padding, backgrounds, and so on.

I think you could argue that browser ship with reasonable defaults for a slap of plain HTML, but what it undeniably gets wrong (and rightly so) is paragraphs running the full width of your window.

There's a lot to be said about the Svbtle/Medium-style design with a small column running down the center of the page.

I would be inclined to agree with you, except for the fact that HTML-only text spans the entire screen with no margins. It's really hard to read two sentences on one line.

Spanning the entire screen with no margins (or a mimimal default like 10px) is exactly what I want text to do on the tiny screen of my phone. Guess what, Wikipedia's mobile design does exactly that.

The full-width text does get a bit annoying when you're trying to read Wikipedia on a 30" screen, but in that case, nothing's preventing you from snapping the browser window to the left or right half of the screen and/or increasing the zoom level to make for more comfortable reading.

So what if there was a way that we could describle a simple set of rules that governed how paragraphs of text appeared in web pages? Perhaps we could make paragraphs 100% wide, up to a max width of 600px (and then centered in the screen)?

    #content { width: 100%; max-width: 600px; margin: 0 auto; }

But this is not going to work on Wikipedia. As the article mentions, Wikipedia is designed for quick scanning, not leisurely reading. When I'm quickly scanning the screen, I want as much of the screen as possible to be filled with text. I don't want over 2/3 of my 1920px screen to go to waste.

http://kevinburke.bitbucket.org/markdowncss/

Hard, yes--but I disagree with the premise that you have to design for 40 years from now.

Unlike the Colosseum, web design can be changed. The NY Times e.g. has done a great job balancing their time-tested values with digital experimentation.

I agree with you, too. For instance, it'll be a little sad if we're still writing MediaWiki macro markup in 2040. On the other hand, it's also probably smart to be wary of trendy designs, and Flipboard-like grids of story panels are very "on-trend" right now.

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