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Honestly, this is really rough. The impulse is admirable, but the implementation has a lot of rough edges and ugliness. A web author looking for good typography is going to be better served reading Butterick's Practical Typography ( http://practicaltypography.com/ ).
http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/five-simple-steps-to-be... http://webtypography.net/toc/
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The italics are basically the only thing that looks OK here: http://i.imgur.com/H9X3Hpl.png Linux/Firefox FWIW.
Linux / Firefox has long been the most horrible combo for font rendering - check out Chrome on OSX http://imgur.com/jsHwIk7
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Yes, the first thing I've thought looking at the page on the computer was "I wonder how that looks on my iPhone." I've tried: not easily readable, for me.
Is it not the case that san-serif fonts are better on screen and serif better in print? Seems a bit strange that the webpage uses serif.
The reason san-serifs were better on screen is that screens used to have lower DPI's, and thus can't actually show the serifs as well as on paper.
In the old days of CRT's and 72 dpi screens, the serifs would be distorted because the display can't show details fine enough. In those cases, san-serifs get you around the problem of low dpi screens.
Nowadays, with retina and high dpi displays, serif fonts can look as good as in print.
Just be aware of why these guidelines exist. It's not always a firm "it has to be this way" hard rules.
One of the things I love most about Tufte is the way his text introduces every single graphic . He tells you what he's about to show you; then he shows you. This stands in stark contrast in most books where the figures are only very loosely coupled to the text. I didn't realize how jarring I found the convention until Tufte! And it makes perfect sense in hindsight: why did we think it's okay to put figures "within a…
I don't think Tufte ever uses top and bottom borders for tables. Also, the delimiter below the heading should not be so bold; it's usually a very thin line.
For a typography-centric project, it pains me to see that you're not including the proper italic version of the font used in the article, forcing my browser to do ugly guesswork [1]. [1]: http://i.imgur.com/CNBSMVH.png
Needs sparklines. https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
Honestly, this is really rough. The impulse is admirable, but the implementation has a lot of rough edges and ugliness. A web author looking for good typography is going to be better served reading Butterick's Practical Typography ( http://practicaltypography.com/ ).
I'd really appreciate if you could add a GitHub issue or two for the problems you list in your other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10012953
I like the idea but turned away when I saw those ugly fake italic headings. Never italicize fonts that are missing italic type styles.
Cute idea. Needs a better example document to really be judged properly (for example, this document has a far too many large and imposing headings), but in any case, some comments: Would be better with less leading, a smaller text size, smaller left margin, and more characters per line. This current version has a text block more like a newspaper column width than a book, and the large type and unnecessarily generous…
I'll try to look into your points about leading, text size, and so on, but it would help a lot more if you could open a GH issue for them. As I've noted elsewhere in this thread, a real italic font has been added, and I'm considering what to do about small caps. To me it doesn't look so bad as-is.
I don't want Tufte CSS to look like a nicely typeset book, and it would take a lot to convince me to indent the first line of new paragraphs. I find that repulsive on the web.
Your last paragraph is gold. I wrote something similar about the table style earlier today. For me, I think this project is an exercise in making style choices using a rough template as a guiding star. I too worry that others will focus more on the finger than that star it is pointing at, by slapping this on top of existing content and calling it a day.