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All you may need is HTML

fabiensanglard.net

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Re: All you may need is HTML

#41

Post by crabbone »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #40

> A host for your index.html files Hostgator $33/year plan. - Google Cloud Firebase Hosting - free; really good tooling to deploy, automatic CDN - AWS S3 + CloudFront - a bit more setup, but more or less free - Azure Static Web Apps - free No need to have any hosting plan. Firebase Hosting in particular is really easy to get started and connect a domain to it. The Firebase CLI tooling makes it dead simple to deploy u…

If you are OK with just having an IPv6 IP, you can live in a country like the Netherlands and simply use your home connection to serve your Web page. Almost like it was intended by forefathers...

Re: All you may need is HTML

#42

Post by zelphirkalt »

Octokiddie wrote: post #15

> THE PROBLEMS A GENERATOR SOLVES One problem not listed is source code syntax highlighting. If you provide source code listings in articles, then highlighting is a big help to readers. Generating it in HTML is not fun.

Pygments does this easily, depending on the source for generating HTML pages. It has been available for a long time. For more than a decade. Some blog generators use it, not only Python blog generators.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#43

Post by ghusto »

truculent wrote: post #18

I sympathise with the main thrust of the post but, to nitpick, this is just plain wrong: > But mostly css appeals to our vanity and ego. Design isn't just about aesthetics. Good information design, clear visual hierarchy, accessibility, etc. all help with communication. The author's effective use of spacing, bold, and code tags show us that they know this intuitively, despite what they write.

> Good information design, clear visual hierarchy, accessibility, etc. all help with communication

Isn't that what HTML gives us?

Re: All you may need is HTML

#44

Post by account42 »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #23
kevincox wrote: post #4

> Originally this website's font-family simply requested monospace. This approach resulted in varying reading experience depending on the OS. Windows browsers got Consolas, Linux users got DejaVu Sans Mono, and macOS people got Courier. I find it so sad that our browsers have such bad default fonts that all websites feel the need to override them to get an acceptable look. It would be great if browsers had decent def…

Consolas is not bad. DejaVu is not bad. Only Courier/Courier New are so bad as to be unusable, it seems Apple wants to push web developers to use font overrides.

DejaVu is not a websafe font, meaning you cannot rely on it being available. Why we can't just require browsers to include DejaVu or another open font is another question - not like the size matters compared to all the other crap they ship. Heck, some even ship their own fonts already, but only for emojis.

Even having some defined meta fonts with rough metrics so that you could say font-face: monospace-standard or whatever and have the text be roughly the same size everywhere would save so much effort and wasted data.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#45

Post by cxr »

kevincox wrote: post #4

> Originally this website's font-family simply requested monospace. This approach resulted in varying reading experience depending on the OS. Windows browsers got Consolas, Linux users got DejaVu Sans Mono, and macOS people got Courier. I find it so sad that our browsers have such bad default fonts that all websites feel the need to override them to get an acceptable look. It would be great if browsers had decent def…

It's well past time for browsers' reader modes to be the default experience for unstyled pages. The arguments for not doing this—and keeping a single set of user agent style sheets containing rules that have to match how unstyled pages looked in the 90s—come from a place of good intentions, but are ultimately poorly reasoned and result in one of the worst forms of stop energy. (The strongest argument against is: "my browser's reader mode is worse than the unstyled page", which I sometimes agree with, but is still not a very good argument at all. It's solved by fixing the reader mode itself to be less bad.)

Re: All you may need is HTML

#46

Post by bombcar »

truculent wrote: post #18

I sympathise with the main thrust of the post but, to nitpick, this is just plain wrong: > But mostly css appeals to our vanity and ego. Design isn't just about aesthetics. Good information design, clear visual hierarchy, accessibility, etc. all help with communication. The author's effective use of spacing, bold, and code tags show us that they know this intuitively, despite what they write.

Reminds me of http://motherfuckingwebsite.com and http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

But the key, underlying point to ALL this stuff is that you do NOT NEED TO WORRY ABOUT PRESENTATION until you have the CONTENT.

A huge temptation is to spend hours and hours tweaking the presentation as a way of avoiding actually creating the content; this is the real danger.

(should mention https://thebestmotherfucking.website of course)

Re: All you may need is HTML

#47

Post by martin_a »

ghusto wrote: post #43
truculent wrote: post #18

I sympathise with the main thrust of the post but, to nitpick, this is just plain wrong: > But mostly css appeals to our vanity and ego. Design isn't just about aesthetics. Good information design, clear visual hierarchy, accessibility, etc. all help with communication. The author's effective use of spacing, bold, and code tags show us that they know this intuitively, despite what they write.

> Good information design, clear visual hierarchy, accessibility, etc. all help with communication Isn't that what HTML gives us?

Somewhat subtle, but: Yes and No.

I'd say HTML for itself just gives us a way to give meaning or imply how something should be styled "headline of first order". In the end it's a markup language, not some magic styling tool.

How it is actually styled (in absence of CSS) is in the hands of the default rendering of your browser. That might very well be a very bad rendering, due to lack of knowledge/time/engagement of the people building/maintaining that renderer.

Also those renderes might come from a time and system where technical limitations where different, markup was different, lots of things were very different.

So I don't think we should expect HTML alone to "look nice" or work well in regards of readability.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#48

Post by cannolicannon »

> "This website used to be hosted by asmallorange. When I became dissatisfied, all I had to do was to open an account on hostgator, upload my html files, and change the DNS entry"

At the risk of being pendantic, asmallorange and hostgator are owned by the same entity[0].

That said, I like the premise of just writing and producing content and not necessarily worrying about setting up tooling. I think devs, and "geeks" in general, tend to enjoy tinkering with tooling, but it can be daunting for the less tech savvy. I suppose that's why things like Wordpress.com exist.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group

Re: All you may need is HTML

#49

Post by sublinear »

Unrelated, but this blog is difficult to read for a few reasons: bold black text highlighted with a gray background is too intense, line height is too small if they insist on using the highlighting, fully justified text for no reason.

Also, the navbar at the top of the page might as well be invisible.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#50

Post by theandrewbailey »

lelandfe wrote: post #21

As always, I think the custom font hate is overstated. > Custom fonts are a waste of bandwidth Latin subsetted fonts are generally 10-30Kb, it's really not that much. For comparison, it's unlikely you'll see blog authors get up in arms over a single PNG . > they come with one of three evils called latency, FOUT, and FOIT A few milliseconds of a different font appearing is truly not much of an evil, but can be address…

> Latin subsetted fonts are generally 10-30Kb, it's really not that much.

Agreed. Make your own custom font files with only the characters you use, or are likely to use.

> A few milliseconds of a different font appearing is truly not much of an evil, but can be addressed by exactly what the author links in their footnote.

Browsers will wait for about 3 seconds for custom fonts to load before showing a fallback font.

> both of two font files are >140kb, they don't have gzip on

woff2 format fonts are already compressed, so gzip won't do much.

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